Special Report: The Stakeholders Have Opinions
Buy-in is a beautiful concept. So is Bigfoot. You’ll hear stories, but rarely see proof. Everything was going according to plan until the stakeholders saw the plan. Then it turned into group therapy with office chairs.
Reports from The Resistance Journal Entry #321
We’d barely finished the kickoff deck when the emails started rolling in.
Not questions. Not clarifications.
Opinions.
Stakeholders have them. They arrive unsolicited and fully formed: like Zeus leaping from the head of Olympus, except wearing a badge and cc’ing Legal.
“I’m concerned this doesn’t reflect the needs of my team.”
“Have you considered renaming the entire initiative?”
“We did something similar in 2014 and it didn’t go well.”
“No one asked me for input, but I’m giving it anyway.”
“Please remove the word 'transformation.' It makes people nervous.”
I’ve learned that engaging stakeholders is less like gardening and more like herding caffeinated cats through a maze made of acronyms. Everyone wants a say. No one wants to own the consequences. And at least one person will suggest a steering committee to solve the problem caused by the last steering committee.
We call them “critical partners,” “key voices,” “change champions.” Sometimes we even believe it. But the truth is, every stakeholder is a potential editorial board, eager to offer feedback regardless of context, alignment, or emotional stability.
And yet, this is the job.
This is the work they don’t put in the job description: making someone feel heard while not actually doing what they asked. Redirecting a bad idea toward a better one without bruising the ego it rode in on. Smiling when someone rewrites your comms in Comic Sans and calls it an “improvement.”
The dangerous ones are the quiet stakeholders. The ones who say nothing in the meetings and then detonate in the hallway two weeks later. Give me the loud ones any day. At least with them, you know where the bodies are buried—and who buried them.
But here’s the part that gets me: sometimes, buried in the flood of feedback, someone says something that actually makes it better. A small idea. A simple phrase. A point of friction we missed. And suddenly, the work sharpens. The story lands. The change lives.
You just have to survive long enough to recognize it.
Final Thought
Stakeholders always have opinions. That’s not a bug, it’s the terrain. Your job isn’t to agree with all of them. It’s to listen just long enough to find the ones that matter, filter out the rest, and keep the train moving. Preferably on tracks. And occasionally, on time.
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