How to Manage Senior Stakeholders
From my hit podcast “Here’s a Startup Idea”— which streams hourly in my brain: some clever hacker needs to build the meeting-trust-inator.
Super simple. In real-time, interrogate the audio on a conference call (i.e., Teams, Zoom, Webex) and keep track of how much each person on the call has spoken. There’ll be some technical challenges— i.e., when multiple people are joining the call from a single conference room— but all you’ll need to figure out is how many people were invited to the meeting (i.e., integration with Outlook, Google Calendar, Fantastical) versus how many different voices spoke… and for how long.
Then, apply all the research that shows that uneven participation in meetings reduces trust within teams, showing in real-time whether a conference call is actively being inclusive.
But that’s just highlighting the problem— an inclusion metric— so you’ll also want to code the solution. That’s where generative AI comes in.
Instead of the vanilla use-case of using AI to generate meeting summaries and takeaways (yawn!), use it in real-time to form questions about what’s already been discussed in the meeting (adding content from previous meetings) and pose those questions to the people who haven’t yet spoken… or spoken as much.
Synthetic inclusion.
You’re welcome.
—
Now, from my other hit podcast “Why Every Answer Leads to Harder Questions”:
Imagine twelve people are on a conference call. And our new synth software is— God bless its heart— giving everyone the support they need to contribute.
Next comes the corporate hierarchy problem.
We’ve all been to that meeting. Everyone speaks but— oddly— only one name keeps getting used: the senior’s.
It’s a type of meeting I call an InformCo. The corporate world calls them SteerCos… optimistically. And usually, the “steering” (quotes intentional) comes from the one or two seniors on the call… max.
But… because seniors have very little time, the meeting has to first bring them up to speed with progress– prepared meticulously in never-ending pre-meetings. Why? Because short of attending the last SteerCo, the seniors weren’t involved in doing any of the actual daily work.
To be fair, the senior’s role— traditionally defined— isn’t to do the work. It’s 1) to use their experience to challenge, 2) to apply their top-of-house perspective– i.e., help connect the dots, some of which aren’t visible to the team– and 3) to continually press the urgency button— which we all know is worn out from overuse in literally every other meeting… ever.
As I said, we’ve all been to that meeting… a billion times.
Short of having the senior play a more dynamic role (which I’ll get to in a minute), that’s a product opportunity for our Inclusynth software. [See, I even gave you a name for it… even bought the domain with the hopes of gifting it to you.]
This feature is harder to deliver technically but Inclusynth will also want to count the number of times participants’ names are mentioned… creating a visible, running tally that highlights the burden of seniority. [On everyone I mean, not just the seniors.]
[And think about how much fun it would be to alert people whose names keep getting used on calls when they’re not in the actual meetings. But I digress….]
Can generative AI help with a solution to this pervasive problem of ineffective corporate hierarchies?
I asked one. Here’s its answer:
“Yes. Generative AI can potentially help with a solution to corporate hierarchies by providing algorithms and insights that allow organizations to better understand the relationships and potential conflicts between different stakeholders. For example, generative AI can help identify ways to streamline communication between different levels of management by recognizing patterns that can be used to foster better cooperation between different stakeholders. Additionally, generative AI can help suggest potential solutions to replace outdated systems, such as traditional hierarchical structures, with more flexible, agile systems that are better able to address the needs and demands of the modern workplace.”
[Note that I’ve stopped having my mind blown by AI. It’s just throwing old ideas back at us.]
How I read that AI response though… validates the core idea that got me journaling about this earlier today: managing senior stakeholders is collaboration.
Our relationship with seniors should be as fellow collaborators. Because despite the corporate culture most of us live in, they are not wise and powerful advisory figures. Status reporting and RAGs are not sacrificial offerings to them.
They’re just well-intentioned, time-constrained peers (who somewhat inexplicably get paid more and who somewhat unfairly have the power to evaluate us)... who also happen to be more broken than us… in a very specific way: they believe in the power of their past experiences more than anyone should.
It *did* get them where they are. But it probably won’t get them where they’re going.
Don’t get me wrong. They might get where they’re going but it won’t be because of their past experiences. It’ll be because of the team.
Let me quote the wisest person I know and prove my point on multiple fronts: “I think we can all agree that celebrating successful companies and inspirational leaders is the writing equivalent of filling your entire backyard with rakes, destined to crack you in the face with the sting of survivorship bias and fundamental attribution error.”
Yep, I wrote that. And paradoxically, I’m both right and wrong.
–
[Ok, can I put my conclusions in the middle of a piece? Why the hell not? Conventions are for cosplayers!]
If your team’s relationship with its seniors is that of service-provider to client or student to teacher, then you’ve 1) strayed from a meaningful definition of “client” and 2) lost your perspective on learning. You’ve lost your path.
