5 Stakeholder Management Activities and Exercises for Workplace Training

A good stakeholder management activity gets participants looking at a project from more than one point of view. The five exercises below cover identifying stakeholders, deciding who needs attention, understanding different perspectives, adapting communication, and dealing with competing concerns.

There are quite a few places where these exercises can be useful. A trainer might use one during a leadership workshop, for example, or include another in project management, change management, or team development training. They can also be used as part of a session that focuses entirely on working with stakeholders.

For more exercises covering related workplace skills, you can also view our free soft skills training activities.

How to Use These Stakeholder Management Activities

You can use the activities individually or combine several of them to create a short stakeholder management workshop. Most work well with participants in pairs or small groups, and you can adapt the scenarios to projects they are already involved in.

Where real workplace situations are sensitive, a fictional scenario can work better. It gives participants more freedom to discuss stakeholder relationships, competing interests, and internal politics without having to talk about real colleagues or current projects.

1. Who Are the Stakeholders?

Purpose of the Activity

This activity encourages participants to broaden their view when it comes to identifying stakeholders.

One might think only of formal decision-makers when identifying stakeholders, but in reality, there are other stakeholders too who can be quite important, even if they exert their influence informally.

Some stakeholders may have direct influence, while others may influence the project more indirectly.

Skills This Activity Helps Develop

By the end of this activity, the participants should be able to identify who the stakeholders are in a broad sense, not only those who make formal decisions.

At the same time, they should recognize when the impact a stakeholder can have is indirect and be able to distinguish between different stakeholder roles.

Activity Setup

Prepare a short workplace scenario that involves a project or a changing situation that needs managing.

The scenario needs to describe only the situation, without mentioning the stakeholders. The participants will write a list of them during the activity.

Ask participants to work in pairs or small groups and share the scenario with each group or pair.

Task for Participants

After reading the scenario, participants will brainstorm and list as many possible stakeholders as they can think of. Explain that they shouldn’t think about their role or level of influence as yet.

Then, ask participants to categorize the stakeholders according to whether they are:

• Internal or external
• Directly or indirectly affected
• Decision-makers, influencers, or affected parties

Finally, start a whole-class discussion and ask groups to compare their lists with other groups, adding, if necessary, stakeholders whom others identified.

Scenario Example

In a company, management has decided to change the way employees work by introducing a new hybrid-working policy.

Employees will work from the office at different times but in such a way as to ensure that enough staff are available in the office at any one time. So, this process will need to be tightly organized.

This change will require a series of reorganizations in different areas of the workplace, including changes to the expected office days, working hours, and physical office space to accommodate this new system so everyone has a desk when working in the office.

This new policy will apply across different departments.

Stakeholders Participants Might Identify

There are several stakeholders whom the participants might identify, such as:

• employees
• line managers
• HR
• senior leadership
• IT
• facilities
• employee representatives or unions
• customers
• suppliers and contractors
• new recruits or applicants
• building management or landlord

Things to Draw Out from the Scenario

As the participants work on the scenario and categorize the possible stakeholders, some key points will emerge.

One thing that will become clear is that authority is only one type of influence, as people who don’t have authority can exert influence too in a different way (for example, the facilities department might find it too challenging to accommodate the new system and might slow down the change).

Some stakeholders who are strongly affected by a decision may have relatively little formal decision-making power. Moreover, indirect and external stakeholders might be easy to miss or easily forgotten.

Finally, stakeholder lists are not static; they may change over time (for instance, suppliers might change) and one stakeholder might fit more than one category.

Possible Debrief Questions

To help your participants reflect during the discussion, you might want to ask questions such as:

• Who did you identify first?
• Which stakeholders were easiest to overlook?
• Who is affected without having formal decision-making power?
• Did your group identify different stakeholders from other groups?
• Who might become important later in the project?

Further Considerations

Encourage your participants to stick to these three ways of categorizing the stakeholders:

1. internal or external;
2. directly or indirectly affected;
3. and decision-makers, influencers, or affected parties.

This is because you want to keep the categorization simple, so it doesn’t take the focus away from the task of identifying the stakeholders.

Point out that there isn’t just one possible list of stakeholders, as this depends on the project and the context.

If you are using the activity as part of project management training, our project management tips for beginners also cover identifying and working with stakeholders.

