Advising Upwards

A Framework for Understanding and Engaging Senior Management Stakeholders

Lynda Bourne, Lynda Bourne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317184959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industrial Management
• Index: Business

Much has been written about leadership and team building, but there are still major gaps in thinking and research about how to engage senior stakeholders in support of an organisation's projects. The central role of stakeholders in the successful delivery of organisational strategy is becoming increasingly recognised, as is the importance of developing a sponsor culture to support more collaborative practices within the organisation. Building, and managing, relationships with senior (upwards) stakeholders is essential for success. Advising Upwards brings together the ideas of experts in fields related to engaging senior stakeholders, such as risk management, decision-making, understanding cultural considerations, effective communication and other disciplines that may enhance the sustainable engagement of senior stakeholders. The starting point is an examination of the difficulties that senior managers face as they move through the ranks of an organisation from middle management to executive levels. Senior managers usually move up through the organisation on the basis of command and control management. Once in the executive ranks they must develop a more collaborative approach and adopt the principles of emotional intelligence (EQ) to succeed. Awareness of difficulties that senior stakeholders may face drives effective approaches for communication between the team and sponsors. Case studies and stories from experts illustrate practical, structured approaches that enable the teams to develop robust relationships with senior stakeholders will result in teams 'being heard', and support their 'being extraordinary' through innovative approaches to advising upwards.

PART I
Advancing the Fundamentals

1
Why is Stakeholder Relationship Management so Difficult?

Lynda Bourne

Whatever your role in an organisation your work will only be considered successful if key stakeholders perceive that deliverables or outcomes meet their needs. Perceptions of success or failure are heavily influenced by the effectiveness of client, project or other team’s communications and relationships with its stakeholder community, particularly those in management or decision-making roles.

Studies have consistently shown that a critical factor in creating successful outcomes is the active support of senior management stakeholders, particularly the sponsor of a given project or activity. Successful managers understand this and are willing to do whatever is necessary to ensure that this group of stakeholders is prepared to support the work to its (successful) conclusion. This requires the manager, and the team, to be skilful at advising upwards, using effective stakeholder management techniques to engage the support of senior executives and to manage their expectations.

Crafting advice to senior management to achieve required outcomes from communication is as much an art as a science. Effective communication requires a clear understanding of the objective of the communication and the skills to create messages that are focused: on the right people, at the right time and with the right information in the right format.

Introduction

Much of the work that an organisation must do to deliver its business strategy generates change. The challenge for organisations to deliver successful outcomes to activities, projects or programmes in a climate of uncertainty is met by ensuring that all those groups and individuals affected by the change – stakeholders – are engaged in a way that encourages and, ideally, ensures their collaboration.

We are social animals: we don’t thrive in isolation, in fact our behaviour is largely driven by reciprocity; you do or say something to me and that will condition a response. We need to build relationships in our personal and professional lives to be effective human beings. Building relationships requires us to understand two important factors: first, a sustainable relationship provides benefits to both parties; and secondly communication is the only tool to build and maintain robust relationships. This is indisputably the case in personal relationships, but the same factors apply to professional relationships. We all communicate: in many cases, with little thought or unconsciously, but we need to appreciate that the most effective communication, personal or professional, is planned – we know the purpose of the communication, we are certain that the relationship is important and we are clear about the level of effort we need to apply to the communication activity. Stakeholder engagement is complex and ‘getting it right’ can be time-consuming. By understanding which stakeholders are important and how best to provide the information that meets their needs, as well as the needs of the organisation, it is possible to reduce some of the difficulties inherent in communication and stakeholder engagement. Engaging stakeholders to ensure their continued collaboration involves constant vigilance in a changing landscape of relationships with diverse stakeholders whose support, interests and influence may fluctuate unpredictably.

This chapter applies the processes that support effective communication to the task of building and maintaining robust relationships with organisational stakeholders, through analysis of a case study – that of the construction and opening of Heathrow Terminal 5. They may be seen as two distinct projects: one considered very successful and the other considered to have marred the reputation of British Airways staff and management because of the first disastrous week of operation. The first section will analyse the factors, both positive and negative, that led to development of perception of the success of the first and failure of the second. The second section describes a structured methodology, the Stakeholder Circle^®,¹ which provides guidance for teams to identify which of an organisation’s stakeholders are the ‘right’ stakeholders for any particular time in the life of the activity and to define the best approach to communicating effectively for maximum collaboration. Finally, there is a discussion of the common problems that teams encounter, that of engaging senior management stakeholders – advising upwards – for the essential support that each project needs for survival.

THE CASE STUDY: HEATHROW TERMINAL 5

The focus of this discussion of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 (T5) is on the following two stages:

1. Construction of the terminal for British Airport Authority (BAA), supported by enlightened contractual arrangements.

2. British Airways (BA) opens its facilities to the public and begins operation.

Construction

The £4.3bn Heathrow T5 project has been acknowledged as the ‘most successful UK construction project’ due to innovative project management practices which focused on collaboration (Potts 2006).² This collaboration was achieved through an emphasis on integrated teams, early risk management to anticipate, manage and reduce risks associated with the project, and an acceptance by BAA of total risk in all contracts, rather than the previous adversarial approach of contract negotiation.

Under the ‘new’ approach to construction project management resulting from the Egan Report (Egan 1998), T5 had been completed on time and within budget at the human cost of two fatalities, compared with a project of this size managed under traditional arrangements which would potentially have resulted in average time overruns of two years, 40 per cent budget overruns and six to eight fatalities. This change in BAA’s culture was described as a ‘watershed’ (Potts 2006), creating an environment for early problem-solving, sharing of information and collaboration.

