Aligning stakeholder expectations with project goals leads to better outcomes and builds trust. Everybody knows that, right? It’s one of the first bits of wisdom I learned in my early career days. Throughout the 30 years of corporate life that followed, it’s a notion that I practiced daily. I viewed it as the corporate standard, a truth to which all workers adhere. Know your stakeholders, understand their expectations, and stay aligned was a common battle cry.

So, why would a perfectly reasonable, experienced talent leader like me neglect to do that?

In the later stages of my career, when I was working as head of enterprise learning and leadership development for a global technology company, I missed a step. A big one. And I paid a big price for it. Not only did I not lead my team to achieve the intended outcomes, but I lost some trust in key relationships along the way.

Here’s what happened.

Shooting for the stars

For years, my talent center of excellence had been operating on a shoestring budget with few people on staff to meet the complex and highly diverse learning needs of our multinational company of more than 30,000 employees. We had only six full-time staff members within the COE, four of whom focused on global learning needs, solutions, and delivery.

The needs and expectations our team faced were many. We worked hard to define our scope clearly and to avoid the temptation of trying to be all things to all people all the time. We wanted to help and constantly challenged ourselves to be resourceful and resilient.

We also dreamed big: We wanted to create a learning council to inform our work, agree on priorities, and help expand our reach and overall company impact. The council would serve as an extension of our team to assist with deliveries into local geographies and the various organizations that made up our global enterprise. Imagine our delight when a key member of the HR leadership team agreed to such an effort and volunteered to help us staff and launch the program.

Getting to work

We got off to a good start.

That HR leader, “Stacy,” was the head of all our boots-on-the-ground, local HR teams. She thoughtfully inventoried her team members and identified those who either had responsibility for or showed keen interest in localized training and development efforts. Stacy graciously made early introductions between individuals in the talent COE and those who would be participating on the council. We followed her lead and began meeting with the council members, who quickly engaged with us and were eager to help us understand their organizations’ priority learning needs.

Council members brought us up to speed on training and development efforts already underway in their respective site locations. We immediately saw promise and the opportunity to synergize, reduce overlaps and duplication of efforts, share best practices, and identify gaps and high-priority needs for which we did not have solutions.

Those discussion led to the realization that some of the COE’s initiatives we had rolled out weren’t getting as much traction as we had hoped. As a result, we identified an early need to level set on the governing philosophy, strategy, and enterprise-spanning solutions that could support employee development needs around the world.

Missing a step

Even as I’m reflecting on the experience today, all our efforts sound great. However, while many things did go right in the beginning days of the council, there is one big thing that didn’t: stakeholder alignment.

The program’s efforts were entrenched in my team’s specific dreams, ideas, and notions. We jumped straight into the work and failed to align with key stakeholders at the HR leadership team level.

Because I did not collaborate with HR leadership about their ideas, expectations, and desired level of involvement, a disconnect appeared. The team’s efforts lost energy and momentum. Team members began to experience competing demands for their time and attention. Individuals faced uncertainty about how to prioritize their learning council work. One of the chief sponsors on the HR leadership team expressed discontent about the direction the work was taking and indicated feeling disenfranchised by the efforts.

Although I am a certified change practitioner and experienced project manager and had decades of HR experience under my belt, my own exuberance and ideas took control of the wheel. I should have conducted regular check-ins with sponsors, stakeholders, and leaders about what an extended group of learning leaders could and should do.

Understanding what happened

I had strong, preconceived convictions about what we could achieve with the initiative.

Unfortunately, not everyone shared my ideas. Other individuals had unique suggestions that I failed to fully tap, which robbed the team of the opportunity to gain great insight, perspective, wisdom, and guidance from those contributors. More importantly, those sponsors and stakeholders felt unheard and left out of a program they had championed.

It was an honest, well-intended mistake, but that didn’t matter. I have learned that even with the best of intentions, humans can still cause misalignment. Such a mistake put my team’s relationship with stakeholders in jeopardy. Without that trust, valuable project participants begin to question what’s happening, who’s behind it, and their motives. Guards go up and communications suffer. Before you know it, colleagues and peers who do not have a reason to be at odds with each other are in conflict.

My big takeaway from that experience is that assumptions are a poor substitute for alignment. In addition, as important as enthusiasm is to establish and maintain momentum, it can be a blinding light that pulls you in the wrong direction.

Today, I keep the guidelines for good stakeholder management practices front and center in everything I do. I remind myself to check in on the customer’s voice. I am far more attuned to the levels of interest and influence that my various stakeholders carry. I follow routine, disciplined approaches for evaluating stakeholder perspectives and involvement. I interact and engage with stakeholders in intentional ways. I pepper those engagements with a strong measure of curiosity and inquiry, endeavoring to hear and understand their unique points of view, needs, and wants.

Had I incorporated those practices on the front end of the project, the team’s efforts would have been much more clear, focused, and effective. Further, my relationship with key stakeholders would have strengthened rather than suffered.

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