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2. Stakeholder Priority Challenge

Purpose of the Activity

Once participants have identified who the stakeholders are, the next step is to assess which stakeholders need the most attention.

This is not because some people are important and some are not. Of course everybody’s needs count.

However, in every project we have limited management time and limited resources available. Hence, there is a need to prioritize so we can make every bit of effort count as much as possible.

Trade-offs need to be made, so how do we do that? This activity helps participants decide.

Skills This Activity Helps Develop

This activity helps participants develop the delicate skill of prioritizing which stakeholders they should pay most attention to.

Prioritizing effectively includes the ability to assess the impact and influence that each stakeholder can have and to judge the consequences of not prioritizing the right stakeholders.

In addition, this activity focuses on the skills of being able to allocate limited attention and resources wisely and to recognize that priorities might need revisiting if circumstances change.

So, the process of prioritization is dynamic and can change over time.

Activity Setup

For this activity, you can use the same list of stakeholders the participants created in the previous activity (if you are continuing in the same training program) or you can provide participants with a ready-made list of stakeholders.

If you decide to use the same list from Activity 1, though, you have two options:

• create one agreed whole-class stakeholder list and use that for Activity 2 (this option makes running the activity more straightforward);
• allow groups to keep different lists and discuss how their original identification affected their priorities (this can show how the stakeholders identified at the start can influence later prioritization).

Likewise, you can use the same scenario as in Activity 1.

Participants will work in groups, and you will give each group a fixed “attention budget”.

For example, this budget can consist of 20 points in total, which the participants will have to distribute across all stakeholders.

Participants are allowed to give a stakeholder 0 points. This does not mean that the stakeholder is unimportant, but that the group considers other stakeholders a higher priority for attention at that particular stage.

Task for Participants

Participants will assign points to stakeholders, with more points equaling a greater need to give that stakeholder attention or to engage them.

The main rule is that they cannot allocate more than the total budget across all stakeholders.

As well as allocating points, the participants will have to explain why they allocated a certain number of points to each stakeholder.

After the group phase of the activity ends, allow groups to compare allocations with each other.

You can also add an additional twist by revealing a new development in the project and allowing the participants to reconsider their points allocation.

This twist can be useful to give participants a sense of how stakeholder priorities can shift during the life of a project as circumstances change.

End the activity with a whole-class discussion.

Scenario Example

You can reuse the same scenario as in activity No. 1.

Possible new developments you can add if you decide to give participants the opportunity to reconsider their allocation of points include:

• Employee representatives raise concerns
• IT identifies a security problem
• A senior leader withdraws support
• An employee survey shows strong opposition
• Facilities announces office-space constraints

Factors Participants Might Consider

Here are some ideas you can give participants as you facilitate the activity, in case they need help.

As they allocate points, participants might want to consider some of the following factors:

• How much each stakeholder can affect the outcome of the project
• How much the project affects each stakeholder
• The importance of cooperation or support
• The consequences if a stakeholder is ignored
• The potential future influence of stakeholders
• The likelihood that priorities may change
• Any assumptions they may have about a stakeholder’s importance or influence

Things to Draw Out from the Activity

The main lessons participants can learn from this activity can be summarized as follows:

• A stakeholder’s formal status doesn’t automatically reflect what level of priority you need to assign them.
• A change in context can change priorities.
• A stakeholder you overlook now may later become crucial.
• Limited resources require choices.
• Do not confuse the level of priority you assign to a stakeholder with their personal worth.

Possible Debrief Questions

Here are some useful questions you can ask your participants during the final discussion:

• Who received the most attention? Why?
• Where did groups differ most?
• Which stakeholder received fewer points than expected?
• What criteria influenced your decisions?
• Did new information make you change your allocation?
• What could happen if too much attention is concentrated on one stakeholder?

Further Considerations

There are a few things to keep in mind for this activity.

First of all, the allocation of points is just something we do for the activity. It’s not a formal stakeholder model.

In real life, participants can use other suitable ways to prioritize stakeholders, and there are also formal models available if needed.

There is no correct way of distributing points. The most important thing for this activity is the reasoning behind how participants allocate their points.

So, ask participants to explain the reasoning behind their priorities, especially where they seem to be making assumptions about a stakeholder’s importance or influence.

Stakeholder analysis can also involve putting people or groups onto a power-interest matrix. This helps participants compare how much influence each stakeholder has with how much interest they have in the project.

