With stakeholders pulling in different directions and competing for your time, staying focused on your daily goals can be difficult. Moira Dunne explains how to manage stakeholders trying to take time away from your scheduled tasks.
Stakeholders are the key people you interact with in your role. It is essential to maintain good relationships with them, support and be responsive to them, but this can impact your work plan and put you in a tight spot.
We feel pressure to respond immediately and don’t want to upset them by saying “no” to a request, even if it is not urgent.
Furthermore, the stakeholder may be a senior figure, so you feel obliged to acquiesce, even if you don’t have time.
As a result, you prioritise the new request but sacrifice important deliverables and your own personal time while letting others down.
Overall, it can feel like the workday is out of control, leading to stress and anxiety.
Here are four tips on managing requests from stakeholders.
1. Take control
To help control your time, be clear about what you need to get done each week and block time in your diary for this priority work.
As new requests crop up, you can assess which is the higher priority task. You may need to do both, but you will not drop the planned work without rescheduling it first.
A baseline plan gives you the confidence to discuss your response regarding the work needed, and not having a plan in place makes it harder to do that.
2. Manage your response time
When responding to stakeholders, the key is to say yes on your own terms. For example:
- Ask when they need the task completed;
- Inform them when you can work on the task; and
- Negotiate a time that suits you both – be as flexible as possible.
As a result, you don’t automatically drop your planned work but still support the stakeholder as best you can.
3. Review urgent requests
Urgent requests generally fall into two categories:
- things that couldn’t be anticipated; and
- things that were not done in time and became urgent.
Many people don’t plan ahead. You can’t change their work style but can change your interaction with them.
Take a few minutes on a Friday afternoon to check in with stakeholders who often have last-minute requests. Tell them you are planning your week and to send on any requests for the next one before close of business so it can be scheduled in.
This prompts them to think ahead about requests instead of waiting until the last minute while subtly telling them that they should let you know in advance if they want time in your diary.
4. Agree expectations
If starting a new relationship with stakeholders, set expectations with them beforehand. Find out what the service level agreement says and ask what timing will work best for them.
Agree the response time for general queries (while acknowledging that genuinely urgent situations can be handled differently).
Once agreed upon, it is easier to stick to these response times in the cut and thrust of a busy day.
5. Drop the guilt
Do not feel guilty if a task from a stakeholder does not fit into your schedule. If you can’t do something, there will be a good reason, such as not qualifying as a higher priority than your current work or being within your role’s remit.
Moira Dunne is the founder and director of beproductive.ie
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