Stakeholder Power Is Not the Same as Engagement
A sponsor who used to send back comments on every report has gone quiet. Two months of clean approvals, no questions, apologies for the last steering group. The project team reads this as things going well and enjoys the calm. It is a reasonable reading and it is frequently wrong, because nothing about that silence tells you what the sponsor now thinks. It tells you only that they have stopped participating.
Power and engagement are separate measurements taken of the same person, and they move independently. Power is what somebody could do to the project if they chose: approve, veto, fund, withdraw people, open a door or close one. Engagement is what they are actually doing about it at the moment: attending, asking, advocating, ignoring, resisting. A stakeholder can hold a great deal of the first and none of the second, and that combination is the one most likely to hurt you.
Two different questions about the same person
Section 2.5.1 of the PMBOK® Guide sets out the key concepts underpinning stakeholder work, and among them is the plain observation that influence and involvement are separate things that happen to be measured on the same people. Keeping them separate in your own notes is a small discipline with a large return.
Power is mostly structural and mostly not yours to change. It comes from formal authority, from control of money or people, from a statutory or contractual position, from technical indispensability, or from relationships that let somebody be heard by people who decide. You can map it and you can work with it. You will rarely alter it inside the life of a project, and effort spent trying is usually effort wasted.
Engagement is behavioural and entirely changeable, which is why it deserves most of your attention. Somebody unaware of the project can be informed. Somebody neutral can be given a reason to care. Somebody resisting can be listened to, and occasionally satisfied. Somebody supportive can be asked to advocate. Each of those is a different action, and none of them follows from knowing how much power the person holds.
The quiet ones with authority
Rank the combinations by how much trouble they cause and the order surprises people. Open opposition from a powerful stakeholder is uncomfortable and manageable, because you know where they stand and everybody else does too. A powerless stakeholder engaged to the point of obsession consumes time and can usually be given somewhere useful to put the energy.
The difficult case is high power and low engagement. Somebody who can stop the project has stopped paying attention to it, which means decisions are being taken without them, assumptions are hardening without their input, and their eventual re-engagement arrives at whatever moment something reaches them. That moment is almost always late, and by then the project has spent months building on ground they never agreed.
Disengagement also carries information about your project that is worth reading rather than enjoying. A sponsor who has withdrawn may have been reassigned in all but name, may have concluded the project is in trouble and be distancing themselves, may have lost an internal argument about it, or may simply be overloaded. Those four situations call for four different responses, and the only way to find out which one you are in is to go and ask directly.
A telecoms operator upgrading its core network had a programme sponsor at director level who had championed the business case and then, from about month five, become steadily harder to reach. The programme took the reduced interference as a compliment and pressed on. What had actually happened was that a group restructure had moved the operational budget the programme depended on into a different directorate, and the sponsor knew he no longer controlled it. He had said nothing because the restructure was not announced. The programme discovered the gap when a funding release failed, seven months in, having made a year of design decisions on an assumption about ownership that had quietly expired.
Engagement is the thing you can actually move
Three levers do most of the work. The first is direct contact with a purpose, which means asking a specific question that only that person can answer rather than sending an update. A request for a decision gets a response where a status report does not, and the response tells you where they are.
The second is relevance. People engage with what affects them, and most disengagement is a signal that the project has been described in terms that do not touch anything the stakeholder owns. Rewriting the same project in terms of their objectives is not spin; it is the difference between a message that lands and one that is technically accurate and entirely ignorable.
The third is route. Where somebody powerful will not engage with you directly, engagement through a person they already listen to is a legitimate and normal move. It works better when it is transparent, and it is often the only realistic option when the gap between your position and theirs is several levels.
Assessing where a stakeholder actually sits, and choosing between those responses under time pressure, is the practical end of stakeholder work, and it is the part that gets thin treatment in most written guidance. A structured PMP exam preparation course is a reasonable place to work through the situations deliberately before meeting them on a live programme.
For a PMP® candidate, the separation that helps is that an engagement level describes current behaviour and can be moved, while power describes capability and mostly cannot. Whenever a situation describes a stakeholder as difficult or absent, the thing to settle first is which of the two is being described, because the response that fits depends entirely on the answer.
Five minutes a month keeps this honest. Keep two columns rather than one: what this person could do to the project, and what they have actually done in the last four weeks. Where the first column is heavy and the second is empty, put a meeting in the diary and ask a direct question. Silence from somebody with authority is information, and it is rarely information you want to receive late.
Interested in going further?
Reading a stakeholder's silence correctly, and choosing between asking directly, changing the framing or going round by a trusted route, is a judgement made under pressure with incomplete information. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through those situations across predictive, adaptive and hybrid delivery.
The key concepts behind stakeholder assessment are set out at greater length in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A133: Stakeholder Management vs Stakeholder Engagement
A082: Tailoring Stakeholder Engagement
A141: Tailoring Stakeholder Engagement for Different Contexts
A134: Power/Interest Grid vs Salience Model
A138: Stakeholder Mapping Is Only the Start
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