The Opening

T5 was designed exclusively for BA’s use. Features of the new terminal included:

• Seamless check-in designed to eliminate queuing.

• Improvements in punctuality with all BA flights arriving and departing from one terminal.

• State-of-the-art baggage system using technology already in use at other airports to streamline the retrieval of passenger’s baggage.

T5 was officially opened on 14 March 2008 by HM Queen Elizabeth and began operating in 27 March, 2008. From that first day flights had to be cancelled, passengers were stranded and over 30,000 pieces of baggage were lost. An enquiry conducted by the House of Commons Transport Committee in 2008 described a series of issues and blunders resulting from poor planning and inadequate preparation of BA staff (House of Commons Transport Committee 2008).

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of BA, Willie Walsh, stated in an interview³ that he and his management took a ‘calculated risk’:

The company had known there were problems with the building from September when BA began to move in its staff and test systems. It was not 100% complete … managers had reviewed their decision to open as planned on March 27 on a weekly basis and had decided that the problems caused by delaying the move to [October] … would be greater than those caused by pressing ahead.

Staff arriving for their morning shifts at T5 on that first day, encountered a number of issues:⁴ a scarcity of staff car parking places, with staff overflow car parks closed; delays in passing through security; no familiarity with the new terminal building and the new systems.

The House of Commons report (2008) provided additional information:

• Baggage handlers claimed that they had not been adequately trained and did not have any support or back-up even on the first day.

• BA asked for volunteers to make up additional numbers to provide this support, but due to low morale staff were not prepared to attend on their day off.

• Check-in staff continued to add bags to the system, causing the new baggage handling system to overload, because baggage handlers were not removing them quickly enough off the belts. There was no override switch to stop the belts!

AN ANALYSIS

The construction of the terminal was acknowledged as a success from a time, cost, scope and quality perspective, but also from the perspective of the soft skills of proactive management of risk and reduction of disputes and conflicts. There was a focus on collaboration: the project owner, BAA, recognised that reducing conflict and the use of integrated teams would increase productivity. The innovative focus on collaboration reflected the inclusive flavour of the development of the Egan report – inviting representation and input from other industries, and excluding representatives of the construction industry (Crane 2010).

Inadequate staff training for the opening of T5 was a clear indicator of BA’s lack of understanding of the importance of training and preparation of staff for implementation. There was no contingency on that first day, no recognition that something might go wrong:

• Management did not ask staff to come in early to counteract the effect of any potential delays in entering a building they had not entered before.

• They did not offer overtime or offer to pay for additional staff, merely asking staff to come on their day off to help out.

• The baggage handlers appear to have not been trained at all – they did not know how to work within the new processes or technology.

• The baggage handling system appeared to have no back-up system to support the new complex system.

What does the experience of the T5 construction project and its implementation tell us about success and failure? BA’s reputation was damaged from the events of T5’s opening. Its failure was a failure to manage the people side – poor preparation of the people responsible for operation of the facility. If T5’s success was to be judged just on the completion of the construction project it would continue to be known as a success, but the perception of the travelling public and many other stakeholders is that T5 ‘does not work’.⁵

LESSONS LEARNED

Whether the focus was on the successful construction of T5 or the ‘unsuccessful’ opening, the common element of both the success and the failure was in the areas of stakeholder engagement and effective communication. On the one hand, the focus of the construction project on collaboration, integrated teams, proactive risk management and long-term contracting relationships. On the other hand, the absence of recognition and engagement of all stakeholders, indicated by the failure to prepare the staff for the immense changes of working within the new building and its infrastructure, or involve staff through adequate training and include contingencies on the first couple of days of operation. Even more important was the inability of the implementation team to engage the CEO (the most important stakeholder). He did not understand the consequences of meeting the aggressive goals that he imposed upon the project to open the terminal before it was totally ready; and before the staff and the important stakeholders were prepared for the changes.

The examples of both T5 projects illustrate the importance of proactive risk management, development of long-term contractual relationship, and stakeholder engagement, in particular the recognition of the negative influence of the most senior stakeholder’s unrelenting drive to meet that aggressive deadline.

We don’t know who the project manager was for the opening: the public face of BA at the time was the CEO, Willie Walsh. He has been quoted in the House of Commons report as knowing there were risks in opening before all the infrastructure was complete. Management had decided he said, that the problems caused by delaying the move would be greater than those caused by meeting whatever obligations dictated opening at the scheduled date.

The common theme for both projects is stakeholder engagement: when stakeholders are engaged and informed they are instrumental to success; when they are not engaged and not informed, success becomes elusive. The next section of this chapter will explore the concepts of stakeholder engagement and effective communication.

Stakeholder Relationship Management

Stakeholders are defined as ‘Individuals or groups who will be impacted by, or can influence the success or failure of an organisation’s activities’ (Bourne 2009).

Stakeholders are groups or individuals who supply critical resources, or invest funds, career or time in pursuit of the organisation’s business strategies or goals. Alternatively, stakeholders may be groups or individuals opposed to the organisation or some aspect of its activities. By definition, a stakeholder has a stake in the activity. This stake may be:

• An interest in the outcome, an individual or group affected by the work or the outcome, whether direct or indirect;

• Rights (legal or moral);

• Ownership, such as intellectual property rights, or real property rights; or

• Contribution in the form of knowledge (expertise or experience) or support (in the form of funds, human resources, or advocacy).

Only when the needs (expectations) of each stakeholder and the stake or stakes they may have in the outcome are known and understood is it really possible to begin to understand the drivers or business needs of a sponsor or other senior mana...