The steering committee wrapped up. Everyone agreed. The slide said “aligned,” and the minutes recorded no objections. By the following Thursday, two of the people who’d agreed were quietly working against it.
I’ve seen that sequence more times than I’d like.
We’ve built a whole practice around chasing stakeholder buy-in, as though the goal is to collect agreement the way you’d collect signatures. Get them in the room. Walk them through it. Note the nods. Tick the box that says engaged.
But buy-in only measures one thing: whether someone was willing to agree in a meeting. That’s a very low bar. Agreeing in a room is cheap. It costs nothing, it avoids an awkward conversation, and it lets everyone leave on time.
What it doesn’t tell you is whether that person will back you when it gets expensive. Whether they’ll find the money when the budget tightens. Whether they’ll defend the decision to their own boss when it’s questioned six months later, with no one from your project in the room.
That’s the support that actually carries a project, and it has almost nothing to do with the meeting.
The mistake is treating buy-in as an event. You present, they agree, you move on. Real commitment isn’t an event. It’s built slowly, well before you need it, through a hundred small moments where people learn whether you’re honest with them, whether you deliver what you said, whether you make them look good or make them carry your problems.
By the time you’re standing in front of them asking for support, the answer is largely already decided. You’re just finding out what it is.
There’s a simple test I use. For each person who matters, ask: will they defend this when I’m not in the room? Not whether they agreed. Whether they’ll actively back it when doing so costs them something.
If you can’t answer that with confidence, you don’t have their support. You have their good manners, and those evaporate the moment things get difficult.
This is why the stakeholder you forgot to count is so often the one who stops the project. The people who can hurt you aren’t always the ones who sign the cheque, and they’re rarely the ones sitting in your engagement plan.
The work, then, isn’t running better stakeholder engagement sessions. It’s earning the kind of relationship where people will spend their own credibility on your project. That takes time, honesty, and a track record. It doesn’t fit on an engagement plan. It’s also inseparable from who actually delivers your project, because the person carrying the delivery is the one whose word those relationships are built on.
So stop counting who agreed. Start asking who’ll act. Those are different questions, and only one of them tells you whether your project will survive contact with the real world.
Ben Webb is an award-winning project leader and strategist. Named Australian Institute of Project Management Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for the International Project Management Association’s World Project Manager of the Year in 2023, he writes about delivery, leadership and the difference between managing a project and actually getting it done.
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