Project Stakeholder Management

Genetically modified (GM) crops are already being used in many countries including the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, India, China, Australia, and some European countries. According to a report in The Economist, the market for agricultural biotechnology doubled from about $3bn to $6bn from 2001 to 2006, and is predicted to rise to over $8bn by 2011.

The use of GM crops to produce food has, however, been fiercely resisted in the UK and some other countries in Europe due to various concerns about their safety and possible environmental damage. For a balanced view, take a look at this Wikipedia article.

From a Stakeholder Management perspective, I was wondering why the perceptions of GM crops were so different between different countries. Reports indicate that GM crops give higher yields with less water, energy and fertiliser, thereby solving some of the following problems:

• An increasing worldwide demand for food
• A decrease in the amount of land and water available for farming
• An increase in the cost of energy

In general, farmers seem to like the new varieties of pesticide resistant crops as they can grow more with less, and therefore make more profit. But how to convince sceptical European consumers? It appears that we may, however, be approaching a ‘tipping point’ where the momentum for change becomes unstoppable and GM crops become more readily accepted by consumers, as new varieties of GM crops are predicted to provide strong benefits to consumers.

We may soon see soya oil that tastes better, is healthier, and produces no trans-fats during cooking. When consumers (stakeholders) see the benefits to them, in the form of healthier food, then we might see the more widespread acceptance of GM foods. That is exactly what we say in Project Stakeholder Management - show people the benefits of your project and they will become your supporters. Keep monitoring the news for updates on the GM food situation.

The Project Management Institute (PMI^®) are now in the process of updating their global standards documents:

• A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^®Guide)

• The Standard for Program Management

• The Standard for Portfolio Management

• Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3®)

These standards are established by taking into account the knowledge, opinions and experiences of project teams, subject matter experts and project management practitioners. As such, exposure drafts of all these standards are now available for comments on the PMI website. Comments will be closed on 22 March 2008.

We are glad to see that the sections in all documents relating to Project Stakeholder Management have been expanded considerably, reflecting the importance of this subject to Project Managers and people working on projects globally. The guidelines given in the new documents follow the principles that we already established here at ProjectStakeholder.com with additional elements that we will incorporate into our Stakeholder Management model.

Email is a great help when communicating with our project stakeholders. There are, however, some limitations of the email format that can cause our messages to be misinterpreted, often leading to conflict.

I’ve been wondering why emails can be the cause of conflict, and can offer these comments:

Much research has shown that success in communications involves three components:

• The message (comprised of the words you use)
• Your ‘body-language’ (body movements and gestures)
• The tonality of your voice (acoustic patterns including tone, pitch, and accent)

The relative importance of words / body language / tonality, are open to debate but it is clear that all of them do play a part in the messages we send. Email, of course, does not allow any body language or tone at all, relying solely on the words. Missing out these important parts of a communication can increase the chances of a mis-communication or mis-interpretation to occur.

But why?

Many years ago we relied on formal type-written reports and seemed to get less conflict than now. Perhaps this is because the formal report does not allow for any emotion, and is read for it’s content alone. Email is different, as the reader seems to assume a body language and tone to match the content, perhaps due to the informal ‘conversational’ style of the medium. If a reader makes the wrong assumption, then our message gets distorted and incorrectly received.

I once received an email from our company secretary asking for my size preference for a new company t-shirt. I saw the opportunity for some office humour by sending the shortest possible email, and replied only with the letter ‘L’ (for my t-shirt size). I was very proud at having sent the world’s shortest email but later noticed that our secretary seemed upset and would not talk to me. After a while I discovered that the secretary assumed I was in such a hurry that I could not be bothered to give a proper reply, and was somehow ‘looking-down’ on her. So my attempt at dry humour ended up generating conflict. Lacking any emotional content, the secretary inserted her own content and acted accordingly. If this is what a single-letter email can achieve, just imagine what damage can be caused by longer and more involved email correspondence!

My recommendation for one-to-one conversations is to simply pick up the phone as a preference to email. Ask yourself why you want to use email in this case?

Here are three tips for the use of email:

1. Limit the number of people you copy an email to. Copying a huge list of people can be interpreted as political games. And you may be surprised to learn that some people auto-delete any emails that have been copied to them, to ensure they only get relevant information.
2. Don’t use ‘bcc‘ ( an email option where people can be copied without the recipient being aware). Once people know that you use it, they won’t trust you fully. Why are you hiding something?
3. Think carefully about any ‘out-of-office’ auto-reply that you use. The auto-reply might be sending a message that your schedule is more important than the customer’s needs. Have someone monitor your email, or use a remote-access device.

Words, tonality and body language are the only means we have to relate our individual understandings, experiences and feelings. Let’s continue to place equal emphasis on all three avenues of communication.

My wife is a very important stakeholder in any project that I run. She can certainly influence me during the execution of a project, especially if I have to work long hours away from home. Occasionally we might even disagree over what I should be doing, so I was interested to read the preliminary findings of a study by Researchers at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and its Psychology Department, who say that fighting with your spouse can actually be good for your health, while people who bottle it all up can die earlier.

They studied 192 couples for 17 years, and found that the couples fell into four categories: where both partners expressed anger when they felt unfairly verbally attacked, where neither partner expressed their anger, and one category each for where the wife suppressed her feelings and where the husband did so.

Ernest Harburg, lead author of the study, said in an interview.”I would say that if you don’t express your feelings to your partner and tell them what the problem is when you’re unfairly attacked, then you’re in trouble,”

The study found that those who kept their anger in were twice as likely to die earlier than those who don’t. There were 13 deaths in the group of 26 pairs where both partners suppressed their emotions, as opposed to only 41 deaths in the remaining 166 pairs.

So it seems that the act of suppressing the emotions of either yourself or your spouse is, eventually, very bad for you. I will mention this study to my wife the next time she yells at me, and see how she reacts when I yell back at her (in the interests of science, of course).

The members of your Project Team are, of course, important stakeholders in any project. They have a high influence on the outcome of the project, and their careers, bonus payments, and status can depend upon a successful outcome of the project.

So how do you identify and choose the ‘best’ people for your team? I’ll bet you were thinking that you would always go for the highly competent person over a likable person of lesser skills? Well, think again. In a study published in July of 2005 in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “Fool vs. Jerk: Whom Would You Hire”, the article describes four different types of colleagues:

1) The Competent Jerk - Who knows a lot but is unpleasant to deal with;
2) The Loveable Fool - Doesn’t know much but is likable and a delight to be around;
3) The Loveable Star - The best combination of likability and competence; and
4) The Incompetent Jerk -The unpleasant and useless combination.

Unsurprisingly, the research showed, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools:
“We found that if someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer. And this tendency didn’t exist only in extreme cases; it was true across the board. Generally speaking, a little extra likability goes a longer way than a little extra competence in making someone desirable to work with. […]”

So there you have it. Likable but less competent people are preferred team members over ‘jerks’, who generally have a repulsive personality and would presumably drag your entire team down with them.

This effect was also studied recently during the 2007 annual Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race in England, as reported in The Economist. Team work is essential to winning a boat-race, and the Cambridge crew (who won) were being observed by Mr. Mark de Rond, a management theorist from Cambridge’s Judge Business School, to see how each member of the team interacted with their peers.

The lesson: Teams that like each other also seem to work better together.