Stakeholder Engagement - Cranfield School of Management ...

Executive Summary
This guide seeks to identify, explore and elaborate the essential elements of meaningful relations and
the concomitant internal environment in an organisation that most enhances its ability to obtain value
from NGO and community stakeholder relationships.
The guide is designed to provide strategic advice to senior
executives who shape and lead institutional policy towards
stakeholders, and practical guidance and case studies to
operational managers who engage regularly with stakeholders.
Reading this guide will help you to be better able to establish
conditions for meaningful engagement by more effectively
recognising, analysing and utilising opportunities and challenges
to building relations; and through exploring issues above and
beyond the simple identification of stakeholders and immediate
‘unprepared’ initiation of conversations. It seeks to reflect the
reality of managers’‘on the ground’ experience, by drawing on
lessons learnt from past incidents, highlighted by practical
examples.
This How-to guide is written primarily for:
❖ Managers moving into a new position who for the first time
have to engage external stakeholders rather than simply
manage transactional relations
Managers should be able to answer:
❖ Who are our stakeholders?
❖ How do we / will we segment our stakeholders?
Box 1: Getting Started
❖ What benefits can we expect from meaningful stakeholder engagement?
❖ What information sources do we already have about our stakeholders and their views?
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❖ More experienced managers who are seeking to improve
their organisation’s Corporate Responsibility and
Sustainability performance, or who may want to reflect on
their organisation’s approach to stakeholder engagement,
especially when facing hostile communities or unfamiliar
NGOs’ campaigns
❖ Specialist Corporate Responsibility managers looking for
additional tools and techniques to share with operational
managers facing environmental, social and governance
challenges
Section 2 examines why an organisation should engage with
stakeholders, while Section 3 explores practically how an
organisation can establish stakeholder relations. Section 4
examines critical success factors in meaningful engagement and
outlines recommendations on how to build conditions and
capacities for meaningful relations.
Readers can go through the guide section by section or refer to
specific section as and when they need that information – as an
aide memoire. Box 1 below gives examples of the type of
information you can find as and when you need it.
❖ What, therefore, do we think are the principal stakeholder wants and needs (SWANS), and the organisation’s wants
and needs from stakeholders (OWANS)?
❖ What are the organisation’s priorities for better understanding SWANS (for example, where are the significant
knowledge gaps; where particularly important stakeholders’ wants and needs seem to be changing; where we believe
there already is / could be significant and potentially damaging gaps between SWANS and OWANS?)
❖ Armed with this better information, where is the potential for reducing risks and increasing opportunities from better
aligning SWANS and OWANS; and where are the biggest threats from gaps between SWANS and OWANS?
❖ What is the best methodology for meaningful engagement with key stakeholders?
❖ What does the organisation need to do to maximise chances of success?
❖ How does the organisation learn and continuously improve meaningful stakeholder engagement?
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Executive Summary