10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power
Key Takeaways
- Power is a stakeholder's ability to influence change, either negatively or positively
- Positional power sources are legitimate, reward and coercive
- Personal power sources are expert, referent and informational
- Coercive power is the belief that punishment can be dealt for non-compliance, while reward power enables compensation for compliance
- Relying on positional power alone produces a top-down directive tell approach, whereas encouraging personal power tends towards participative co-design
Power is defined as "a stakeholder's ability to influence change, either negatively or positively". An understanding of power sources and attitudes to power is therefore important for managing stakeholders.
Note the definition includes negatively or positively. Power is not the ability to help; it is the ability to affect. A stakeholder with high power who opposes the change is exercising power just as much as one who supports it.
The six sources of power
CM3 divides power into positional and personal sources.
Positional power sources
These come from the role a person holds:
| Source | Definition |
|---|---|
| Legitimate | Power derived from a person's role in the hierarchy |
| Reward | Power that enables compensation for compliance |
| Coercive | The belief that punishment can be dealt for non-compliance |
Note the careful wording of coercive power: it is the belief that punishment can be dealt. The punishment does not have to be applied — or even to exist — for the power to operate. It works on expectation.
Personal power sources
These belong to the individual regardless of role:
| Source | Definition |
|---|---|
| Expert | Power provided by specialist skills and knowledge |
| Referent | Power from being respected, admired or liked; people are influenced because of who is speaking |
| Informational | Power from access to information that others need |
The positional/personal split is the most examined distinction here. If a stakeholder would lose the power by leaving the role, it is positional. If they would keep it, it is personal.
This is also why the change agent role depends entirely on personal power. Having no formal line authority means legitimate, reward and coercive power are unavailable, so expert, referent and informational power are the whole toolkit.
Attitudes to power shape the change approach
CM3 makes a direct link between how power is used and what kind of change becomes possible.
Where power lies within an organisation and attitudes towards sharing power affects how things get done, and this will impact how change is approached and managed.
- Traditional attitudes to power rely more heavily on positional power sources. Relying on these positional forms of power alone to bring about change results in a more top-down, directive 'tell' approach to change.
- Where more personal power is encouraged, there will tend to be a more participative, co-design type approach to change.
Personal power is encouraged through:
- Empowering people
- Supporting them in building skills
- Encouraging collaboration and connection with others
- Creating an environment of openness and transparency
This is a genuinely useful diagnostic. If you want to know whether a co-design approach is realistic in an organisation, look at which power sources actually operate. An organisation that runs on hierarchy, reward and sanction will experience co-design as a category error, and the change manager who proposes it without first building the conditions will be disappointed.
It also connects to the tell, sell, include messaging spectrum: positional power produces 'tell'; personal power enables 'include'.
Two-dimensional stakeholder mapping
Stakeholders are mapped in two dimensions, plotting each stakeholder or group by their level of power or influence against their level of interest in the change. That produces four quadrants, each implying a different engagement approach:
| Low interest | High interest | |
|---|---|---|
| High power / influence | Needs enough attention to keep informed and avoid activating opposition; can block if the change touches them | The critical group — engage closely, involve in decisions, use as advocates |
| Low power / influence | Light-touch general communication | Keep well informed; often a source of energy and detailed insight, and potential change agents |
Three practical cautions:
Position is not fixed. A stakeholder's interest rises sharply the moment the change reaches their area. Someone in a low-interest quadrant at initiation may be your most engaged stakeholder by delivery, and the map should be revisited rather than treated as a one-off artefact.
The map does not record attitude. Power and interest say nothing about whether a stakeholder supports or opposes the change. A high-power, high-interest opponent and a high-power, high-interest advocate occupy the same square and need entirely different engagement. The stakeholder engagement strategy handles this by separately recording each stakeholder's potential level of resistance.
Mapping is a means, not an end. The output that matters is the engagement approach it produces, not the diagram.
Using power analysis honestly
A note on ethics that CM3 implies throughout. Power analysis can be used to work out who must be persuaded and who can be ignored, which is a legitimate prioritisation of scarce engagement effort. It can also be used to route around people whose objections are inconvenient, which is not — and which reliably backfires when those people discover it. The test is whether the analysis is being used to engage people better or to engage them less honestly.
Staff comply with a new reporting requirement mainly because they believe those who ignore it will face consequences at their next review. Which source of power is operating?
An organisation relies almost entirely on hierarchy, reward and sanction to make things happen. What does CM3 say this implies for the change approach?
Which of these is a personal rather than a positional source of power?