How To Get Alignment With Tough Stakeholders

Cindy Brummer at UXDX Community: Functional Programming and Aligning Stakeholders. Video: https://youtu.be/BLoccpsSa1U

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and agenda

[00:00:00] Cindy: I'm so glad to be here today, especially because dealing with stakeholders has been something that I've been going through for many, many years, both positive experiences and even negative ones. What I hope to share with you today is how to get ahead of that, and how to not have negative experiences as much as possible. Here's what I'm going to be covering. I'm going to talk about why stakeholders are tough; maybe you'll be able to identify a little bit with that. I'm going to talk about the SCARF model for understanding why stakeholders are responding the way that they are to you. And then we're going to talk about methods for helping to get around that, things like helping to increase their status and putting together a vision meeting, and why those techniques work. At least they have for me, and hopefully they'll be successful for you. And of course questions are welcome throughout.

[00:00:58] Just a little bit about me. I am the CEO and creative director of a user experience agency in Austin, Texas, and today I'm in San Antonio for a meeting. So thank you for having me here from Texas. I have a master's degree in UX design. I have been a contributor to the book 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know, and I do all kinds of teaching around UX, so I've been doing this for many, many years. My company, Standard Beagle, is a UX design agency. We do strategy, we do research, and we do product design. We've been doing many projects lately at the enterprise and mid-level company level, so a lot of my experience comes from that level of stakeholder.

The tough stakeholder: Fred

[00:01:51] First of all, the tough stakeholder. Maybe this will bring some memories to your mind, or maybe some fear of anticipating it. When we're in the middle of a project and we're dealing with a tough stakeholder, we are often thinking, why is this happening? Why is this happening to me? Or we get angry and we think, God, why can't they just let me do my job? I just want to be able to do the best job I can.

[00:02:19] And we can see the danger coming. We foresee that there could be some sort of disaster on the horizon, which could make the project unsuccessful, or at least make it a miserable experience for us. And when it is a miserable experience, we feel like this is happening to us. We're flipping around and landing in the mud. Whether or not the project is successful, this is still what we're going through in terms of anxiety, having to deal with someone who's not very open and amenable to the work that we're accomplishing for them, whether they be a VP at our own company or a client that we're working with.

[00:03:00] That is what happened to me with a client I had last summer. We're going to call him Fred, because obviously I don't want to reveal his real name. Fred was a really tough stakeholder. The thing is, I've dealt with lots and lots of tough stakeholders, but this one really caught me by surprise. I was on a research project, working with another agency on it, and things started off feeling good. He was very excited about the work we were doing, but then things started to change, and I could feel it happening, and it didn't feel good.

[00:03:36] What happened was that all of a sudden he became much more disconnected. He started staying off camera for our check-in meetings. There were lots and lots of people on the call, so he would just stay off and stay very quiet. But on the back side, as we were preparing lists for reaching out to potential participants for user interviews, he started to micromanage the process, and I could feel from his tone that he was getting really frustrated with it. And he started to question the findings themselves. As I was bringing the findings to them and telling them, this is what the data is showing, he was questioning severely, and it felt like he was trying to trip me up in those meetings and make me look bad in front of all the other people on the team.

[00:04:27] At the very end of the project there was no positive feedback from him. He almost seemed disappointed that we were able to successfully give the results that we did. That's a tough stakeholder, and that's tough to get around. The thing is, I saw it coming, but I didn't see it coming. I missed those signs of trouble. Now that I'm reflecting back on it, there were some definite things that I've seen throughout my career where I should have known, I should have said something and acted.

[00:05:01] Because I've had a number of observations about stakeholders, especially the ones that are going to be trouble. My first observation is that these are the ones that are critical. These are the ones that are very negative about what's happening with the project. They're trying to bring everybody down, or they're pointing out the shortcomings. It doesn't feel good to be in meetings with them because of the criticism that you're receiving.

[00:05:28] There also seems to be a lack of buy-in. It could be initially, at the start of the project, or it could be mid-project, which is even worse, because you thought everything was going well and then things start to go awry, the communication is poor, and you know that all of a sudden they've lost faith in what you're doing. And the problem is that they can influence others, and this is my third observation. They are actually telling other people that the work isn't going the way that it should, even though it might be, and it feels really unfair, as a person who's completing the work, to have to deal with someone who's spreading what could be untruths about it.

The SCARF model

[00:06:09] So the question becomes why? We could chalk it up to "this person is a jerk" or "this person just doesn't like me," but honestly there's something deeper there, and that's what I want to go through here. I want to talk about how the human brain reacts, and this is where the SCARF model comes in. Every human has a basic set of needs, and this is beyond the hierarchy of needs that we all have learned about. These are the things that the brain is constantly judging our relationships with other people about: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness.

