305 Building Stakeholder Relationships Using Effective Communication

Unit Overview

305 Building Stakeholder Relationships Using Effective Communication is a unit within the CMI level 3 module that focuses on improving the relationships with stakeholders, which are critical for the organisation. Stakeholder engagement is important in promoting the desired levels of collaboration between the organisation's customers. This focuses on ensuring that both the internal and external stakeholders are involved in setting the strategies and approaches within the organisation that are aimed at accomplishing the set goals and objectives of the organisation.

Focusing on stakeholder engagement ensures that there is an effective understanding of the different needs and expectations of each stakeholder in the organisation hence improving the ability of the organisation it achieves the desired levels of satisfaction among the stakeholders. It is important for leaders to understand the required levels of communication that contribute to shaping stakeholder relationships. The leaders have to facilitate effective interactions by passing information to the stakeholder and receiving feedback on different aspects of the workplace. The feedback is designed to ensure there are improvements that are made by the organisation to adjust to the needs of the stakeholders.

305 Building Stakeholder Relationships Using Effective Communication is a unit that focuses on building the desired levels of relationships between stakeholders. The unit helps the learners to understand critical principles of engagement between stakeholders. They are guided to understand the approaches to communication with stakeholders, including the use of statistics and the presentation of information that supports the sharing of information. The unit further builds the ability of the learners to effectively involve stakeholders in making decagons through receiving feedback that is sustainable and helpful from the context of the organisation. The unit is taught in 20 hours of guided learning and contributes 4 credit values towards the completion of another module.

Suitability of the Unit

305 Building Stakeholder Relationships Using Effective Communication focuses on building capacity and capabilities to effectively interact with the stakeholder of the organisation is the duty of leaders within the workplace to ensure that they engage the stakeholders. This involves consulting different groups of people affected by the activities of the organisation, such as the customers, shareholders, employees, and other stakeholders. As such, 305 Building Stakeholder Relationships Using Effective Communication is a unit that is suited to the leaders within the organisation. It helps them to develop effective methods and approaches of communication that facilitate the stakeholders' engagements required for their organisations. The unit helps them to understand various principles of communication that build required relationships to improve the performance of the team or unit that they are leading in relation to meeting the obligations to stakeholders.

The unit is designed to meet the learning needs of the first-line managers and supervisors within the workplace. It helps these leaders to understand the critical role that they should play in ensuring that stakeholders are engaged and that there is a good rapport with these stakeholders involved in setting strategies and approaches for the teams or units that the leaders lead. However, the unit can also be applied to other stakeholders. Middle managers and senior managers can pursue the unit to improve their understanding of contributions that they can make by creating interactions with stakeholders. Employees, junior leaders, and team members can also use the unit to build their ability to perform leadership duties in the future.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the unit, the learners should be able to:

• Identify a range of stakeholder groups that are relevant to the manager and handling of the team

• Identify the needs and expectations of each stakeholder within the workplace

• Identify the benefits of relationships with stakeholders in the success of the team or areas of operation

• Compare channels of communication that have been established within the workplace to build stakeholder relationships

• discuss different types of communication, including verbal communication and nonverbal communication techniques, that can be used to improve communication with the stakeholders

• Discuss approaches that can be used in summoning meetings and improving the ability of the individual to achieve the desired goals and objectives. 

• Understand the barriers to effective communication with stakeholders within the workplace

• Understand the ways that can be used to address the barriers when communicating with stakeholders

• Discuss the significance of stakeholder feedback.

• Use the information provided by the stakeholders to improve the performance of the team or organisation in general

Key Areas of Learning

305 Building Stakeholder Relationships Using Effective Communication is a unit that aims at improving the performance of leaders in interacting with stakeholders. The main areas of learning covered within the unit include:

Understanding Stakeholder Relationships

This area of learning is focused on improving the ability of the leaders to align the activities to the needs and expectations of the stakeholders. It focuses on ensuring that the leaders understand the different stakeholders within the organisation as well as their needs and expectations. It also helps the leader sot appreciate the need to establish effective relationships within their areas of responsibility.

Communication with Stakeholders

This area of learning focuses on the actual process of communication with the stakeholders. The learners are introduced to methods of communication that include verbal communication, non-verbal communicant, and written methods as a means of improving performance. This area further helps them to understand the different approaches that they can use to overcome the barriers to communication that could be experienced in the process of putting up communication with the elders. It also guides the leaders to understand principles and approaches to managing meetings, such as inviting attendees, managing the meeting, and reaching agreements within the meeting with stakeholders.

Using Stakeholder Communication

This area of learning focuses on improving the ability of the learners to interpret the information provided by the stakeholders and use it to contribute to the learning goals and objectives. This area of learning focuses on improving the ability to gather information from stakeholders using different methods and implementing the findings from this feedback in improving the accomplishment of leadership goals and objectives.

Evaluation

The evaluation process includes both formative and summative assessments. Supervised practice, simulated exercises, and case studies are some of the main formative assessment methods that are used. A written assessment is used for summative evaluation and provides the overall coverage of the learning outcomes.