Engage Your Stakeholders & Win Hearts & Minds.
Patrick Harkness is the Lead Consultant to the Not for Profit Sector at Consult Capital, a dedicated consultancy with offices in Cardiff and London. Patrick has over 30 years experience of working with not for profit bodies, principally the social housing and related sectors, as a CEO, Chair and consultant. Here, Patrick explains about the need for housing associations to have a clear, concise and interactive dialogue with their stakeholders and the best way to go about achieving this.
Housing associations have a unique status as trusted intermediaries with the communities and customers they serve.
The key stakeholders involved in the housing association model must be simultaneously acknowledged and engaged in order to fulfil the fundamental purpose of any housing association – to keep customers and communities at the heart of all decision making. However, this must be achieved in tandem with key processes like enhancing the viability of the business and maximising opportunities for growth.
Housing association stakeholders form a complex web, often with paradoxical demands, all of whom have a part to play in focusing the enterprise on services to customers, and meeting housing need. Employees, management teams, the board of directors, consultants, regulators, funders, other service providers, local authorities, local and national politicians, suppliers, trade unions, pressure groups, think tanks, charities and of course, customers and communities, are just some of those who keep the wheels of a housing association turning.
The most successful housing associations design and deliver effective business strategies to great effect because they meaningfully engage stakeholders in their decision making on many levels. Robust relationships are crucial during these challenging days of squeezed budgets, vulnerable communities and a social and economic landscape that is changing as never before. Housing associations’ relationships, and therefore their ability to deliver, is being severely tested. Every organisation with a social purpose has a clear responsibility to nurture its vital relationships – failure to do so will render them brittle and fractious, threatening the well-being of the customers and the business itself.
One of our most exciting and results driven projects is our work in stakeholder research. This work has been particularly relevant in relation to our clients in housing, care and health, who have been going through an unprecedented period of evolution. This is especially true in Wales as large swathes of social housing stock have transferred to new community mutual landlords. Many of these are in the process of shaping their stakeholder relationships. In turn, this is having an impact on traditional housing associations, and all local authorities, whether they have transferred their homes or not.
Our stakeholder research projects strip back the layers of key relationships, and offer organisations a candid and strategic perception of their organisation, through the eyes of its stakeholders, including a unique comparison with Best in Sector.
Recent surveys show a clear shift in stakeholders’ expectations of their housing partners. Integrity, commitment, strategic partnering, innovation and community engagement have all shown a marked increase in importance. And all of these require an enhanced capacity to collaborate at all levels, from governance to delivery, to shape a collective and concerted response to the new and evolving landscape.
Our studies test the health and potential of issues such as relationship management, recognition of values, communications, issue resolution, change management, leadership, strengths and weaknesses, future strategy and operations and many other factors that contribute to the corporate strategy of an organisation. The result is a unique insight into the key issues for an organisation, from the differing perspectives of diverse groups of stakeholders. It highlights the paradoxes, ways of managing them and the potential opportunities and trade-offs of strategic decisions.
We have successfully delivered stakeholder research to a host of social housing providers, large and small across the UK, including some of Wales’s best known providers. They have all found it an invaluable tool in understanding the priorities they needed to address, and also in identifying the potential for collaboration, and linking strategies and service delivery with others.
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