align-stakeholders

name	Align Stakeholders
description	Build consensus across diverse stakeholders by understanding their thinking, surfacing disagreement, and making deliberate trade-offs. Transforms stakeholder chaos into coordinated support. Trigger on: 'stakeholder alignment', 'buy-in', 'disagreement', 'getting approval', 'cross-functional decision', 'executive alignment'.
dependencies	[]
connectors	[{"name":"Slack","reason":"Monitor stakeholder concerns and sentiment in real-time"},{"name":"Google Calendar","reason":"Identify key decision-makers and review meeting patterns"},{"name":"Google Drive","reason":"Access strategy documents and track feedback from stakeholders"},{"name":"Email","reason":"Understand stakeholder communication and concerns"},{"name":"Notion","reason":"Document stakeholder requirements and alignment strategies"}]
author	Harmony
version	1.0.0
icon	sparkles
cover
screenshots	[]
category	Strategy

Purpose

Many great ideas fail not because they're bad ideas but because stakeholders aren't aligned. Sales wants one thing, engineering can't build it, finance is worried about budget, and marketing is planning around an assumption nobody validated. By the time you notice misalignment, months have passed and you're reworking everything.

This skill teaches you to build alignment before you need it, not after decisions fall apart. It's based on a critical insight: stakeholders rarely disagree about what they actually think. They disagree because they don't understand how others think. When you understand how a person thinks—their constraints, incentives, what they actually care about—disagreement often resolves or at least becomes a clear trade-off both sides understand.

The skill covers how to approach stakeholders with genuine curiosity instead of trying to convince them, how to present options with recommendations so people can make informed choices, how to distinguish disagreement from misunderstanding, how to build trust through consistency, and how to repeat messages relentlessly so understanding sticks across diverse audiences.

When to Use

Use this skill whenever you need agreement from multiple people with different incentives. It's especially valuable when:

• You're launching a major initiative that requires buy-in from multiple teams
• There's visible tension between stakeholders and you're not sure why
• You've explained a decision multiple times and people still don't seem to understand it
• You're heading off a disagreement before it becomes a problem
• You're building trust with a stakeholder who's been burned before
• You're presenting to executives and need fast decisions, not endless deliberation
• You're navigating organizational politics without compromising the work
• You need approval from someone who has power but hasn't been engaged yet

Instructions

Step 1: Understand How They Think, Not What They Think

Most alignment work focuses on what people think: "Sales wants growth, engineering wants simplicity." But understanding stops there. The real insight is how they think—the underlying logic that drives their positions.

Before a major alignment conversation, invest in understanding:

• Their constraints: What are they responsible for? What are they measured on? What keeps them up at night?
• Their mental models: How do they see the world? What patterns do they notice? What analogies do they use?
• Their past experiences: What burned them before? What worked before? What shaped their current thinking?

Hilary Gridley calls this "understanding how they think." You're not trying to change their position—you're trying to understand the logic that created it. When you understand someone's mental model, you can speak their language. You can show how your idea fits within their framework instead of asking them to abandon it.