What skills does my team need to meet our engagement requirements and get the most out of our efforts?
It can be challenging to add stakeholder engagement activities to an already full plate of responsibilities. What can make it even harder is that the skill set required for planning, implementing, and following up on quality engagement activities is diverse and may not overlap with your team’s existing training. Additionally, the broad set of skills take on an entire engagement portfolio, making a team approach more appropriate.
Professionals with a wide array of stakeholder engagement experience identified a number of skills that are beneficial for meaningful engagement. Multiple professional associations – such as the American Evaluation Association – even explicitly identify engagement among the core competencies for the fields, recognizing both the role of engagement as a competency but also the many skills required for successful engagement. While this list is not exhaustive, it is a good place to start identifying areas where your team could increase their engagement efficacy.
Interpersonal Skills
Cultural competency
As defined by the American Association for Health Education, “cultural competence is the ability of an individual to understand and respect values, attitudes, beliefs, and mores that differ across cultures, and to consider and respond appropriately to these differences in planning, implementing, and evaluating health education and promotion programs and interventions.”
Respect for lived experience
A skilled engagement process will include methods for ensuring that the experiences of participants are valued.
Humility and humor
The ability to deal with stressful situations and disarm potential conflicts is vital to creating a space for engagement to be successful.
Resilience and flexibility
Engagement work can be challenging. Tempers can flare and deep-seated frustrations are frequently brought out. If someone is going to do this work, they need to be able to simultaneously focus on the overall engagement goal and be resilient enough to not take the process personally.
Technical Knowledge
Those working in engagement activities should be technically competent in the subject matter being discussed. This does not necessarily mean that they should be experts in the field, but they must be able to understand the context for topics and questions brought up by stakeholders.
Networking
This is a broad category, but may include such skills as:
Coalition building
Communications
Public speaking