[00:06:53] These five things we're always doing with each other. No matter what the interaction is, it is always happening, and we're not always consciously aware of it. With stakeholders in particular, I've found that the three that are bolded here, status, certainty and relatedness, are the ones that most often come into play when you're dealing with a tough stakeholder. So let me explain what that means.

[00:07:24] Status. Our preference is to have a social status or hierarchy where we're higher than others. I know that sounds really egotistical, but that's what fuels us. We are constantly dealing with a threat of status or a reward of status: reward being if we feel higher than someone else, threat being when we feel like we're going lower. And people will react very negatively when they feel their status is being threatened. If you think about even just interactions that you've had in the past week, when someone has burst out at you, or said some things that made you feel less than, that usually is an underlying response of status. Somebody is trying to make themselves higher on the social pecking order. Because social pain, like rejection or exclusion, activates the same pathways in our brain as physical pain. So status is really important.

[00:08:37] Another one is certainty. This is where humans want to feel like something ahead is going to be certain, or want clarity. Time and time again studies have shown that humans will make choices that are financially not going to be beneficial to them, because they want to feel certain about something. So that feeling of uncertainty is really important. This is shown in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. You can read about his study of people choosing the poor choice with certainty over the one that would give them more reward in the future. This is all a brain pattern. We want to feel certain, we want to feel safe.

[00:09:26] The third piece of the stakeholder puzzle is relatedness. As humans, our brains want to feel a connection to other people. We want to feel like we're part of a group, part of some sort of cohesive team, and when we feel that way, there is reward generated in our brain and we want to keep it coming. When there's an absence of relatedness, this generates a threat response. So when we're thinking about how we relate to other people, if we feel excluded, we're going to react in a negative way.

[00:10:06] All of these things that I just talked about came from this amazing book that I've read. It's called Your Brain at Work, and it's by Dr. David Rock. If you want to read more about the SCARF model and these principles, I highly recommend it. It has totally changed the way that I think about my interactions with my family, but especially at work and dealing with stakeholders.

Creating a sense of safety

[00:10:28] If we think about things in terms of status and certainty and fairness, and we think about how we make sure that our stakeholders feel rewarded instead of threatened, what can we do? Here's a great quote that I've pulled from that book: "Many great leaders understand intuitively that they need to work hard to create a sense of safety in others." And that's the piece. We want to generate a sense of safety. Sometimes that means we're going to have to do things that go against where our own threat response is going to come into play, but that's what we have to do.

[00:11:07] When we think about status and the stakeholder, we want to increase a person's sense of status by doing something to help them feel like they're being rewarded. One way we can do this is by publicly recognizing them. That generates that positive reward, and the benefit is that it can resonate for years and years.

[00:11:33] Certainty is also important, and we can help people have a better sense of certainty by giving them a larger understanding of the big picture itself. When we provide access to more information, this helps put our stakeholders' minds at ease.

[00:11:54] And then relatedness. We want people to be able to connect with us as stakeholders so that they can feel part of the team and that they belong. When we are meeting with them, if we can allow more time for casual conversation, or more opportunities to participate with the team, this really helps increase that sense of relatedness.

Managing status

[00:12:18] We can focus this, though. Instead of doing casual "Hey, try this, hey, try this," there are actual methods that we can bring into our processes as researchers and designers in order to bring more alignment from our stakeholders. Let's talk about managing status a little bit more, because this is probably the one that I run into the most. In fact, every time I hear about people quibbling with each other, usually it has to do with a sense of status.

[00:12:51] If I think back on what happened with Fred last summer, his status felt threatened. He thought that I was threatening it. Somehow, and I don't remember how, I made him feel less than, and he was reacting to that. It could have been how I presented the material. It could have been that I didn't defer to him enough on calls. It could have been something that I wasn't even aware of, like some other boss being in the room. I don't know, but definitely his status felt threatened.

[00:13:27] This is where we need to be aware of hierarchy. Status is absolutely relative. How we feel about our status with regard to other people is relative to the different situations that we're in. I was coming in as an outsider, as a vendor, to a company where there were already corporate politics going on, and these corporate politics include having a pecking order. The individuals that were at play there already had some sort of hierarchy in place, and then I was being inserted into it for a project, and that messed everything up. So being aware of that is really important.

[00:14:10] Some of the things I could have done: I could have given a stroke. A stroke is something like a compliment. It makes us feel good. Like, "Oh, thank you so much for clarifying that point," or "I really appreciate you providing that other perspective." It doesn't have to be "Oh, you're the best person in the world." It just has to be enough to defer. That stroke really helps, and I could have done that.

