Managing Stakeholders in GBS: Turning a Black Box into a Treasure Chest

“You guys are a black box.”

Not something anyone wants to hear from a key leader in the business, especially from one who was usually a cheerleader at key leadership forums. 

While hearing this is perhaps not a hair-on-fire crisis, the feedback was a clear signal that we had a stakeholder management issue.

In the four years since being established as a captive Global Business Services (GBS) organization, Takeda Business Solutions (TBS) was considered reasonably successful; we had built a reputation for consistently hitting our targets, scored well on Employee Engagement surveys, and won a string of SSON Impact Awards.  Like most GBS teams, we weren’t the most popular kids in the class, but we were making steady progress and considered ourselves to be good enterprise-level collaborators.

So, how did we end up here?

The prevailing view in TBS was that teaming-up with the business to keep operations humming, hitting our performance targets, and digitizing everything we could get our hands on were solid-enough proof-points of the impact we were having.  After all, we had invested heavily in senior stakeholder management to ensure that our-license-to-operate was clear and established. 

However, what we didn’t yet see was that our savvy, top-down relationship management approach created a blind-spot. We weren’t growing everyday bonds between our people and their operations counterparts in the business. Looking back, we didn’t sufficiently ask ourselves how we were perceived at the operations level, and whether or not we had a healthy and collaborative symbiosis with them.

In the age of measuring everything, it’s easy to mistakenly think that a scorecard full of green KPI’s and smiley CSAT scores mean that your teams are collaborating well with the business.  And while a presence in important leadership committees is a critical success factor for GBS, it isn’t a reliable proxy as to how other parts of the organization perceive your organization and its value to the enterprise.

Why can’t you all just team-up?

While there were notable bright-spots of trust between our TBS teams and their business counterparts, we learned that some areas were less-than-optimal – by no means hand-to-hand combat, but also not many spontaneous high-fives.

Further investigation revealed some interesting observations that helped us to diagnose the situation:

Power Imbalance: Our meeting cadence with the business brought together very senior stakeholders with relatively junior TBS operators.  Not a surprise that some stakeholders viewed TBS colleagues as subordinates instead of partners, which encouraged a steady stream of special requests for non-standard ways-of-working (counter to the GBS mission of harmonizing processes). This also created an uneven playing field where our staff didn’t feel empowered to challenge stakeholders, and redirect them towards creating enterprise success, versus fulfilling individual stakeholder requests (which often created a net-negative enterprise impact).

Sub-par Relationship Skills: The strength of our executive-level engagement was a double-edged sword – a strong and credible presence in senior executive forums, but a crutch substituting for bonds between business and TBS operations teams. While our people could manage processes like pros, we were missing high-perception stakeholder management capabilities at the operator level, a whole different skill-set.

Excessive Escalations: Our Business Partner model, which established a single-point-of-contact for escalations, also contributed to patchy stakeholder skill development.  While it felt like a brilliant idea when we set it up, this simple and easy-to-use escalation path quickly became the go-to mechanism for the business to problem-solve, robbing teams of the benefits of building trust and respect through traditional teaming-up to innovate solutions. This also positioned our Business Partners as the enforcement-arm of the stakeholder community, earning them less-than-warm welcomes in the operations teams.
 

In combination, these created negative noise and it was clear that teams were not perceiving process stewardship and making improvements as a shared responsibility, which in-turn decreased the willingness to challenge the status quo.  This was slowly taking a toll on innovation and contributing to the spiral of decreasing trust and an emergence of the “us” versus “them” mentality.

Read Also: Why Stakeholder Experience is the #1 Differentiator – by SSON Research & Analytics

Esprit de Corps

The key to righting the ship was to understand that a warm and collegiate bond between different parts of any organization is the sum of all the daily connections, the collective whole of all the individual human experiences being shaped every day, whether they are at the executive level or in the operations teams.  And like any relationship, outcomes depend on investing in building trust.

For us in TBS, this meant taking a fresh perspective, including;

Democratizing relationship management: Removing the Business Partners from the escalation process and redesigning the BP role to be focused on strategic alignment with stakeholders has increased alignment and introduced a longer-term strategic perspective, especially now that daily crises are not driving the conversations. In addition, the absence of BPs in the problem-solving process means that TBS operations teams have more accountability for direct person-to-person engagement, improving their relationship management skills, and reducing the impersonal nature of the interactions between teams.

Measuring and sharing (is caring): Standing-up quarterly Operational Performance Reviews has renewed the focus on sharing performance data with stakeholders, ensuring that conversations between teams are data-driven rather than based on perceived performance-levels. This is encouraging fact-based analysis and joint root-cause problem solving and has re-energized the TBS commitment to leveraging Daily Management to continuously improve operations, with Gemba-walks now being a central focus of stakeholder visits to TBS hubs.

A meeting cadence to focus on community-building: A revised meeting cadence that brings smaller numbers of leaders together for strategic topics, enabling operations leaders to have space to build productive and sustainable relationships with stakeholders has improved person-to-person operations contact and increased the view that we’re all on the same team.

Conclusion: There is gold in balanced relationship management

This new approach has helped to create a mindset shift, encouraging TBS teams to reach-out directly to stakeholders to discuss issues, reducing the reliance on Business Partners as go-betweens, and replacing power struggles with more balanced and trusted personal interactions.  This in-turn is gradually reducing the “us” and “them” perception, as we recognize that we are all Takeda, pulling for the same outcomes.

Overall, this has reinforced that it’s critical to put people at the center of any relationship management strategy.  The strongest path to collaboration-success lies in how we, as GBS professionals, use our expertise, resourcefulness, and spirit-of-helpfulness to shape outcomes, build goodwill, and drive positive experiences, side-by-side with our business stakeholders.

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