If you’re a senior, and your only contribution is advisory (and pressing the urgency button), then you’re actively sacrificing team and organizational trust and it’s built on a shaky foundation of false confidence that your intelligence and previous experiences will always add value to every new situation. You too have lost your path.
Because you didn’t get you here. Your past teams did.
The Path
We can’t improve the collaboration between teams and senior stakeholders without first changing the daily practices of seniors– the people with organizational power. So the first step needs to be seniors prioritizing their time to get involved with the dailies, instead of just waiting to get caught up at the next senior-fest. I don’t know if they’ll ever understand– if I’ll ever understand– that if they don’t make the time to be actively involved, they don’t have the credibility to guide.
See. Hard problem.
At the same time, teams need to stop managing their message– managing their careers– and delegate up. At a minimum, they need to over-communicate with their most time-constrained members– their seniors. And that comes with real career risk: seniors won’t change their habits and worse, will take the extra engagement as a sign of incompetence.
See…
It’s worth the risk though. Especially if you recenter on the word client– the real one– and your ambitions around learning.
Look… if nothing else, we can all stop curating progress (or challenging curated garbage) once a week/month for SteerCos… and recognize that sharing information pales in comparison to sharing tasks.
Teams– seniors included– that are not delegating up and down, that are not redefining inclusion to actively challenge the stale corporate power conventions based on hierarchical thinking… well, they deserve those miserable SteerCos.
Part II: Rethinking “The Path” with Organizational Network Analysis
If you haven’t read When Collaboration Fails and How to Fix It, you should. I’m hoping that you haven’t because when you do– if you do– I’d suggest that you keep thinking about the only bolded statement in this piece: managing senior stakeholders is collaboration.
My guess is that you won’t have time to read it. So– with a gentle disclaimer that I’m not an expert in the field of Organizational Network Analysis (just a fan)– here’s a high-level summary of the research and how I believe it applies to improving collaboration with seniors in your network.
As you read about these 6 types of dysfunctional networks (and how to fix them), think about your experiences on SteerCos.
1. The Hub-and-Spoke Pattern
The network diagram above says it all. In this pattern of team collaboration, every critical decision that a team makes needs to go through one person at the center– either a formal or informal leader.
The research shows (and my experience validates) that a team trapped in a hub-and-spoke model will deliver much slower than expected, their ability to innovate will suffer, they’ll feel increasingly alienated over time, and their leaders will feel overloaded.
And God help you if your senior is the hub (that center circle)– because, as we covered before, that’s not their job and they’re the most time-constrained node in the network.
It’s funny because every once in a while, a failing program will get such intense visibility from the c-suite that some alpha senior will force themselves into that center role, causing the fail to last even longer (inevitably becoming an epic fail). The senior is blind to their role in the ongoing failure and they’ll keep blaming the high flames on the winds of history (before they forced themselves into the center circle). As they see it, they (obviously) aren’t flaming the fire. They’re just cleaning up the mess.
But they’re wrong, even if no one dares to tell them. Their model of collaboration slows the speed of information exchange and more critically, regresses the team and project into autocratic decision-making. Goodbye flexibility. Goodbye autonomy. Goodbye quick recovery.
[Goodbye moon.]
Even when there isn’t a career-ending dumpster fire of a program, a hub-and-spoke-shaped network is a drag on delivery. It’s one person– usually a program manager– collaborating with 8… which is… the opposite of collaboration. That program is slower to fail but it’ll ultimately have similar outcomes to the alpha senior scenario above… even if it doesn’t parade itself as competent senior intervention.
So let’s apply all this through the lens that managing senior stakeholders is collaboration. The hub and spoke pattern of dysfunction should teach us a couple of lessons. First, having more team members engage one another is paramount. (If only Inclusynth software was real!) Because the worst way to run a SteerCo is to have experts talk only once, only when it’s their turn to present, only directed at the senior, and only to get feedback from the senior.
[Wow… I think I just described every SteerCo ever.]
Getting past this culture requires coaching for everyone (especially the senior) on how to assume an appropriate level of authority. It also demands that the team distribute its tribal knowledge, flattening the expertise hierarchy… which itself demands growing expertise in the unlikeliest of places (in seniors!) through joint work… not passive updates.
[That’s one of the reasons I keep begging people to delegate up! Another reason: fairness… but I digress.]
The research also suggests that organizations actively revise decision rights, roles, and/or incentives in the short to medium term; with the longer-term ambition being to actively shift work away from hub-and-spoke patterns.
2. Disenfranchised Nodes
This one’s a little easier to explain and a lot harder to understand. See those two free-floating circles? They’re our marginalized team members. They lack access to resources and struggle to contribute. And that negatively affects the entire group’s performance. Note though that I didn’t say “And they negatively affect the entire group’s performance.” Because that’s classic disenfranchisement.
