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Do You Know Who’s Interested in What You are Doing? (BV32)

In this video, I’m going to explain how you can find out who’s interested in what you’re doing in your business. Hi there. Matts Rehnstrom here, Shaper of Business Excellence. In this video, I’m going to talk about the stakeholder analysis that we need to do in the business. So in the previous videos, we’ve been up here. We’ve been talking about these green components.

We talked about the business idea. We talked about the vision and the strategy goals. We’ve broken that down into critical success factors, goals, and measures and we’ve talked about strategy as well. We will come back to the other green ones, but now for this video, we’ll be up here talking about the stakeholders that we have in the business.

What’s a Stakeholder?

So what’s a stakeholder? A stakeholder is someone that’s got an interest in your business. I see a lot of organizations that don’t understand there are different types of stakeholders.

For example, if it is a municipality they think the stakeholders are citizens. Everything is for the citizens, but it’s not really true because the citizens are those that own the business,and they are a stakeholder. But there are also people that want other things than the citizens.

Which means that yes, grouping everything, putting everything together within citizens or just customers. That makes things fuzzy. Fuzziness occurs if one does not differentiate between the stakeholders and their expectations.

Different Stakeholders Have Different Expectations

So we need to break that up and see what different stakeholders do we have because if you don’t understand those, how are you going to satisfy these different stakeholders expectations? They want something. They have needs and they have wants.

They expect something, but if you don’t see them in their role as one of several stakeholders, you don’t really know. You don’t really know how to satisfy them, and if you don’t satisfy this particular stakeholder and the next stakeholder and the next stakeholder, they’re going to feel that you don’t really deliver the value that they want out of your business. And that goes for a public sector organization that goes for a company. It’s the same.

To NOT differentiate between the stakeholder is to not satisfy any of them. They all get the same poor fulfillment of their expectations.

How to Perform a Stakeholder Analysis

  1. Identify ALL your different stakeholders
  2. Identify the wants and needs of each type of stakeholder
  3. Identify the processes that are dedicated to taking care of each stakeholder’s expectation

So what you need to do here then is to list those different stakeholders that you have in your business. You need to understand who they are and when you have listed them down, like in this matrix that I show here.

Then you need to define what they want out of your business? What do they expect from you? You need to be sure that you understand that because if you don’t understand that, who’s going to understand it?

Yeah, they understand because they come into your business, whatever hat they’re wearing, they’re the stakeholders. I am Stakeholder A and I expect this, but when I’m being met by this organization, by the business, I don’t get the service that I want because they don’t understand me. The business doesn’t understand me as a stakeholder.

So when you have listed them, and a customer is one, but you can have several customers, and we’ll come back to that in another video. But you can have the authorities. They’re stakeholders. They want something out of your business as well.

You shouldn’t pollute. You should treat your employees in the right way and so on and so on. The owners that we talked about earlier, they’re also stakeholders. They have some expectations, and that we talked about so that you can take off fairly easy in this matrix.

The other ones we haven’t talked about, so you need to list them as well. And then finally when you have understood all these things, then you need to get an understanding of what process is going to satisfy this particular stakeholder because you can’t have the monster process of them all satisfying everyone a hundred percent.

No, that isn’t how it works because that creates fuzziness. To try to satisfy everyone fully within one process is like saying we’re not satisfying any because everyone will go out of that process. They will come in here with their expectation.

They will follow the process, and we’ve come out on the other side and say, “Nope, I’m not satisfied.” So you need to understand if you then need to and what should those different processes be that take care of each stakeholder’s expectation of your business. So here we start with a little seed about what’s coming when we’re talking about the processes in your business, but that’s for an upcoming video. So, that’s what you need to do in order to continue to the next step, which I will talk about in an upcoming video.

Have You Done a Stakeholder Analysis?

So have you done the stakeholder analysis within your business? Do you know what stakeholders you have, or did this video start your thinking about, wait a minute? No, we didn’t read it. We don’t really know what interests people or organizations are expecting. What do they want out of our business?

So please leave a comment down below because I’d love to see what’s your experience in this area. And if you like to have this poster for free, click here and the link will take you to a page where you can download it. Then you can follow along in this video series that I have, and you can also read more about each and every one of these very important business excellence components and the relationship between them. And with that said so until the next video, let’s go and shape our businesses for excellence.