Executives today are keenly interested in building and maintaining trust with their various stakeholders. But most companies don’t really understand how to manage stakeholder trust effectively. One reason managing stakeholder trust is difficult is because there are many different stakeholder groups, each with its own particular needs and perspectives.
Establishing trust is complicated, and executives struggle to discern where and how they should focus their energies. One way to help in this regard is to begin to think of stakeholders in broad groups, which will help you approach how best to deal with each.
You can categorize stakeholders according to two essential dimensions. First look at the intensity of their relationship to the company -- how long the relationship has existed, as well as how frequently they’ve interacted with the company. Second you can examine their locus -- that is, whether they are inside or outside the organization. You can then plot these two dimensions -- intensity and locus -- to create four archetypes.
Understand, of course, that actual stakeholder groups will not necessarily align perfectly with any of the four archetypes. For example, a stakeholder’s relationship with an organization could be of moderate depth as opposed to high or low. But the major stakeholders categories -- customers, suppliers, employees and investors -- can each be loosely associated with one of these four archetypes.
For more information on this topic is available at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2008/summer/13/