Stakeholder Management - Stars Institute of Learning and Development

Leadership is often discussed in the context of things such as providing a role model for other people in the team, delegation, effective decision making, dealing with performance issues and so on.  

In all these areas there is an implication of lateral or downwards leadership in the context of what is normally the traditional pyramidal shape to team structure.

However much this team structure is being questioned in favour of a matrix management models, the reality of life is that it still continues to be by far the commonest collective enterprise structure around.

Yet what is sometimes overlooked is that the effective leader also typically has a relationship with stakeholders.  Sometimes they may be the people who are sponsoring or expecting to get some benefit out of the activity concerned and who expect to have a strategic controlling interest as a result.

In other cases the relationship may be rather more conventional and simpler, being upwards to an immediate boss or two.

What this means is that an aboriginal and Torres islander leadership development programme may need to examine some of the techniques available for effective upwards leadership.  

To take just one example, typically the stakeholders, sponsors or steering group associated with any sort of activity will expect to be kept fully informed by the activity leader.  That includes being made aware of the key metrics associated with the activity and any actions being taken to address issues.  Needless to say, they will also expect to be kept fully aware of progress against plan.

Little is more likely to undermine the confidence of the stakeholders in an activity than when they have to go looking for information about what is going on as opposed to having it presented to them in a cohesive and timely fashion.

So, exemplary leadership skills are not just about being a centre of visible excellence for other people in your immediate team.  It also involves the need to manage a public relations and executive management communication strategy on behalf of the team as well. 

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TOP TIPS for Keeping People’s Attention!

If you are running any form of seminar, lecture, workshop, training course or youth leadership development program, keeping the attention of your audience can sometimes be a challenge.


Even if the attendees are attending voluntarily, there are some aspects of human psychology you need to be aware of if you are to avoid people potentially mentally ‘switching off’ and disengaging.

•    If you are presenting something, try not to talk for more than 20 minutes without some sort of break to give people a change from needing to listen to just one voice.

•    Try to throw the session opened to questions, comments or group exercises at least once every 30 minutes.  This can help avoid people mentally dozing off.

•    It is an extremely good idea to stop for some sort of physical out-of-the-room break every 45-60 minutes.  Try to get people on their feet and moving around for a coffee or something else, even if only for 5 minutes before the session re-starts. It gets the blood oxygen flowing.

•    Try to speak spontaneously rather than reading verbatim from prepared notes. 

•    Make sure you use plenty of visual or other aids.  Looking at somebody’s face and listening to them speak for extended periods can be extremely tiring.  Projections, flip charts, and other graphical aidsall help stimulate people’s visual interest.

•    Ask the odd spontaneous question.  This isn’t meant to intimidate people and your questions should be open without a right or wrong answer.  It is an old technique but if delegates suspect they may be engaged with a question at any time it can be effective in keeping their adrenaline levels up.

•    Keep plenty of fresh air circulating.

•    Share the podium and avoid ‘grandstanding’.  A change of face, voice and delivery style can help freshen up a session and stop attendees becoming stale.

These are all basic tips but can be very useful in helping to keep your youth leadership development program or other sessions on course and delegates firing on all cylinders! 

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What’s stopping you Achieving Your Full Potential?

One of the commonest things encountered by people working in developing human potential is individuals who have low self-esteem.

This can be manifest in a number of different ways but one of the commonest is a tendency to view potential outcomes with an unrealistic degree of pessimism or to engage in self-deprecation with an associated “can’t do” mentality.

Why is this so regularly encountered, particularly in programmes designed to assist in Aboriginal and Torres Islander leadership development?

Well, there is no one single answer because these problems can arise in people due to a number of different causes, though what is often found is that they have their origin back in childhood, adolescence or teenage years.

Just a sample of some the things that can introduce such self-inflicted negativism about your capabilities include:

1.    Body image problems

2.  Parental and/or social conditioning encouraging you to “recognise your place” in the world

3.    Failing to see your own strengths and to deploy them accordingly

4.    Being forced to participate in activities based upon somebody else’s terms of reference rather than your own

5.   Having tried and failed in the past, leading to assumptions that failure is an inevitable outcome of your activities

6.    A media culture that portrays beauty and universal high achievement as being the norm for all, which creates feelings of inferiority.

7.    Personal relationship challenges and failures

8.    Etc.

The difficulty is that we live in a prevailing culture which glorifies competition and achievement.  On a day-to-day basis, we are all conditioned by the electronic environment surrounding us into believing that success in all things is constantly achievable for large numbers of people who society sees as ‘winning material’.

Some people are able to see through the fallacy of such views and they refuse to allow themselves to be constrained by them.

Other individuals seem to find that more challenging but they can be helped to throw off the oppressive weight of these constraints with appropriate coaching. The difference such development can make to individuals with low self-esteem can be phenomenal. 

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Leadership Development and Training – The Role of Failure

For some people, failure is one of the great non-subjects.

