S4E89: Effective stakeholder engagement with Elizabeth Harrin

In this week’s pod we welcomed Elizabeth Harrin to talk about effective stakeholder engagement.

Elizabeth Harrin is an author, trainer and mentor who helps people juggle their projects and ditch the overwhelm. She does that through straight-talking, real-world advice, based on her 20 years in project management roles.

Elizabeth is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management who has written 6 books about project management. She also writes the award-winning blog, A Girl’s Guide to Project Management.

The main topics we discussed on the podcast were as follows:

·  Project Managers do not and cannot manage people’s behaviour. It is arrogant to think you can

·  There is a need for people to feel valued within projects and organisations

·   How can you create a compelling story so people understand why the project needs to happen?

·   Try to condense your project story into two sentences so people can understand

·   Measuring engagement will always be subjective

·   Do you get the behaviour change you are expecting?

·   Do behaviours change actions or do actions change behaviours?

·   Try to understand the motivations of your teams even if you differ on some traits

·   Always try and find the easiest way to get your message across. This can be via phone calls, email, Kanban boards

·   The visibility of governments in holding daily press conferences to discuss the pandemic helped to manage the message around what was happening. People will make their mind up if there is a lack of communication

·   The power / influence matrix is outdated, we should be measuring the stakeholder life-cycle

·   Be curious when you receive blockers in the workplace. Try to understand what is driving certain behaviours

Here are links to some of the topics that were discussed:

Girl’s Guide to Project Management - https://www.girlsguidetopm.com/

This episode is sponsored by PlanAcademy.com, JustDo.com, and InEight.com.

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Join us next week when we’re joined by Americo Pinto from the PMO Global Alliance.

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Stay safe, be disruptive and have fun doing it!

Dale and Val