Stakeholder interview

A stakeholder interview is one of the oldest and simplest tools in leadership development. Someone with no stake in the outcome speaks one-to-one with a small number of people who see the leader in the situations that matter: senior executives, board members, peers. They ask open questions, follow up on vague answers, and report back themes rather than attributed quotes, so that the people who spoke are protected.

The Journal article What is a stakeholder interview, and why does it matter? covers the practice in depth.

Feedback on a family successor is harder to get than feedback on any other leader. People are careful about what they say about a future owner, and more careful still when the current owner is the successor’s parent. The honest view tends to travel sideways, between executives or privately to the founder, and rarely reaches the successor in a usable form. A confidential interview with someone outside the family creates one place where it can be said plainly.

Stakeholder interview or 360-degree feedback?

A 360-degree feedback process usually relies on a questionnaire with ratings, aggregated so that answers cannot be traced. In a small family company, that anonymity can be thin and the scores politely vague. A stakeholder interview is a conversation, which allows context, examples and follow-up questions. The two can be used together.

How Second Chair™ uses it

In Second Chair™, stakeholder interviews are part of the private diagnostic in the first two weeks. Three to five people, such as senior executives, a board member and sometimes a sibling, each have a confidential 30-minute conversation. One question sits underneath every interview: what would make you follow them? What is heard shapes the diagnostic and the practice plan for the six months that follow. The article on what happens in the private diagnostic describes the full process.