Change is inevitable, but your approach to leading and influencing your teams and communicating with them during the process makes all the difference. Managing stakeholders effectively involves engaging the right stakeholders, building trust with them over time, and ensuring accountability. This nurturing process ensures that you develop authentic, meaningful relationships that allow you to build credibility as a leader.

This executive brief reveals actionable strategies for identifying and engaging key stakeholders, building meaningful relationships, and empowering leaders to build their credibility and influence so that they can drive successful organizational change.

This roundtable was held on March 20th, 2025

Identifying and Engaging the Right Stakeholders

Post-merger integrations (PMIs) offer a valuable blueprint for managing large-scale change by emphasizing leadership alignment and clear accountability. Unlike PMIs, many change initiatives lack this structured approach, making execution less effective. Applying PMIs to general change initiatives can ensure senior leader stakeholders share a unified vision so organizations can drive change with greater clarity.

Stakeholder Mapping and Influence

Successful change management begins with identifying and engaging the right stakeholders. Map out key players early to clarify responsibilities and ensure accountability. The criteria should go beyond roles and influence, accounting for an individual’s stage of readiness for the change initiative.

• Step 1: Understand who truly holds influence and decision-making power to avoid significant resistance. Assess their interest level to gauge support. Integrate top-down and bottom-up approaches to drive change from leadership and grassroots levels.
• Step 2: Identify any overlapping change agendas. Coordination can be challenging when multiple change initiatives happen simultaneously. Even when teams genuinely try to engage stakeholders, the sheer volume of concurrent changes often leads to overwhelming complexity.
• Step 3: Recognize and address the challenges posed by a diverse workforce. Multigenerational and culturally diverse teams may need targeted communication strategies to foster open dialogue and buy-in.
• Step 4: Share the roadmap with all stakeholders to provide structure, improve communication, and build momentum for the transformation process. Provide updates for any changes in strategies to avoid misalignments.

Building Trust and Meaningful Relationships

1. Fostering Trust through Engagement

Trust is foundational to successful change management. Engage with stakeholders in personal, one-on-one conversations to understand their concerns, preferences, and readiness for change. This helps build rapport, setting the stage for better collaboration. Often, relationship-building and decision-making extend beyond formal meetings. Try to leverage informal networks to influence and drive change from both the top and the grassroots levels.

Foster open communication and demonstrate empathy, particularly with employees navigating the emotional stages of change. Acknowledge and amplify regional perspectives to ensure diverse voices contribute to organizational strategy.

2. Establishing a Core Communication Group

Avoid the ‘Last Mile’ problem where well-designed, innovative communication strategies falter during execution. Establish a core communication group with representatives from various functions to ensure clear, consistent communications from the start. Cross-functional alignment is crucial for minimizing conflicting messages and ensuring a cohesive narrative throughout the change process.

3. Ensure Communication Relevance

The focus on how communication is delivered often outweighs whether it drives action. Change teams can sometimes prioritize creative methods, like gamification and new formats, over genuine engagement. Instead of bombarding employees with broad messaging, design content for specific phases of change adoption. For example:

1. Awareness → Email newsletters, announcement decks
2. Commitment → Surveys, town halls, leadership engagement
3. Knowledge → Training decks, playbooks, evaluations
4. Adoption → Practical toolkits, hands-on workshops
5. Reinforcement → Ongoing nudges, leadership reinforcement

Test messaging with small groups before broad rollout. Consider the factors below to ensure continued impact with each communication:

