Political Dilemmas at Work: How to Maintain Your Integrity and Further Your Career

New Stakeholder Maps

Stakeholder Maps are not just for project teams and sales. Recently, this idea has been applied more broadly and has been picked up and used by teams and managers as a way to analyze the organization. This is good news, and certainly makes us more effective. The challenge now is to find maps and models of the new political landscape. Many of the accepted stakeholder concepts, while still valid and useful, are nevertheless based on older organizational designs. There is a constant need for new maps. And we need maps that look beyond power and interest. Stakeholder mapping provides us with the tools to assess the politics around our work and ensure that we have the right conversations with the right people at the right time.

 

• Update your briefcase with new stakeholder maps on a regular basis.

• Accept that stakeholder management is for everyone, not just for project managers.

• Good stakeholder management is one example of positive organizational politics.

 

Our charter needs a commitment to stakeholder management whatever our role or function. We need maps that see the interconnections between people and that help us understand the political backdrop.