Resilient Leadership: Stakeholder Engagement With Mark Crocker
Updated: Dec 1, 2020
If you could choose a Halloween costume to be in right now - what would it be?!
A vampire hunter... aka "A Stake Holder"
Stakeholder engagement was the topic for this week's session of the Resilient Leadership Program, with signature sponsor Coast Capital Savings.
The Resilient Leadership Program is an initiative to support the leadership teams of our community-serving organizations through the COVID-19 pandemic. We were thrilled to have this learning session facilitated by our very own Executive Director, Mark Crocker. Mark's extensive experience in international development and in various leadership roles in the community-serving sector brought incredible insight to this week's content.
Mark’s life focus is sustainable community development. He works with local community leaders here in Victoria and has trained thousands of leaders around the world to travel into the tougher places on the planet to make a difference. Marks says he loves helping leaders make a lasting local difference wherever they find themselves on the planet.
Stakeholder relations involve not only nurturing partnerships, but collaborative efforts to create lasting solutions to complex community problems. Our goal of the session was to come out of it with a tool kit for creating connection points, communicating our context, and engaging in potential stakeholder partnerships. We prompted our participants to come to the session with a current project in mind; we used these real-life examples throughout the morning to create a dialogue about the roadmap of possible stakeholder partnerships ahead.
Partnerships are imperative for bringing diverse skills and perspectives together for problem-solving. However, our mutual interest in solving the problem is not enough on its own; the truth is, many solutions arise in the face of a problem, and sometimes, they go bad. When we ask the question of why many community development problems fail, we may actually find the biggest problem in the solution: the solution lacks roots in community ownership. Stakeholders matter, because we are dealing with ownership over our projects. We need to learn how to balance our needs, theirs, and those of our communities.
We learned to distinguish our stakeholders on spectrums of interest and power; this was imperative in understanding to scope of our efforts in problem solving. We need to get specific about who's involved, and how. Drawing upon an outcome-based design also helps us stay aligned with the process, our mission, and one another.
We extend our gratitude to Mark for this inspiring learning session, and to our signature sponsor Coast Capital Savings and the support from the City of Victoria in making the Resilient Leadership Program a reality.
Learn more about the program by clicking here.