Common speech is littered with platitudes on the subject, including things such as describing failure as an opportunity or being something that one should never admit to.
Much more worrying is the occasional suggestion that somehow the peoples of the First Nations are fatalistic about failure and simply shrug it off with indifference. This, of course, is simply wrong and shows a marked lack of understanding of the cultures and individuals concerned.

In fact, members of the indigenous communities are just as determined to achieve success as anyone else and don’t welcome failure lightly.

Here at the Stars Institute of Learning and Leadership, we know a thing or two about leadership development and training.  We also, as you might expect, understand how to apply that in some of the very specific cultural circumstances of the Aboriginal and Torres Islander peoples.

However, we also understand that things in life don’t always go according to plan.  Sometimes in spite of the best endeavours of the individual or organisation concerned, things simply fail to materialise in line with our expectations and efforts.

One of the primary objectives of leadership development and training is to try and reduce the possibilities of such events occurring but it is also extremely important to understand the techniques for dealing with problems when they arise.

One of the first things to try and break is the association of things not going to plan with ‘failure’. Failure has extremely negative semantic connotations that often imply fault and the allocation of blame to an individual or group.  In fact, problems should be seen as no more than problems and strategies need to be adopted to deal with them without recrimination and blame – particularly when it’s self-inflicted.

Our leadership development and training programmes aim to instil confidence into individuals and teach them how problems need to be used as a platform for learning and improvement rather than destroyers of self-confidence.Out of that will grow the realization that failure isn’t inevitable and rarely is it ever total or irredeemable.

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Laughing at yourself – it’s OK!

There is no conflict whatsoever between the concepts of taking yourself seriously on the one hand and laughing at yourself on the other.

In fact, some people would argue that being able to laugh at yourself is actually one of the ultimate signs of a high degree of self-confidence and assurance.   

At the Stars Institute, we know that there is a balance to be struck. Humor can be exceptionally important in aiding the development of the individual and helping to put some of life’s trials and tribulations into some sort of context.  However, that can’t be at the expense of your own self-confidence.

That’s because there are different types of laughter.  One comes from the realization that, however accomplished and successful you are, you are also a human being and you will make mistakes.  Being able to recognize that and take steps to both laugh at yourself whilst at the same time making sure that you won’t make the same mistake in future, is a very healthy sign of individual leadership development.

There is, however, the slightly sardonic laugh of despair that can come with a classic lack of self-confidence accompanied with the belief that everything you do is doomed to failure.  As you might imagine, this is a very negative symptom for self-development and one that any indigenous leadership program needs to recognize and deal with immediately.

Strangely, there is a widely-held belief that successful leaders and individuals must always and constantly take themselves hyper-seriously.  In fact, if you look at some of the most successful people on the planet by any measure, you may find that is a gross over-simplification.

Many extremely successful individuals take themselves very seriously indeed but that doesn’t mean that they are incapable of laughing at their own inevitable howling mistakes.

So, should you ever laugh at yourself?

In our view, yes, you most certainly should.

However, that laughter should be based on your self-confidence and secure in the knowledge that the problem is not one that you are likely to repeat in the future.

Let us help you to discover how you can laugh at herself productively rather than negatively!

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Leadership From the Front or in Splendid Isolation?

Some of us may have experienced what is sometimes derisorily referred to as ‘distance leadership’.


In the old days, this was manifest by the letter that was delivered from the boss or head office, effectively telling you what you had to do for the period ahead.

In more recent times that may have been replaced by the telegram, telephone, E mail and SMS but the same basic frustrations arise.  How can anyone you barely know and rarely see, possibly be trying to offer you leadership on a day-to-day basis through remote distant communications?

Of course, accusing a leader of being ‘out of touch’ is a comforting cop-out to sometimes help us avoid having to make decisions of our own.  Even so, it is widely accepted today as being a highly inefficient way of getting things done.

Modern leadership is all about participatory endeavor.  It’s about being part of a team and demonstrating leadership qualities through that team in terms of your personal behaviors and communication skills rather than through directives and orders.

In modern models, leadership isn’t about rank and hierarchy.  It’s all about your behaviors and the values you communicate through those.

This is an area that we at the Stars Institute of Learning and Leadership push hard.  It is particularly important for what some still call Aboriginal tribes’ development,as visible behaviors on a day-to-day basis are the best ways of promulgating increased confidence within the First Nations communities.

This is important because reading about leadership success in your community is one thing but it’s nowhere near as effective as being able to see real-life examples of it in practice.  Yes, theory and motivational techniques are important but personal example is even more so.

We don’t apologies for believing that the old models of leadership are now largely, though perhaps not exclusively, outmoded and inappropriate for present day Aboriginal peoples or indeed anybody else.

It isn’t easy to change views in this area because from birth many of us have it had drilled into us that we need to see leadership as being synonymous with parental, school, religious or legal system authority etc.

Our goal is to help you think differently and more broadly about what leadership is and how you can demonstrate it.

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