While a corporation’s kneejerk answer to free-floating nodes might be that those employees “just need to be connected,” there’s usually a structural reason why they’re not empowered. And like their larger societal counterparts, those structural barriers usually get framed as being the disconnected person’s fault.
[Racism much?]
Suffice it to say that there’s a ton of cognitive bias that contributes to leaders elevating some group members above others (i.e., tech over ops, men over women, ivy leaguers over veterans, etc.)... and it’s hardened into a firm’s culture with biased processes (i.e., onerous RAG reporting that can’t change from week to week but is chastised weekly, or hiring processes that signal that we trust senior engineers to interview junior engineers but not junior engineers to interview their peers).
It’s one thing to admit that we all have cognitive biases. It’s something much, much more boring to recognize that cold, hard, seemingly-scientific processes reflect those biases.
And someone needs to call out that we never put processes through those awful bias-training classes. They don’t do well with role-playing.
So… let’s apply the idea of disenfranchised nodes through the lens that managing senior stakeholders is collaboration. There’s little chance that your senior is the disenfranchised node, although some SteerCos come with dueling seniors (fun!)– one of whom is less … let’s call it empowered. [Oh sweet sweet politics!]
The key takeaway on this dysfunction then is that collaborating with your senior can’t be the exclusive privilege of your empowered team members. Because that’s how it usually plays out: alphas want to talk to alphas. They seem to despise the dogs that don’t bark.
Let me take that back. They don’t really despise them. They just don’t have the time to wait for the bark. Or to coax it out.
That’s why those in power need training aimed at exercising their power differently– to actively recognize and reintegrate the disenfranchised– to pull back those who have been relegated to disillusionment and withdrawal because of structural constraints.
Oh, and if we want to give seniors (like me) a problem worthy of their salaries, they should be actively focused on eliminating structural constraints, instead of just advocating for the idea of diversity and inclusion.
[Oooh… self burn!]
3. Misaligned Nodes
Let me start with an example of misaligned notes that all of us in banking will get. The blue nodes are Vince McMahon, The Rock, Triple H, Kane, and Sgt. Slaughter. The two yellow ones are Stone Cold Steve Austin and Mankind. And the two red ones are D-Generation X and The Ministry of Darkness.
Yep. Factions! [Explosion!] The kind that festers when corporate values aren’t shared… Vince!
To quote the research “factions that don’t relate to one another slow down work, erode cohesion, undermine project success, and lose WWE titles.”
[Let’s be honest. No one reads this far down any blog. This is entirely for me, brother!]
We’ve all experienced misaligned nodes at work. We usually call it politics but that’s because we fail to understand network dynamics.
Misaligned nodes are when key players agree on one thing and do another; when they put their team’s goals over that of the enterprise, or worse, over that of clients. It’s teamwork gone tribal. Like-mindedness over one-mindedness. And it breeds the worst kind of distrust– rooted in competition amongst a team that shouldn’t be competing to begin with.
If you’re finally on board with the idea that managing senior stakeholders is collaboration and if your senior is a misaligned node, you got serious problems. Because getting everyone “aligned” is a legit senior responsibility– which means that your senior is either incompetent or raving mad. Mick Foley or Mankind.
[Ok, I’ll stop.]
Or maybe they’re the unpredictable Cactus Jack or the demented hippy Dude Love.
[Seriously. That’s the last supercool reference. I have my lack-of-a-career to think about.]
The literature on building better teams has some suggestions for correcting misaligned nodes: co-creation of shared goals and priorities (I’d add “with your senior”), management through metrics and accountability (ditto), etc. But in my experience, this problem can only be solved by building or rebuilding interpersonal trust.
And if the relationship is seriously damaged, reset it… the way Vince did at the end of WrestleMania 22.
4. Overwhelmed Nodes
This one’s special. My initial understanding of the hub-and-spoke pattern— the first network dysfunction that I outlined in the piece– was off by a mile. My notes for that section read “we need to have all team members engage one another.” The problem lies in the word “all.” I later changed it to “more” because if all team members engaged all other team members, we would have overwhelmed nodes– the collaborative equivalent of a denial of service attack– its own network dysfunction.
It seems obvious now but there are not enough hours in the day to keep up with an all-to-all level of collaborative rigor, especially with larger teams. Plus, we (all) know that collaboration is a process, not the actual delivery. And an efficient process needs to give the team sufficient time to deliver.
We (all) know intuitively that overwhelmed nodes will make decisions inefficiently and compromise more than they should. Less obvious is that left unchecked, overwhelmed nodes harm employee engagement, and eventually lead good people to burn out.
Hallmarks of this vicious circle include ineffective meetings, pointless email storms, and the lack of concrete collaborative metrics. Teams seesaw from fearing to make independent decisions to fearing that they’ll be left out of the process.