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3. Understand the Stakeholder’s Perspective

Purpose of the Activity

With this activity, we are moving beyond simply labeling stakeholders and placing them into categories.

Instead, we are delving deeper into the stakeholders’ needs, concerns, motives, and what they might potentially gain or lose from the project.

So, this activity is more about looking at the project from the point of view of different parties, in order to develop a deeper understanding of stakeholders.

Understanding the stakeholders’ points of view can also help the participants reduce the risk of making assumptions that are not grounded in the stakeholders’ actual situation.

Skills This Activity Helps Develop

This activity helps participants develop the ability to see a project from different perspectives, analyze the stakeholders’ situations in more detail, and identify their interests and concerns before issues arise.

This is also a useful reflection tool that allows participants to start distinguishing assumptions from known information and recognize that different stakeholders may have conflicting priorities.

Activity Setup

For this activity, you will need a workplace scenario (let’s use the same scenario from Activity 1 in this example).

Participants will work in pairs or small groups, and you will assign one stakeholder to each group or pair.

Then, ask each group to examine the scenario from the point of view of the stakeholder assigned to them.

Finally, start a whole-class discussion for groups to compare their different perspectives.

Task for Participants

Each group will examine the scenario from their assigned stakeholder’s perspective by asking themselves:

• What does the stakeholder want?
• What matters most to them?
• What might they gain?
• What might they lose?
• What are they worried about?
• What information will they need?
• What could make them support the project?
• What could make them oppose it?
• What influence/resources do they have?
• What are we assuming rather than knowing?

After considering these questions in their groups, participants will summarize their answers and share them with the rest of the class.

Finally, during the debrief, groups will compare their points of view and discuss.

Scenario Example

You can reuse the same scenario from Activity 1 and pick a number of possible stakeholders.

For example, each group can analyze the hybrid-working policy as viewed by one of these:

• an employee with a long commute
• a line manager
• HR
• IT
• Facilities
• a senior executive
• a new employee
• a customer-facing team

Possible Stakeholder Concerns or Interests

Here are some concerns or interests these stakeholders might have, which you can suggest to your participants in case they need help:

• flexibility of working hours
• coordination of tasks
• productivity
• office costs
• security
• fairness
• recruitment and retention
• team cohesion
• management visibility
• onboarding
• customer service

Things to Draw Out from the Activity

There are a number of conclusions you can draw from this activity that may be worth pointing out to the participants.

One point is that the same change can be positive for one stakeholder and problematic for another. So, one of the challenges is understanding how the needs and concerns of different stakeholders may differ or even conflict.

Another point is that stakeholders may show a certain position on the surface, but there may be deeper interests or concerns behind that positioning.

For example, a line manager might say that they don’t support the new hybrid-working policy, but their underlying concern may be about how to coordinate shifts, whether the arrangement is fair, or whether they might be blamed if it goes wrong.

This distinction matters because positions can look incompatible while the underlying interests may leave room for negotiation.

There may also be some overlap between stakeholders’ interests, even when their positions differ. Because a stated position may be different from the underlying concerns, two stakeholders may appear to disagree, but underneath they may want some of the same things.

For example, a line manager may be against hybrid working, while HR might support it. However, both parties may share some underlying interests, such as wanting staff to perform well and to be treated fairly.

Finally, the fact that you understand a stakeholder’s position does not mean that you have to agree with it. You just need to understand it in order to work out how it might affect the project or how best to approach the stakeholder.

Possible Debrief Questions

During the final discussion, you can ask the following questions to bring up ideas:

• Which perspective was easiest or hardest to understand?
• Did the project look different from that stakeholder’s viewpoint?
• What assumptions did you make?
• What would you need to ask the stakeholder directly?
• Where did stakeholder interests overlap?
• Where did they conflict?

Further Considerations

Here are some suggestions you can give your participants for the activity to be as effective as possible.

Encourage them to avoid stereotypes or caricatures. For example, they should avoid saying things like “senior leaders only care about cost,” “employees only care about flexibility,” or “IT will always resist change.”

These ideas may sometimes hold a grain of truth, but they are stereotypes. In real life, concerns and interests are much more nuanced. Real stakeholders usually have several interests, and people in the same role may think very differently.

Warn your participants that they should distinguish between what they know, what they infer, and what they would need to check.