• Tone of Communication: Risk-averse organizations may adopt cautious, legal-driven messaging that lacks engagement. Balance clarity, transparency, and legal risk to keep messages informative yet approachable.
• Audience Segmentation: Customize communication based on change readiness, roles, culture, and interests. Factor in behavioral traits and communication preferences, tailoring message depth for different groups—detail-oriented stakeholders need comprehensive insights, senior leaders require concise, strategic updates, and middle managers need information to manage downwards and upwards. Use subscription-based models to let employees opt into topics that matter to them.
• Message Simplification & Delivery: High message frequency can lead to overload. Categorize updates as urgent, important, or optional, and establish a communication cadence to manage expectations. Keep messages concise and ensure additional context by linking relevant department communications in updates to avoid confusion.
• Coordination & Context Awareness: Be mindful of competing priorities, like performance reviews. Set up a cross-functional calendar to avoid message saturation, and provide preemptive information to key leadership before major updates to avoid reactive firefighting.
• Leverage Technology for Scalability: Move beyond static screens and email overload and use more engaging formats like chatbots, personalized dashboards, and AI-driven content. Manually managing this level of personalization can be complex and time-consuming. Leverage AI-driven tools to automate repetitive tasks, ensuring efficient and scalable communication.
• Test & Iterate: Gather input from employees on what’s working and where there are communication pain points through pulse surveys and feedback loops.

Solidifying Credibility and Enforcing Accountability

1. Building Credibility to Encourage Action

Credibility is earned over time by consistently delivering value, demonstrating expertise, and building trust. Be flexible and open to feedback. Leaders should avoid becoming too attached to one rigid approach—being able to pivot earns trust and engagement from employees. Balance assertiveness with strategic patience, and know when to push and when to step back. Credibility-building strategies may vary depending on your position within the organization, so adjust your approach to the situation at hand:

• Building credibility in a new role and environment: Newcomers offer valuable fresh perspectives, and credibility can be quickly established with confidence. Reflect on past transitions to assess what worked and didn’t, and adapt your insights to refine the approaches. Build relationships before seeking trust, recognize potential disruptors, and engage neutrally. Start with informal conversations and avoid discussing conflict upfront.
• Transitioning to a new role within the same organization: Be aware of pre-existing perceptions. Use this opportunity to shape your personal brand. Be intentional about how you present yourself in the new role while reflecting on past experiences.
• Navigating new organizational cultures: Different environments require different approaches. For example, a US-based organization requires a more aggressive approach, while Asian cultures prefer a less direct style. ‘Read the room’ to recognize cultural nuances and expectations to help adapt suitable leadership and communication styles.

2. Ensure Accountability to Drive Outcomes

Hold leadership accountable for progress, not just echoing directives. Align actions by coordinating messages and modeling desired behavior to set the tone for the organization. If senior leadership fails to set the example, control what you can with your own response. Continue to demonstrate resilience and foster a positive environment to sustain engagement and assess whether behaviors and engagement are genuinely shifting.

Follow up on commitments with meaningful action items, clear ownership, and regular progress tracking. Create structured forums (e.g., leadership calls) to keep stakeholders engaged and accountable. Applying a structured marketing framework to change adoption can help map out the process, ensuring targeted content for each stage of the change journey—moving from scattered communication to intentional change enablement.

• Awareness: Stakeholders become aware of the initiative.
• Interest: Some express interest in learning more.
• Commitment: Stakeholders commit to supporting the initiative.
• Knowledge: Training and education enhance understanding.
• Adoption: Individuals begin implementing the change.
• Reinforcement: Continuous support ensures lasting adoption.

Conclusion

Empowering employees to thrive during change is not a simple task. It requires deliberate strategies that engage the right stakeholders, build trust, and foster accountability. By adopting a flexible, responsive approach to leadership and communication, organizations can navigate even the most complex transformations successfully. The key is not only in how change is communicated but in how leaders model the behaviors they want to see across the organization, ensuring alignment and momentum every step of the way.

The Executive Council for Leading Change

The Executive Council for Leading Change (ECLC) is a global organization that brings executives together to redefine the landscape of organizational change and transformation. Our council aims to advance strategic leadership expertise in the realm of corporate change by connecting visionary leaders. It’s a place where leaders responsible for significant change initiatives can collaborate, plan, and create practical solutions for intricate challenges in leading large organizations through major shifts.

In a world where change is constant, we recognize its crucial role in driving business success. ECLC’s mission is to create a community where leaders can excel in guiding their organizations through these dynamic times.

Interested in joining ECLC? Learn the membership criteria and sign-up below.

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