[00:14:42] I could have also provided what I call a third-party story. I could have given examples of how I've worked with other companies, and shown how I left that corporate hierarchy in place without threatening it, and given him some sense of ease about it.

[00:15:02] Another thing I could have done was ask Fred questions and bring him to the point where he was coming up with an idea that I had given him, but he could have felt like it was his own. The thing here is that you want to be super careful. You're not trying to let them steal your idea per se, so there's a very careful line to walk here. The idea is that we feel a greater sense of status when we come up with our ideas on our own, and somebody isn't just telling us to do something, because that feels threatening.

[00:15:40] My favorite part of increasing status is to get uncomfortable intentionally. This is when we do something that makes us look a little vulnerable, like maybe we're not all together all the time, and every time somebody sees that, they feel a little bit better. I heard a great story about this regarding a salesperson. The way that he would get uncomfortable intentionally when he was talking with a potential client was that he would go to find his pen, and it was always missing, and he always had to borrow a pen. "Oh my God, I forgot my pen, can I borrow your pen?" The potential client would think, "Oh my God, who is this person that doesn't have a pen?" But it worked really well, because it helped increase their status, and it didn't make him look like an idiot or something like that. Just enough of being uncomfortable intentionally.

The vision meeting

[00:16:40] In terms of managing certainty and relatedness, there's all sorts of things that you can do, but there's one method that I love using, and it actually even helps with the status response. This is a method I use with a big meeting: a vision meeting. With Fred, he lacked the certainty and the relatedness. I'm sure that his vision of how the project would go was one way, but when the data took us a completely different way and it started going in a different direction, I'm pretty sure that he stopped feeling that certainty, and he stopped feeling like he was part of the team. I was a stranger. He just didn't know me, so there was an absence of relatedness.

[00:17:30] If I could go back in time, get in my time machine, what I would have tried to do is create a vision meeting with them. Not just a kickoff call, but an actual brainstorm and same-page meeting. The nice thing about one of these types of meetings, and I'll explain the structure in just a second, is that it provides the big picture, so this helps with certainty. It fosters team relatedness. And there's idea creation from everyone, and that brings in the status piece.

[00:18:04] Some other benefits are that when you have a vision meeting and you're creating it in a whiteboard scenario, you're equalizing the voices. You don't have one person speaking and then everybody else falling in place. It reverses the influence, so it allows everybody to have influence, instead of one voice doing it for everyone else. And then you really earn that buy-in. People feel like they're contributing, they're getting in there and feeling like they're involved, so they're really bought into the process.

[00:18:41] In terms of creating it, the key ideas here are making sure that the folks involved in this meeting are all the key players. You don't want to have everybody from the company; 100 people would be way too many. But the key people, the key stakeholders, the key team members that need to be there. What you're going to do is create structured exercises for them to move through. You also need to make sure that there's strong facilitation, so that someone is there guiding the process throughout, and that they're enforcing this idea of being silent together. So you're working and creating ideas silently and then coming together as the group.

[00:19:23] This is an example of a vision meeting that I did a few years ago, pre-COVID, with a health district. We were coming up with a vision for a new web property for this organization. They were going in a different direction. There were lots of different voices from different departments at play, and I really wanted to make sure that we were all going to be on the same page for how it was going to move forward. As a result of going through this process and this meeting with them, they were very bought in. Even the toughest stakeholder, the head of marketing, was all bought in to it, and I didn't get any backlash at all through the rest of the project. So it resonated throughout.

How to run one

[00:20:09] Here's the method for doing one of these vision meetings. First of all, at the beginning of the project, make sure that everybody knows that they're going to be part of this. Just make sure it's part of the agenda. The next thing you're going to do is start the meeting by building rapport. You don't want to just launch into the exercises; you want to make sure that everybody feels comfortable, so that icebreaker is going to be really important. They also need to feel like they know the direction of the meeting, so having an agenda is important. And then you're going to do a whiteboard exercise. This is where the facilitator comes in more strongly and makes sure that they're all working together and capturing those ideas.

[00:20:56] The nice thing about doing it this way is that it's dead simple. Honestly, it's an affinity diagram. You're able to bring together everybody and make that work visible. It also promotes critical thinking. This is an example of what one might look like.

[00:21:16] One idea here, though, is that selecting the facilitator is key. You absolutely need to do it. That person needs to be a listener, they need to have presence, and they need to be objective. So make sure you choose them, and if it's not going to be you, it needs to be someone that you feel would have these capabilities.