This means separating the information actually given in the scenario from reasonable interpretations they are making from that information or things they cannot know without asking the stakeholder or gathering more evidence.

Last but not least, the activity asks participants to imagine how the situation might look from another stakeholder’s point of view, but that does not mean pretending they know exactly what that person thinks or why they behave in a certain way.

In other words, participants should generate possible explanations and useful questions, rather than confident claims about somebody else’s motives.

For example, making claims about a motive might sound like this:

“The manager is opposing the change because they are controlling and don’t trust their staff.”

Whereas, generating possible explanations might sound like:

“The manager may be concerned about coordination, workload, productivity, or losing contact with the team. We would need to speak to them to find out.”

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4. Match Communication to the Stakeholder

Purpose of the Activity

This activity focuses on the idea that communication can’t be the same for every stakeholder. Instead, it has to be tailored to different stakeholders’ needs.

So, we should avoid giving everyone the same information in the same way because we must consider what is relevant for each stakeholder to know, when it’s best to deliver the information, how much information to provide, which channel to use, and who should deliver it.

We should communicate with every stakeholder in a way that is most appropriate to their needs, role, or interests.

Skills This Activity Helps Develop

This activity is about developing communication skills specific to stakeholder management.

These include:

• Planning communication strategies for different stakeholders
• Being aware of the audience the message is aimed at
• Adapting a message to its audience
• Selecting the appropriate channel and timing
• Avoiding information overload
• Maintaining consistency of information while tailoring it to different audiences

Activity Setup

For this activity, you will need a scenario in which there has been a change to a project, and participants need to inform the stakeholders.

You will also need to prepare a list of stakeholders.

The factual information regarding the change will be the same for every stakeholder, but the way this is delivered will differ, and each group of participants will decide how.

Task for Participants

Ask participants to work in small groups and assign three stakeholders to each group.

Each group will then outline a message for each of their three stakeholders.

For each stakeholder, the group will decide:

• what they need to know
• what matters most to them
• what detail is unnecessary
• what questions they might ask
• when they should be told
• what the best channel is
• who should communicate the information to them
• whether it should be a one-off communication or require ongoing communication
• whether they should give the stakeholder an opportunity for feedback or questions

End the activity with a whole-class discussion during which groups will compare the changes they made to the message to adapt it to different audiences.

Scenario Example

You can create a very simple scenario. For example: the implementation of a new workplace system has been delayed by six weeks.

Possible stakeholders you can list are:

• a senior executive
• the employees who will use the system
• the IT team
• the project team
• the customer-facing employees
• a supplier
• the affected customers, if relevant

Participants might consider the following information to include when communicating with each stakeholder.

Senior executive:

• impact
• risks
• cost
• revised timeline
• decisions required

Employees:

• practical implications
• dates
• training or support
• what they need to do
• where to ask questions

IT:

• technical dependencies
• resources
• revised tasks
• testing
• timeline

Customer-facing staff:

• customer impact
• interim arrangements
• what they can tell customers

Things to Draw Out from the Activity

When discussing the activity with your participants, you might want to highlight some of the following factors:

• Tailoring a message doesn’t mean changing the facts.
• Different stakeholders need different levels or types of detail.
• Timing matters.
• Channel matters.
• The person delivering a message matters (e.g., some messages may be better coming from a direct manager, project lead, HR, or senior leader depending on the issue and stakeholder).
• After delivering communication, you should allow feedback (because people may need to ask questions, raise concerns, or provide information the project team has overlooked).
• Too much information can be as unhelpful as too little.

Possible Debrief Questions

Here are some questions you can ask to facilitate the debrief:

• What changed between stakeholder messages?
• What stayed the same?
• Who needed the most detail?
• Who needed to know first?
• Which communication channel seemed most suitable?
• What could happen if everyone received the same message?
• When could tailoring become misleading?

Further Considerations

To make this activity as effective as possible, here are some pointers you might want to give to your participants.

Remind them that the facts must remain consistent through all communication to all stakeholders.

The difference is in how you deliver the message, when you deliver it, who delivers it, and what information you give or omit.

This does not mean hiding information from someone. Some stakeholders may genuinely not be interested in knowing every piece of information, but only what is relevant and useful to them.

Two important takeaway messages are that contradictory messages should be avoided. Also, adapting communication should make it more relevant to the stakeholder, not hide important information.

