Hosts Merv Jersak and Tim Jerome highlight personal stories and experiences to illustrate various strategies for effective stakeholder engagement, mentorship, and leadership qualities beyond formal training. Through anecdotes about overcoming challenges and fostering teamwork, they emphasize the value of relationship-building, preparation, and adapting creative solutions to enhance collaboration and project success.

Main Take-Aways

Stories are powerful teachers. Today’s story lessons:

• The importance of informal interactions with stakeholders
• Using positive influence to interact with stakeholders
• Influencing stakeholders to engage with each other
• Using teambuilding to enhance stakeholder participation
• Strategic methods for learning more about engaging with your stakeholders
• Developing strong bonds with stakeholders through common interests

 Show Notes

Today’s Project Managers Coffee Chat: Leadership Lessons from the Trenches – Stories of Stakeholder Engagement

00:28 Merv and Tim reiterate that the sharing of their personal stories from their project experiences – both positive and negative – are meant to provide real life lessons learned for their audience. Their stories are not meant to be instruction, but do provide examples of what can work and what might not work in given situations.

01:30 Tim kicks off the podcast with an example of the importance of informal interactions with our stakeholders, which reminds Merv of a very similar situation of chasing down a key subject matter expert on one of his projects to their regular smoke break locations.

04:14 Merv recounts a ‘banana nut muffin’ strategy to gain access to a key stakeholder – an example of using positive influence to manage stakeholder engagement.

05:47 Tim provides an example of zeroing on stakeholder participation by influencing stakeholders to communicate with each other to come to a conclusion his team could move forward with.

10:26 Merv tells a story of organizing a social event with his team and his customer team that  stayed within the confines of his company’s contractual requirements while providing a team-building experience that was met positively by his stakeholder subject matter experts.

14:05 Tim recounts an experience where a competing (but collaborative) consulting firm pumped his team for information, and in the process taught him a strategic way to educate himself on establishing stakeholder relationships to build trust.

16:28 Merv confirms Tim’s description of the other firms’ strategy by revealing that his organization always held a ‘meeting before the meeting’.

18:38 Merv enjoys telling of an experience where he developed a strong bond with a stakeholder executive through their common love of humor and standup comedy.

19:43 Setting up for upcoming weeks as Tim and Merv will explore many of the essential skills that project managers must develop to be truly successful. These initial discussions of effective leadership strategies with regard to leading teams and leading stakeholders form the foundation for those upcoming episodes.