Advising Upwards

Advising Upwards: A Framework for Understanding and Engaging Senior Management Stakeholders

Gower Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, UK.

Building, and managing, relationships with senior (upwards) stakeholders is essential for success. Advising Upwards makes a detailed examination of stakeholder relationship management, starting with a discussion of the personal changes that senior managers must make as they move into executive roles in the organisation, and recognising that through targeted and purposeful communication the team must ensure that their senior stakeholders understand how best to support their work.

Studies have consistently shown that the active support of stakeholders from the Senior Leadership Team, particularly the sponsor, is a critical factor in creating successful outcomes. Successful activity managers not only understand this but are also willing to do whatever is necessary to ensure that their senior stakeholders understand and fulfil this support role. This requires the activity manager to be skilful at building and maintaining robust relationships, focused on engaging the support of senior executives, understanding their expectations and managing them through targeted communication. Effective communication helps change perceptions and adjust expectations (to make them more realistic and achievable), as well as helping to acquire the support necessary for successful delivery of the outcomes of the activities.

The principal focus of the book is on perspectives that will contribute towards an understanding of the critical survival skill of engaging senior managers, and of ‘helping them help you’. It includes:

• Stakeholder management theory and its application to senior management stakeholders: what makes engaging them so difficult?
• Managing (or advising) upwards: the culture of organisational leadership and the demands of decision making in today’s competitive environment;
• An exploration of ways to secure and maintain the engagement and support of senior stakeholders, through diverse approaches based on behavioural theories, influence networks, operating within the power relationships of the organisation;
• Developing or adapting your sponsor (or leadership team) engagement practices to ensure a greater chance of successful delivery of organisational activities.

The book has two main objectives:

• A ‘how-to’ book for the fundamental processes and practices to support either individuals or organisations in building and maintain upwards relationships with important stakeholders. These relationships are essential in all aspects of work to deliver an organisation’s business strategy through projects and programs. Similar relationships must also be considered during activities that support organisational survival such as mergers and acquisitions, or boosting organisational advantage through more effective processes for tender bidding, marketing campaigns or even critical operational activities;
• Through contributions from researchers and practitioners in related fields the book provides diverse perspectives on the changing world of management and stakeholder relationship management through considerations of culture, group and individual behaviour, organisational management theory and other related subjects.

Contributing authors (in alphabetical order) include: Alfonso Bucero, Randall Englund, Robert Higgins, David Hillson, S.K. Khor, Bob McGannon, Ruth Murray-Webster, Arthur Shelley, Jürgen Oschadleus and Jon Whitty.

$99.00 AUD (inc. GST and free shipping) - Australian customers only

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