Every stakeholder in an organization has their different characteristics and task to deal with. Owners and shareholders have their specific characteristic like the roles that the owner carries out differs according to the size of firm and the shares that shareholder holds in an organization. In the similar way managers organise, makes decision, plan and control the organization. A well going business needs staffs and employees to carry out it activities according to its plan. Employees and staffs working in an organization have different levels of payment levels which vary with their skills, qualification, age and types of work. Customers buy the goods and services produced by the organization so the companies should try to fulfil the costumer’s needs and wants. Suppliers are other important stakeholders with whom organization should have effective relationship in order to have regular supply at reasonable prices. Since, the local community provides maximum staffs and most of the goods are supplied to the local community itself Community and firms always has two ways relationship between them. Government also has a vital role playing in stakeholder as economic policies affects the organizations through the taxation and the interest rates, rules and regulation focusing on the environment and health and safety of the people.
Stakeholder management is an important discipline that successful people and organization use to win support from others. Engaging the right people in the right situation and time can make an effective production. When an organization becomes more successful, actions taken by those organizations and the project that they run will affect the people in various ways. Nowadays, mostly every business organization faces the impact and the interest of different people belonging in different groups. Therefore every organization has to take care not only for the needs of their direct owners, but also of various other groups, like employees, public interest groups like environmental organizations, strategic partners, journalist. Management has to assess and evaluate these external forces in order to adjust them with corporate objectives. Whenever an organization is making decisions, it is necessary to know about the expectations of different stakeholders and to determine, to what extend they could and would exert an influence. Hence, the importance of stakeholder management is based on a long term strategic decisions.
Stakeholder management is important to the marketers in the 21st century because an organization can use the opinions and ideas of other stakeholders who are powerful enough to guide the organization from the early stage. Continuous support from these stakeholders can help the firm to make an improvement in their projects and products. The project that an organization has been running could be more successful if these powerful stakeholders keep on giving more important resources and information. These stakeholders can help actively to the organization if there is better communication between them. Frequent communication with these stakeholders can help the firm to understand clearly the benefits of their work and their role towards the projects. So, the firm can have a clear idea what the people thinks about the product and make improvement to reach the peoples desire. Therefore, the stakeholder management helps to identify who are the most powerful, influencing and interested stakeholders in an organization. This helps the organization to focus mainly on those stakeholders who are important to them. The final step is to have good relationship with the stakeholders which help the organization to gain full support from them in making their project effective. All these factors can help the organization to build up a stakeholder map which clearly defines how the different stakeholders should be communicated. The first step of stakeholder management it to identify who are their stakeholders. The organization should think of those people who are effected by their work, whose work effect them and those people who are interested in working with them to achieve successful or unsuccessful results. The possibilities of stakeholders in the projects can be the boss of the firm, senior executives, coworkers, teams working for that project, customers, own family members, shareholders, alliance partners, suppliers, lenders, analysts, future recruits, governments, traders, press, interested people and groups, public or the community. That is the reason why organization should know their stakeholders could be both organizations and people. It is necessary for the organization to communicate with them and identify each and every individual stakeholder within the stakeholder organization. Therefore, it is a tough job for the organization to identify and give more priority those stakeholders who are effective and powerful. There are huge number of people and organization that are effected and gets effected by the organizations work. As well as, there may be some people interested in the project and some who lacks. For example, in an organization usually the boss is likely to have high power and influence over the project and has high interest. However, the related family members have high interest, but are unlikely to have power over it. As we can see on the figure below there are four different people who are characterized according to their interest. High power, interested people are those people who have high power and have high interest in the project. High powers, less interested people are those who have high authority towards the people working with them to keep satisfied and usually have low level of interest in the project. Low power, interested people are those who are regularly informed about the project and communicate with then to make sure no major issues are raised. Basically, in an organization these kinds of people are very helpful to deal with the project. Finally, low power, less interested people are those who do not care about the project even they try to influence them. The organization should be able to know the key stakeholders from all these people who have different characters. It is necessary for the organization to know how the key stakeholders feel and react about the jobs that are given to them. An organization also should have the potential to make those people best engagement in the project and the best way to communicate with them. What are the financial and emotional interest that they have towards their work, what are the information that they want from the firm, what are the things that motivates them to do the project, who influence their opinion, how and up to which level can they support the firm to complete the project, who are the people that they can influence by their opinion are some of the questions that an organization should have a faultless answers to identify their stakeholders. The most effective and efficient answer for these questions would come up for the stakeholders itself. Talking to the stakeholder directly is the excellent way of getting these answers because usually people feel more comfortable to share their views and ideas. Communicating of various information with the stakeholders are some of the factors which brings motivation in the project. That is the reason why the sharing of information between the stakeholders and organization plays a vital role and needed to plan how to manage communication with the different stakeholders. The reason for the communication is to bring out good relation with the stockholders and to gain the maximum support from them to complete the project. An organization identifies the most important stakeholders and gives them priority according to their powers and interest. Then it is necessary for them to know the things that influences and motivates these stakeholders to stay with them. Stakeholder planning is the next step that helps the organization to manage their stakeholders and gain their support to complete their task effectively and efficiently. In stakeholder planning the stakeholders are categorized according to their power, interest and then they are assessed according to their abilities. The time taken to allocate the stakeholder management depends on the size and the complexity of the project, the time utilized for the communication and the expectation of the firms results. Stakeholder planning helps the organization to think the level of support that gives and the role that organization wants them to play. So, basically it helps to think what the firm wants for the each stakeholder. It helps passing the message to every stakeholders and persuade then to support the project. The message can make the stakeholders aware of what an organization are doing and motivates them on the key performance to achieve improvement and increasing profit.
