How to Manage Challenging Stakeholders and Difficult Clients
Essential skills for research & insights teams, agencies and tech firms
With clear principles, relevant examples and useful tips, this course will teach you to:
Identify conflict
Understand where and how conflict arises; spot the signs early; make it constructive rather than destructive.
Diagnose conflict
Apply the stakeholder / client matrix tool; recognise sources and triggers; identify contextual and behaviour factors.
Manage conflict
Learn the key intervention models; deal with toxic teams and true bullies; explore case studies.
This course is for anyone who works with stakeholders or clients: insight managers, researchers, account handlers, customer success teams and anyone else
COURSE INSTRUCTOR
Pam Hamilton
Author, Business Leader and Collaboration Expert
Pam is a teamwork and collaboration expert and author of Supercharged Teams: 30 Tools of Great Teamwork and The Workshop Book, How to Design and Lead Successful Workshops.
Pam helps teams to work well together, build trust and overcome conflict.
With a background in psychology and 20 years experience in corporate and public sector teams around the world, she delivers practical learning, case studies and examples in a positive and energetic style.
Pam is MD and founder of Paraffin, winner of The Queen’s Award for Enterprise 2021, and member of the UK’s Institute of Export & International Trade.
Course Reviews
Finding where a client sits on the Matrix and the circle of control: major light bulbs
I have definitely been someone who “accepted” whatever the situation was and did my best to “rescue” aspects of projects, leading to a lot of anxiety and loss of sleep worrying about things that were not even in my control: the circle of control really hit home – I need to practice using this tool a lot more.
Being able to identify where a client lies on the matrix will really help shape the way I approach new projects and I found the individual intervention really helpful with the examples expressed. Using the family framework to help deal with people across projects will be really useful. Super helpful and interesting course, so glad to have taken it!
Stakeholders are not monolithic
Overall, this was a decent course, especially for anyone not familiar with difficult stakeholders/clients.
However, I found a lot of the recommended strategies a bit disconnected from the reality that most employees face. A lot of these solutions seemed applicable to self-employed people or people dealing with a constant influx of new clientele. Many of these strategies do not seem relevant or possible to apply to a typical working relationship where an employee could risk career consequences by following these steps. I especially disliked the recommendation of making a report of bad behavior or to stop working with the stakeholder – as if that is a choice for an employee who is working with a stakeholder on a multi-year contract.
I would love to see this educator reconsider their approach and try to break down stakeholders into different categories and address each with the focus of this course.
Basic Overview
The training was a basic level at how to handle difficult stakeholders, I would have a like a deeper dive into this topic and some examples for Project Managers. It would have been nice also to focus on the relationships between subs and primes.
Excellent practical tips to apply to everyday working with people
I thoroughly enjoyed this training. It was easy to understand with practical tips and examples that I could relate to. I can start using these tools straight away. Thank you
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On-Demand Access
£99 /enrolment
12 Months’ Access to All On-Demand Content
Individual Enrolment
One-Time Cost
Frequently Asked Questions
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