Dealing with stakeholders: content design training (4 of 7)
This is the fourth in a series of 7 blogs about Scroll’s new content design training modules. It covers stakeholder management and effective techniques to build relationships and effect change.
By Andrew Charlesworth
Andrew Charlesworth is a content strategist and Scroll consultant. He specialises in helping organisations measure and improve the impact of their content and efficiently manage its life cycle. He's trained content designers from public and private sector, journalists, and PR execs.
If there is one skill that a content designer must be good at to succeed, it is stakeholder management.
You can write as well as John Steinbeck - punchy sentences, grouped into short paragraphs that drive pacy narrative - but your prose will never be seen by users if you can’t negotiate with stakeholders.
Whereas, if you’re good at managing stakeholders, you can get away with less than perfect writing skills. Controversial, but true.
Winning not compromising
However, being good at stakeholder management doesn’t mean making all stakeholders love you because you do everything they ask.
At the bare minimum, it means satisfying users’ needs while not being dragged into lengthy and destructive trench warfare with stakeholders. Optimally, it means providing users with what they need, while persuading stakeholders this is actually what they wanted all along.
At best, stakeholder management means stakeholders will love you because you make them look good. If users get what they need, and respond well to the content, the stakeholders look successful in the eyes of their superiors.
Workshops required
This is another of the course modules - like content process design - which is more like a strategy workshop than a conventional training course. It can’t be pre-packaged. The module has to be customised, because the stakeholders, the content team and the environment they inhabit are different in every organisation.
It can fit in a 2-hour slot, but it’s better divided over 2 or 3 sessions adding up to about 4 hours in total.
It helps if the trainer is given access to the stakeholders as well as the content team. Stakeholders have legitimate concerns too. Furthermore, the publishing process is rarely transparent in any organisation, so it’s important to get both sides of the story.
But the 2 groups need to be engaged separately. They will not speak the unvarnished truth if they are in the same session.
Get the hurt out
Firstly, it’s often necessary to provide the content team with a time of catharsis. How do stakeholders currently behave? What’s normal? What’s most painful? When you’ve pushed back, what was the reaction? What worked? What would you have done differently knowing what you know now?
From this forum, and a parallel session with stakeholders (if available), you can build a problem statement.
Frequently, the complaint is that stakeholders email signed-off drafts to the content team with instructions to publish within a short deadline. The content team sees stakeholders as bad neighbours who toss their rubbish over the fence, polluting the content garden. Consequently, user experience is compromised because the draft is not user-centred but there is not enough time to amend it.
Specifically, content is framed and structured from the point of view of the organisation, not the utility of users who will access it.
Conflict arises when the content designer pushes back and tries to retro-fit user-centred values.
The result is a 3-way loss:
published content is not fit for users
the process is stressful to stakeholders and content designers
the reputation of the organisation is at risk because of poor user experience.
Solutions
It’s good to move quickly from catharsis to helping the content team talk about solutions - even if only theoretical - lest the module becomes an exercise in the content team wallowing in their misery. They can do that together over coffee or in the pub.
There are methods to close off the avenue with which ‘final’ drafts with short publishing deadlines are sent to the content team, such as committing stakeholders to engage early or to consult with the content team before drafting.
There are also techniques for dealing with stakeholders, introducing ways of working that subtly manipulate behaviour, such as:
evidence-based arguments for user-centred design
solving problems by asking questions
minimum viable product
standardised email responses
tactics for dealing with conflicting priorities
‘yes, and…’ approach
standardised content request and briefing forms.
All these are covered in the course.
Deployment
But that’s where a lot of content strategy ends: with some nice-sounding solutions that are a million miles from day-to-day working.
So it’s vital to discuss what the content team can do to get from where they are now to where they want to be.
Let’s think about the last technique - standardised content request and briefing forms…
My very first training gig was with an PR agency team servicing a global IT firm. The client said the team needed writing training because they were producing rubbish news releases.
After an hour, it was obvious there was nothing wrong with the team’s writing skills. What they lacked was a decent brief from which to write. The average brief was a 15 minute call with a subject expert on his way to the airport.
So the rest of the 2-day course became about drafting a standardised superset of briefing questions to ask, and developing the team’s interviewing skills, largely through roleplay.
The course was 100 percent bespoke. The team told their manager it was the best training they’d ever had, and it revolutionised the client-agency relationship.
Change agents
The stakeholder management modules deal with how the content team can be an agent for the change they want.
We explore what is within their power to enact themselves, what they need management support for, and how to sell it to management to gain support. And, of course, how to communicate change to stakeholders, make it something everyone wants, how to pilot change, and how to iterate.
Scroll’s new modular training
The focus of Scroll’s new modular training is on developing skills that content teams struggle to acquire:
Content design basics
The role of user research
Content process design
Stakeholder management
Taking a brief
Thinking like a user
Accessibility
Discussion, review, and 2i
Co-developing content
Measuring content and audit
Content lifecycle management
Read more about Scroll’s content design training.
Talk to us about training for your content team