[00:21:35] You need to make sure that you're giving yourself enough time, just like I'm looking at the clock now to make sure I give myself enough time for questions. You also want to make sure that you're not inviting too many people. I would say a good size is somewhere between seven and 12 people. Any more and it just becomes way harder to manage. A nice quiet conference room, like the one I'm in right now, or you could do it in an office if you're doing it remotely. And make sure that you have an agenda in place.

[00:22:06] Whether you do it in person or remote is up to you. You can do it successfully both ways. If you're in person, you want to make sure that you have all the materials: a whiteboard, sticky notes, Sharpies. I use dot stickers. And I also have some method for timing. If you're remote, make sure that you adjust the agenda to give more breaks, because nobody wants to sit in a chair for 4 hours. You also want to make sure you have the right tool. You could use Mural, Miro, FigJam, whatever your choice of sticky note program is.

[00:22:43] When you do this, you want to make sure that you set those rules and build the rapport. When you're going through it, make sure that you ask everybody to put their phones to the side, so that you have their full attention. When you're building that rapport, your whole goal is to make people feel safe, so starting with an icebreaker is really helpful.

[00:23:06] When you run the exercises, you're going to run it like you would run a whiteboard affinity diagram session. You're going to start with a question, and you're going to get everybody to write one idea per sticky note. Then you're going to have them put it up on the board, and you'll collect the ideas. You'll have them spend a few minutes on each question, put the ideas up on the board, and then organize them so you can start to see patterns: where are people coming together? Then ask them to label it for you. And finally, you are going to decide which one is the most important one to move forward with. Once you've done that, you can repeat for each question.

[00:23:48] Here are a few examples of ones that I've done with teammates. A lot of them have been online. These are definitely going to help you build alignment. I do want to make sure that I have enough time for questions, so feel free to pop them in. While you're doing that, I'm going to run through the benefits here. All the voices are heard. It's modeling positive behavior for everyone. And what you're doing is getting commitment over agreement, and this is really helpful for those stakeholders that could be troublesome down the road.

[00:24:24] When they're asked to contribute, this helps increase their status. They feel much better about it. They can see the big picture from here, which increases their certainty. And it's part of team building, so they feel related to the process. All these things can help you understand how you can relate better and build more alignment with your stakeholders. We covered everything on my agenda today. We talked about the SCARF model, we talked about methods for aligning with stakeholders, and I would love to take your questions if you have any.

Q&A

[00:25:02] Host: Excellent. Thank you very much, Cindy. I really enjoyed that, because I've felt the challenges with tough stakeholders a few times. It's a great way of breaking it down and thinking about it in different ways, instead of going the traditional human route of just thinking they weren't a nice person.

[00:25:23] Cindy: Right, that's what we do. If you break it down, you're like, oh yeah.

[00:25:30] Host: Excellent. Please do enter your questions in whichever platform you're in; I'll keep an eye on them. But I did have one question. Something jumped to my mind, particularly when you were talking about status. I had a difficult client, or a stakeholder, and the challenge was they had designed the process, and we were coming in and changing it. I tried all of that inclusion and stuff, but they fundamentally disagreed with what we were doing. They were like, "No, the way I've done it is right." And I couldn't convince them otherwise, even when I showed data of us making progress and how it was working, because I guess it was attacking their status. So what would you do there?

[00:26:21] Cindy: Yeah, that is the hardest one. This is where I think the technique of guiding someone so that they come up with the suggestion is the hardest thing to do, but it's probably going to be the most successful. Because from their point of view, they're perfect. Everything of theirs is fine, and no matter what you say, you're not going to convince them otherwise. Only when they've come up with the idea that "oh yeah, we could really improve there" is when things will start to change. So some thoughtful questions could maybe get someone going in that direction without actually leading them, because they'll be able to spot a leading question from a mile away. Even with the data, I think it's building rapport, and I think it's helping them come to the realization on their own that something has to change. That's when it's going to be okay, and that's the hard thing to do.

[00:27:21] Host: Yeah, I unfortunately didn't succeed in convincing them. We just had to go ahead with them constantly niggling at our heels and trying to stop us.

[00:27:33] Cindy: Yeah, I wish I had an answer. But it's good to recognize what was going on with that relationship. Sometimes you're not going to win, but I would say that maybe next time you'll be able to align with a stakeholder a little bit better.

[00:27:51] Host: Great. Well, thank you very much. Do send in some questions. We don't have any more time now, but if you think of anything, pass it through and we'll post them on the Slack group and ask Cindy to answer there. So thank you very much, Cindy.