I get the point of stakeholder management. But it still pains me to have to do it.

Entrepreneurs are generally not very good at owning up to their biggest weaknesses, in my experience. Perhaps that’s because we spend so much of our time pretending that we know exactly what we’re doing (when in fact we’re actually making it up as we go along) that we end up losing track. But I’m going to make an exception. This week’s big job – to put together a job spec for the possible new COO role – has reminded me of my greatest failing: stakeholder management.

Yuck. Even typing out the words sends nasty shivers up my spine. Instinctively, I just can’t help seeing it as justifying decisions I’ve already made to people whose input isn’t really necessary. I mean, this isn’t a democracy. The reason I’m running a business is because I want to be in control, and if people come to work for me, it feels like they’ve accepted this state of affairs. So consultation processes aren’t really my thing. However, the bigger the company has got, the more time I seem to spend making sure that the right people are on board with my decisions before I implement them. And try as I might, I can’t help but feel that this is rather an imposition. After all, this is my business, so shouldn’t it be my decision?

On the other hand, I do recognise the benefits. If you spend time getting people on board in advance, it makes life a lot easier later: your senior people feel like their opinion is valued, and they’re much more likely to champion it to the junior staff. So every time I have a big change to make, I force myself to ‘cultivate key influencers’ (even more yuck) before I tell everyone else. But I hate doing it, and I slightly hate myself for doing it.

The trouble is that everyone has an axe to grind. I started with my HR/ office manager (bonkers as she is, she’s a good gauge of how the rest of the company would react). The first problem was that she immediately assumed, as I knew she would, that this person was being hired entirely to render her job unnecessary. I swear to God she was already rehearsing her constructive dismissal argument by the time I convinced her otherwise. The other issue was that this person would obviously oversee the HR function, so a) she’d get a new boss and b) that person would be a potential block on her future progress. On the other hand, I could also see that the prospect of reporting to someone who takes a rather more sympathetic approach to HR issues than I do was probably quite tempting…

Then there’s Mammon, my senior sales guy, and Ace, the guy who’s running my new business (I saw them separately, of course – divide and conquer). Both of them quite like the idea insofar as it will allow me to commit more time and energy to them – but at the same time, the potential arrival of another senior person is a threat to their future pre-eminence. Same goes for the girl who oversees my delivery function: she’s not as obsessed by the size of her pay cheque as Mammon, but she’s still fairly ambitious.

So I’ve spent most of this week trying to sell the idea to them. The good news is that I’m giving them a forum to share their concerns. The bad news is that I’m quite unlikely to listen to them, unless they agree with me (‘Compromise is being someone else’s doormat’, as my Grandma used to say). Told you my stakeholder management skills leave a lot to be desired.