Stakeholder Engagement - Cranfield School of Management ...

Example: CR and Business Units View Stakeholders very differently
A CR manager described the experience of engaging with stakeholders during a major physical infrastructure project. He
commented on the resistance from the business unit tasked with implementing the project.
“You can’t spend that much effort on something [engagement with stakeholders] without having the approval of your business unit
manager because you are taking people’s time and [spending] a budget, but also you are inconveniencing the business.You are saying
‘we are going to bring people to your site, there will be x visits over x weeks’ – it’s a fairly big inconvenience to managers when they are
busy trying to dig a trench, put stuff in it safely, and there was a bit of resistance! Some people said ‘this is just such a waste of our
time … we are on a tight timeline.We are trying to do this on a budget … you are just getting in the way’.We did generally have
management support, but if you didn’t have the support of your business unit leader you would not be able to do it, because it was too
high profile and it took too much valuable time.”
The motivations of business units and CR department in the
same organisation may be different and depend on
organisational history and the culture of each department.
Typically, staff from operational units of businesses have a strong
focus on achieving practical business objectives: meeting
deadlines, designing new products, installing physical
infrastructure in an appropriate and timely fashion, implementing
business plans or guaranteeing that appropriate skills are in place.
They therefore, naturally, focus on how stakeholders can assist
them to achieve these aims – as the following exchange with a
business operational manager demonstrates:
Question:“So a lot of [the stakeholder
engagement] was about making [the project]
work operationally?”
Answer:“Yes, absolutely” 23
In contrast the motivation for CR professionals to engage with
stakeholders have typically focused more on longer term and
less tangible benefits, such as reputation gain and licence to
operate for the organisation.
As a manager in your organisation ask yourself and colleagues
the following questions as a means of identifying the motivation
of different departments for engaging with stakeholders:
❖ What are the role or roles that Business Unit staff believe
stakeholders can provide for the organisation?
❖ What are the role or roles that CR staff believe stakeholders
can provide for the organisation?
❖ Are there differences between the two answers?
If yes, then consider whether the difference is simply the use of
different language to describe the same concept or if there are
fundamental differences in the motivation of the two
departments to engage with stakeholders.
Typically, companies that have a ‘more advanced degree of
integration of CR principles in their operating and strategymaking
processes’ demonstrate higher degrees of alignment
between CR and business units and as a result between the
business and stakeholders 24 .This issue highlights the need for
companies to prioritise the integration into business operations
of the understanding, utilisation and development of stakeholder
relations, as a means to encourage the establishment of
meaningful stakeholder relations.
Consider the potential complexity within a large organisation
and how differing agendas from different parts of the
organisation can make engagement externally quite challenging. It
is important to get internal alignment right first. Not doing this
can result in duplication of effort, time and resources as well as
very different and sometimes conflicting messages being sent,
often resulting in great frustration for the stakeholder.The
knowledge management system discussed in Section 3.5 can
help with this, as will building internal expertise, as detailed in
Section 3.3.
23 Interview with Author, June 2007
24 Zollo, Maurizio et al. 2007. Response: Understanding and Responding to Societal Demands on Corporate Responsibility. INSEAD
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Alignment of CR and Business Units Relations