Make Lemonade: Dealing with Complex Stakeholders
This week I’ve asked
to share an article I saw recently and felt deserved sharing publicly. See below, I’m very pleased to be able to collaborate with them.🍋 Lemon behaviour with stakeholders is about them, not you.
TL,DR:
When a thing happens, put a gap between your emotional reaction and your thinking mind by taking a sip of water/tea/coffee.
Work out if this is a one off or consistent behaviour, and if it's down to ignorance or malice. It will almost always be ignorance; if it's malice though things can escalate quickly.
If it's a one-off, ignorant behaviour, most people would appreciate it being pointed out. If they don’t appreciate it, that’s on them.
Working out why someone is being a lemon doesn’t excuse the behaviour but helps you understand how to deal with something going forward, particularly if it’s consistent; what are they trying to gain from the interaction? If you’re working in a consultative capacity, as data folks often are with teams in the rest of the business, it will often be one of the following;
They have the wrong idea about what you’re there to do (e.g. you’re there to make decisions about how something should proceed, but they think you’re just there for advice). Again, easy to address with a polite, candid explanation about the purpose of what you’re doing.
They’re having a bad day/week/month because of some other stuff going on in life. Happens to everyone, including you. Giving people the grace to fluff things when it’s not happening in the rest of life is being a good human, and they will remember it gratefully.
They see you as a threat to their job. Really common, quite easy to disarm by being candid about what you’re there to help with.
It’s part of their “work character” - often comes with people who declare themselves “brutally honest”, such people are usually more interested in brutality than honesty. If you wouldn’t take advice from this person (ask yourself this; it’s unlikely), contain the behaviours with clear boundaries and some protective techniques and leave them in your rear view mirror.
Long Form Version
Introduction
Dealing with complex, annoying, inconsistent or chaotic stakeholders (hereafter, a lemony stakeholder, after the many general negative origins of the turn of phrase) is an important learning experience for any consultant. When working in data, we are often working in a consultative role, whether or not we are external to the company - we’re advising people how to apply our speciality to whatever they’re doing, and we’re not as involved with their teams. This means that when playing a consultative role (hereafter, a consultant!), you are not necessarily bound by the same hierarchical structures - part of the point of utilising consultants, internally or externally, is often to overcome hierarchical biases. However, that does mean that you might be the person finding The Missing Stair, or on the wrong side of someone who other team members have had to pacify. Therefore, the way you handle a lemony stakeholder is important to developing a lot of key consulting skills like diplomacy.
In my job, I’ve found myself coaching quite a few of my colleagues on how to deal with the not-so-nice people you find at every workplace (as sadly, I’ve met them too), so I’m sharing this in the hope it helps some other folks early (or not so early!) in their careers too.
The first thing to bear in mind with a lemony stakeholder is this:
💡Their behaviour is very unlikely to be about you.
It might very much feel like it is, because you’re on the receiving end of it. But most of the time, as humans we are caught up with ourselves too much to be grasping our impact on others. So, if you’re dealing with a lemony stakeholder, please have a look at the below.
Something Happens
Something happened and your emotions are trying to tell you something. At that moment in time, grab a swig of water/coffee/tea - this puts a moment of time between your emotions and your thoughts, before you respond. If the comment has really caught you off guard and you’re not sure how to respond, that’s fine - when something like this happens, it’s better to err on the quiet side of professionalism than the first reaction (or even second) reaction which comes to mind, especially if you are particularly profane at times (like I am!).
When you next have a moment, on a bit of paper/notes app, please write down what happened and how it made you feel, or DM someone you trust. This is important because your emotions are essentially your nervous system for interpersonal relations, which has been developing for about 52 million years - it is an important information system. Generally, something happens and it makes consultants feel the following;
There might be a double meaning or information I am missing to fully interpret it.
I’m being patronised.
I’m not being listened to in terms of technical expertise.
I’m not being listened to in terms of work capacity.
I’m being made a villain for keeping someone accountable.
Less commonly (thankfully), the following might also appear;
I feel like I’m being made a scapegoat.
I feel like someone has a problem with some aspect of my identity.
If you are experiencing either of the latter two, even just a little feeling, please tell your boss, your mentor, a senior team member or someone in HR sooner rather than later. It’s important to get support in those situations because they can have persistent effects on your mind.
How Should I Handle This?
To some degree, it’s worth working out two things:
is the behaviour down to ignorance, or malice? Always assume ignorance unless malice is clearly present.
is this a one off, the second time, or very consistent?
This is because we can then work out how we might deal with it, as per the below.
Most stakeholder conflict behaviours are generally ignorance and one-offs, where people don’t realise they are proverbially elbowing someone else in the face. This can be ignorance around what you’re there to do, what the limits of your role, access and capabilities are, or ignorance about the project being worked on. This is OK; we’re all ignorant about stuff until someone tells us otherwise, and most people want to be filled in if their knowledge of something is incomplete.
Malicious one offs are a bit Year 8 but sometimes they do happen at work. Unless profanely explicit or part of a wider pattern of behaviour, I’d probably note this down somewhere (including time, date, ideally witnesses) but otherwise ignore it - it’s rarely worth it to stoop to a provocation.
If a behaviour happens a few times and it’s bothering you, please escalate this one of the folks I mentioned above. They’ll help you validate what’s going on and provide a listening ear, and address it with the appropriate party where necessary - this is also the case for consistent behaviours which might pass the threshold into bullying, which needs to be picked up as soon as possible to put you out of danger.
Consistently ignorant behaviour is usually something which is probably frustrating and annoying to deal with, but doesn’t have a clear path of resolution in the same way that malice does. So, it’s worth doing a bit of reading of the below to give you some idea of the options you have, and then you can discuss how you want to deal with it with your management or your peers.
Amy Gallo wrote a great guide on how you might look at this, sadly behind a paywall at HBR, but the potted version of advice is this;
What’s the actual outcome/point of what you’re doing?
Is the person’s behaviour obstructing that, or are they just annoying?
If they’re not obstructing it, who cares? Getting caught in the rain is annoying, until you get your umbrella out. Your peers, mentors and work friends will all have strategies that might be the umbrella you need. Vent safely to someone far enough away from the lemony stakeholder if you need to and then don’t let them ruin your day/week.
If they are obstructing it, you can contain it, address it directly or escalate it. Most folks I know tend to contain it, which is where The Missing Stair comes from. Containment strategies (like note-taking the hell out of things) are often pretty good practice anyway, but they do take time to be effective, and create an extra burden on your time going forward. At some point, addressing or escalating will be needed - but you can talk to your work folks to understand exactly where that is or what that looks like.
The most common lemony behaviour directed at folks early in their careers is condescension, which Gallo also wrote about here, and is too good for me to simply summarise.
I hope this has helped provide some useful avenues of thought if you’re finding yourself dealing with a difficult stakeholder, as we often are in data. But, I hope they’re just having a bad day.
Hi, Chris here. On another note, and separate to the fantastic article above shared by my contributor
, I also wanted to share a guide for small businesses from BeDataLit.com; The Small Business Blueprint for Data-Driven Growth.This is a fantastic guide I’m still absorbing, but it’s well worth downloading.