See Virginia, there is such a thing as overinclusion.
How can we avoid overwhelmed nodes within the context that managing senior stakeholders is collaboration?
Quick question. Can you imagine a collaborative exchange where one party’s suggestions cannot be denied? Is that collaboration? Not really. That’s “I say, you do.”
So buckle up for the turbulence kids because organizations need to empower team members to say no to their seniors.
[Let’s never quote me on that. Actually, let’s never quote me. Period.]
There’s a little bit of irony here because every decent senior I know already encourages their teams to say no but the context is always(!) “to your stakeholders”-- an implicit “Not to me, your friend. Them! The enemy!”
Seniors are not your friend. They too are stakeholders. You just happen to report to them.
This is a tough nut to crack, especially in large, complex organizations because they rely exclusively on the hierarchy to command and control. And hierarchy’s only answer to being able to say no to your boss is to go higher in the hierarchy– to rely on the problem for the solution.
[sigh]
While the research avoids this little paradox entirely, the answer (or the start of one) lies in understanding the next dysfunction.
5. Isolated Networks
The blue nodes are a seemingly well-functioning, cohesive team but they operate in a network vacuum– ignoring the orange nodes (potential stakeholders and experts). In my experience, they work this way in the name of efficient delivery, using the rationale of overwhelmed nodes (i.e., “If we got everyone’s input, we’d never get anything done”).
This results in echo chambers– where the echoed voice is usually/exclusively the senior’s. Flawed decisions follow. Innovation fails. And the team– not the senior– bears the brunt of the reputational damage.
Again, think SteerCos. If they weren’t isolated networks, their participant lists would be dynamic. And I wouldn’t constantly be comparing them to Las Vegas (i.e., “what happens in SteerCos stays in SteerCos”). They’re well-intentioned enough (i.e., “Let’s make sure we have someone from risk and legal and compliance and…” on and on and on). But none of those nodes run back to their networks bearing SteerCo news and greetings. “What happens in SteerCos….”
How can we avoid isolated networks without becoming overwhelmed nodes? Better tooling (i.e., not email). Better comms (i.e., not email). And we need to rethink our processes for regularly (not constantly) rehydrating SteerCos– not just playing to the usual suspects but systematically identifying and engaging relevant stakeholders and influencers (and this is important) who are both positive and negative opinion leaders.
The research also suggests building in time for iteration with stakeholders. HA! Right. Researchers are funny little creatures… who don’t jump from meeting to meeting simply to hear their seniors wear out the urgency button. Adorable.
How do we incorporate this into our bolded mantra that managing senior stakeholders is collaboration?
For one, we start with the assumption that just because they’re plugged into power discussions does not mean that seniors are plugged into the right discussions. They are like everyone else in a large org– isolated– even if their echo chamber is lined with marble.
So collaborating with them needs to come with network analysis (which is my fancy term for organizational sentiment analysis) (which is my fancy term for schoolyard chatter).
This is where we start to uncover a path for the paradox in the last section. As a less-powerful collaborator with a senior, you need to recognize that they’re a superconnected node in the network and therefore are necessarily influenced by network traffic and network sentiment. In other words, seniors honestly believe that perception is reality.
[It’s not. But their jobs are mostly political now. And politics stopped being about facts. It’s now mostly about network noise.]
So how do you say no to your senior without going above your senior? You orchestrate network sentiment.
[If I said that any more clearly, we’d all get fired.]
6. Priority Overload
And because all answers only lead to harder questions: fixing your isolated network problem comes with the complexity of priority overloads– the siren song of the orange nodes. Letting more external stakeholders into your house might cause your team to lose sight of its mission and priorities.
The team will feel overloaded and negatively impact the quality of execution. Delivery dates will slip. And like the misaligned nodes problem, people will burn out.
So… no free meals in business. Unless you’re in sales.
My favorite irony– and there are always a bunch here– is that constantly pressing the urgency button– senior skill #1– lays the foundation for priority overload.
[Note that I don’t like describing it as a “bunch of ironies.” I suggest we call a group of ironies a murder… like a murder of crows. There’s a certain symmetry– a joyfulness– to “a murder of ironies.”]
This one is easy when it comes to applying the idea that managing senior stakeholders is collaboration. Always share your ordered priorities with your collaborators. It should be a tattoo on your forehead.
In non-permanent ink. Please.
In Closing
Let me channel all seniors everywhere:
Where in God’s name did you find the time to get to the end of this piece?
Get. The. Hell. Back. To. Work.
I need everything by yesterday.
[Warm fuzzies.]
[I am a natural leader.]
Send me some 1-on-1 feedback with your thoughts on this piece or head back to LinkedIn to post a comment and participate in the ongoing discussion. You can also “love” this piece there (because a “like” is cold and impersonal and makes everyone think that you don’t actually read anything).