The influence-impact matrix has four boxes, and the most difficult one is not the box with high influence and high impact. That box speaks for itself: that stakeholder gets attention, and everyone in the organisation understands why. The difficult box is the other one: high influence, low impact. A regulator who looks in once a year. A trade association that only responds when something goes wrong. A shareholder who is silent until silence is no longer possible. These stakeholders are not involved in your daily work, but they can block, delay, or reverse a decision at the moment it matters most.
The question "what do you do with this stakeholder" is therefore not rhetorical. The answer determines whether someone who rarely speaks is heard before it is too late, or only after things have already gone wrong.
Organisations often direct their attention toward impact: who is emotionally or practically most involved, who complains, who asks questions. That is understandable, because those stakeholders make themselves heard. A stakeholder with high influence and low stake does not do that. There is no pressure, no signal, no reason to do anything today. Precisely because of this, this stakeholder disappears from view, until the moment influence is exercised without any prior warning.
Whether someone ends up in this box depends on how impact is defined and on which period is taken into account. How you score that, and why that choice changes the picture, can be read in how you score impact when multiple projects are running. Influence itself is also not a fixed value; it shifts with the topic, and how you score influence when multiple projects are running explains where that shift comes from.
What follows from this box is a different rhythm of contact, not necessarily more contact. A stakeholder who is rarely impacted has no need for weekly updates. What this stakeholder does need is timely information at the moment influence becomes relevant, and a point of contact who knows what is going on as soon as that moment arrives.
What does not follow from this is a statement about what this stakeholder thinks of your organisation. We do not know that, and you cannot derive that from a position in a matrix either. Influence and impact say something about the nature of a relationship, not about the content of an opinion. You only hear that content when the stakeholder expresses it themselves.
Despite acknowledging that this stakeholder matters, the question of who manages this relationship often remains unanswered. Is it the executive who has the subject on their plate? The corporate affairs function, because it concerns reputation and positioning? Or someone who happened to have contact once and has held onto the role ever since? Without a decision on this, a relationship without an owner emerges: nobody calls, nobody informs, until the moment the stakeholder intervenes themselves.
This question becomes more pressing as multiple projects run that affect the same stakeholder, because ownership can then become fragmented across departments unaware of each other's contact. What ownership means in that situation and how you agree on it is set out in who becomes the owner of a relationship when multiple projects are running. The matrix itself, and how it relates to an environment with multiple ongoing initiatives, is explained in what an influence-impact matrix is when multiple projects are running.
A stakeholder with high influence receives, at some point, a commitment from your organisation: a deadline, an update, a moment of consultation. For this stakeholder, a missed commitment weighs more heavily than for a stakeholder with low influence, because it is precisely this stakeholder who has the room to make a missed agreement felt. Failing to keep a small commitment often costs more trust than failing to make a large investment, and this applies above all to someone who expects little from you and therefore remembers everything that goes wrong.
How you record a commitment so that it does not depend on the memory of a single employee is set out in how you record a commitment. And because a commitment without a deadline amounts to nothing, the question who monitors a deadline is just as relevant as the question of who manages the relationship.
We do not state here what this stakeholder thinks of you, and we do not advise you on how to deal with this specific person. We describe what the scores for influence and impact depend on, and why ownership and commitment must be arranged separately from those scores. The Trust Baseline from impact-promise.com places an internal survey alongside an external stakeholder survey for this purpose, so that the difference between what management thinks and what is happening externally becomes visible, with a commitment tracker that keeps track of commitments and deadlines. This tool is under construction; those who wish to use it can sign up for the waiting list.
Mapping influence, impact, and ownership is itself a form of work: scoring, tracking, informing, monitoring deadlines. Part of that work is routine enough to be redistributed. The work scan from FTE TO AI calculates, per task, which part of the work can be taken over by AI, and can thus show which part of maintaining a stakeholder overview qualifies for that.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.