Don’t Play Favorites with Stakeholders

Playing favorites with stakeholders causes all sorts of problems and makes your job as project manager more difficult. Taking an impartial stance with all stakeholders and their requirements is the way to go. Here’s why: 

• Project success is founded on trust. Favoritism destroys it. When stakeholders sense that you’re closer to some stakeholders, confidence in the project management process drains away. Why should they trust you, when they aren’t sure whether your decisions are made on merit or on relationships? Without trust, you’ll spend more time and energy managing politics than the project.
• All stakeholders feel listened to when you’re impartial. When stakeholders feel heard, they’re more likely to support ALL project objectives, not just their own. You can increase stakeholder support by truly understanding their issues and concerns and then communicating those to your project team.  
• Every stakeholder has a significant contribution to make. A project requirement that seems less important might turn out to be a critical dependency. Bring equal curiosity and thoroughness to all parties and their viewpoints. If you dismiss or deprioritize some voices, you risk blind spots that could require costly rework.  
• Impartiality helps maintain your credibility. Projects always involve some conflict. When stakeholder disputes arise, your ability to successfully mediate depends on them seeing you as impartial. If you’re known for playing favorites, your career as mediator is over.
• Disgruntled stakeholders can present significant risks. Stakeholders who feel ignored are still important to your project. They don’t disappear, but they might disengage, escalate, or turn into project detractors. I’ve seen late-stage projects derailed by a stakeholder who wasn’t listened to in the planning phase and came back to torpedo the project at the worst possible moment – during implementation. Proactive, equitable treatment of stakeholders is much easier than uphill relationship management.

Have you seen someone in your work world play favorites? How did that make you feel? And how did other people react to it? On the other hand, have you seen other benefits when you or another project manager has been an impartial arbiter in stakeholder dealings? Share with us in the comments section! 

For more about stakeholders, check out Natasha Kasimtseva’s, Managing Project Stakeholders course.

 

Coming Up

Many different audiences make up a project team, from the project sponsor and customer to numerous stakeholders, to various teams that take on the work in the work breakdown structure. These audiences often need different information, prefer different communication methods and frequencies, and come with unique perspectives and idiosyncrasies. I’m a big believer in effective communication, so I’m looking forward to this conversation with Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes. I hope you’ll join us on Friday, April 10, 2026 at 11am MT/1pm ET. Click here to join!

 

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 104,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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