Your team members rely on your support. Whether that's giving them advice on how to grow their career, offering constructive feedback on their work, or helping them prioritize projects that create the biggest impact — it’s no surprise that focusing on that one-on-one relationship is crucial to both your roles.
That said, another relationship not to be overlooked is the ongoing connection you have with your team members’ key stakeholders. These are the people you may not work with directly day to day but are core contributors in your team members’ success at work.
Without proactively building relationships with these people, you may find yourself missing important holistic information, such as, their strategic perspective on how their team operates, or opportunities to elevate both of your teams members to develop professionally.
So, how can you build stakeholder relationships into insightful opportunities that enable your team members to get ahead?
Establish a meeting cadence
Jot down a list of the stakeholders each team member works with. These might be people mentioned in weekly syncs or those they work with on a regular basis. Restructure the list, as needed, to pinpoint direct stakeholders compared to tangential or more senior stakeholders. Those insights should tell you how often you should be scheduling meetings with them, on a bi-weekly or monthly cadence, respectively. After scheduling, send each stakeholder a message to explain your intentions. If there’s a group of stakeholders your team member interacts with equally, consider setting a group sync to spot and discuss feedback trends together.
Get visibility into the basics
Too often, parallel team leads can experience varying degrees of misalignment between their teams. Whether that’s within a department or across departments, take the time with your team members’ stakeholders to get to know their team’s goals, strategies, and success metrics. Bringing that level of curiosity can often highlight commonalities as well as gaps and insights for your team. Ask them to share with you any important deadlines that they’re working toward with your team members. Marking those dates on your work calendar can help you stay in the know and follow up with relevant team members on how you can support them, as needed.
Build cross-team initiatives
The sign of a strong stakeholder relationship is when fellow leaders have complete trust in your work and proactively want to run projects with you. A great way to do that is to brainstorm big-picture initiatives that can be worked on across your teams. Joining forces can unlock fresh perspectives and skill sets to accomplish larger company goals with shared accountability and excitement. Be sure to include your teams in creating the tactics and communications plans for the projects, giving them opportunities to present their collective strategies and ultimate impact in a larger forum.
Rethink process optimization
With Q1 almost in the rearview mirror, take a look with your fellow stakeholders at existing processes between your teams. You can do this by running a simple retro on a recent workflow or iteration. What worked well? What needs improvement? Where is there room to optimize further? Documenting together these answers can shine a light on new ways you can bring on additional process-critical roles, build out more time to alleviate that last-minute rush, or get senior signoff earlier in the project. It’s important at this stage to also discuss possible solutions — be it ways you can prepare more in advance or handle mid-iteration complications if they reoccur.
Tap into their POV
While meetings can help define space and time for working together, consider mixing it up by inviting team members’ stakeholders to have lunch or coffee with you. The change of scenery can help form a more personal bond. As a manager, making friends at work might feel like a back-burner priority, but if you’re up for it, getting to know a fellow leader can tell you a lot about their concerns, perspectives, and priorities. Through active listening, you can build trust and an understanding of how they think, giving you the know-how to stand in for them and be their voice even when they’re not in the room.
Close the loop
Asking stakeholders for feedback on your team members gives you a holistic view of team performance. That said, check in with those stakeholders to also understand what they want to see out of your relationship. Maybe they want to meet more often or be more aligned on a certain topic or team member. You can also take this up the ladder by asking your manager to collect feedback from these stakeholders. Giving your leader a POC shortlist can help them reach out to the relevant people in your circle and give you both visibility into how you perform as a fellow stakeholder.