In practice, these decisions can form part of a wider stakeholder engagement plan or communication plan.

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5. Deal With Conflicting Stakeholder Concerns

Purpose of the Activity

When dealing with stakeholders, disagreements or resistance can happen. We cannot completely prevent them.

However, we can learn how to best deal with them.

The aim of this activity is to understand how to handle disagreement and resistance constructively.

A key part of this is trying to understand the reasons behind disagreement or resistance before we try to persuade the stakeholder.

So, we need to explore the conflicting stakeholder interests and identify when to negotiate, adapt, escalate, or maintain boundaries.

Skills This Activity Helps Develop

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There are many skills that this activity can help participants develop.

Participants will learn how to:

• recognize and understand resistance
• question assumptions
• negotiate with the stakeholders
• influence them
• find common ground
• handle competing priorities
• decide when they need to escalate

Activity Setup

You will need a scenario describing a workplace project that is already underway. At some point, one stakeholder starts to resist the project, or the needs of different stakeholders begin to conflict.

The scenario will need to provide enough information for participants to understand the issue partly, but not completely.

Task for Participants

The participants will work in groups and discuss the following questions:

• What do we know?
• What do we not know?
• What might explain the stakeholder’s resistance?
• What questions should we ask?
• What assumptions should we avoid?
• What does the stakeholder need or want?
• What does the project need?
• Where are interests aligned?
• Where do interests conflict?
• What could be changed?
• What cannot be changed?
• What could be offered?
• What approach or conversation should we have?
• When would escalation become appropriate?

Then, they will jot down a strategy for what they would do in that situation, and each group will present it to the rest of the class.

Finish the activity with a whole-class debrief.

Scenario Example

The company is implementing a new workplace system. The project is halfway through, and everything seems to be progressing well.

However, a department manager who was originally supportive now says that the project is creating too much additional work for their team.

As a result, the manager is discouraging their team from engaging with the project, but the project requires all departments to cooperate in order to succeed.

Here are some possible reasons behind the resistance that you can mention to your participants if they need help:

• workload
• poor timing
• lack of consultation
• previous negative experience
• inadequate training
• insufficient resources
• unclear benefits
• operational risk
• loss of control or status
• competing targets
• misunderstanding
• change fatigue

Possible ways forward may entail:

• gathering more information
• listening to concerns
• clarifying misunderstandings
• providing resources
• adjusting the timeline
• modifying part of the plan
• running a trial or pilot
• negotiating a compromise
• clarifying what is non-negotiable
• escalating where necessary
• accepting that full agreement may not be possible

Things to Draw Out from the Activity

This activity can teach us some very useful points about dealing with resistance.

For instance, resistance is not always bad. Rather, it may contain useful information that may help us improve a project.

Disagreement does not necessarily mean that someone is being obstructive. It may still be possible to find a workable way forward, even when stakeholders disagree.

Persuading somebody to change their mind is not always the right solution. Sometimes it is worth treating the disagreement as feedback and making changes to accommodate the other parties.

However, stakeholder interests can genuinely conflict and, in these cases, a compromise is sometimes possible and sometimes not.

In some cases, escalation may eventually become necessary and appropriate.

Possible Debrief Questions

During the debrief, you can ask your participants some of the following questions to stimulate reflection and discussion:

• What might the resistance be telling you?
• What would you want to find out first?
• Which assumptions could be dangerous?
• What could reasonably change?
• What should remain non-negotiable?
• When would you negotiate?
• When would you escalate?
• Can stakeholder management be successful even if people still disagree?

Further Considerations

Here are some points you might want to make clear during the activity.

Stakeholders should not be treated as “difficult people”. When disagreement happens, you should try to understand what is behind it.

To do so, try to understand the stakeholder’s interests (what they are trying to protect, achieve, or avoid); their constraints (what limits their choices); their behavior (what they are actually doing); and the context (what is happening around the situation).

Resistance often makes more sense once you look at those factors together.

Successful stakeholder management is not simply about getting the immediate decision you want or persuading everyone to agree.

Good outcomes can include:

• finding a solution that allows the project to continue
• addressing some legitimate concerns
• agreeing on what can and cannot change
• keeping communication open
• preserving enough trust to work together afterwards
• maintaining a workable relationship even when full agreement is not possible

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Frequently Asked Questions About Stakeholder Management Activities

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