Adam Smith Was Not a Mum

I am not completely convinced by these audience priorities, particularly if the numbers are interpreted as suggesting that some stakeholders genuinely deserve very little attention. To me, the model works better as a description of who takes primary responsibility for each relationship rather than how important that audience is to the organisation as a whole.

There is something almost Adam Smith-like about the logic. Specialisation makes organisations more efficient. A product brand team cannot realistically give customers, employees, regulators, suppliers, financial markets, local communities and shareholders equal attention every day. It makes sense for the product team to concentrate heavily on customers while the corporate brand team takes greater responsibility for financial markets, government or regulatory relationships.

Where I disagree is when that division of labour starts to look like a hierarchy of importance. If customers score five for the product brand team and one for the corporate team, that can work because somebody is giving customers the necessary attention. Likewise, if financial markets receive a five from the corporate team and a one from the product team, they are still being covered. Viewed across the whole organisation, I would almost argue that every stakeholder needs to add up to five, even if responsibility for reaching that five is distributed differently.

My experience as a mother also makes these neat separations feel artificial. In real life, relationships overlap. Decisions made in one area rapidly affect another. Organisations behave similarly. An employee issue can become a customer issue; a supplier problem can become a reputational problem; a local-community dispute can attract regulators. Equally, if a product team unexpectedly secured a major government commission, government would immediately become a commercially significant audience for that team.

My experience as a mother is probably why I struggle with the idea of assigning fixed levels of importance to different audiences. I cannot realistically say that one child is a “five” and another is a “one”, or that my work is less important than my family. My work helps put food on the table, while my children need emotional attention, practical support and time. I also have responsibilities to myself, my household and other people around me as stakeholders. All of these areas matter, they do all demand the same amount of attention at the same moment.

What actually happens is closer to a process of dividing and coordinating responsibility. If one child has an exam, illness or problem at school, that child may temporarily require more attention. If there is an urgent deadline at work, work may take priority for several hours. That does not mean the other responsibilities have suddenly become unimportant. They still have to be covered. And yes, obviously we’re not going to handle all the problems like a little kids football team everybody running for the ball and leaving the goal open for others.

This is how I see stakeholder management in organisations. A company may need its product team to concentrate heavily on customers while its corporate team focuses on shareholders, regulators or financial markets. The specialisation makes sense. What I find less convincing is the suggestion that some audiences can therefore be considered inherently low priority. Across the organisation, all of these relationships still need adequate attention. Drop the ball on one and you’ll pay.

Plus attention can shift according to circumstances but responsibility remains. In that sense, organisations may need to “divide and conquer”, but they cannot afford to forget any of the groups on the list.

This is why I think stakeholder priority is better understood as dynamic rather than fixed. Freeman’s (1984) stakeholder perspective already asks us to see organisations as networks of interconnected relationships, and Mitchell, Agle and Wood (1997) show that stakeholder salience changes according to factors such as power, legitimacy and urgency.

So I would keep the distinction between corporate and product audiences, because specialisation has value, but I would make the scores flexible. The organisation needs every relationship covered; what changes is who holds the relationship, and when it requires greater attention.