When to Stop a Change Initiative: Navigating Misalignment and Strategic Drift with Hardeep Kaur (Director of Business Transformation, Merck)

Are your stakeholders making or breaking your transformation efforts? 

Hardeep Kaur, Director of Business Transformation at Merck, shares her three-stage approach to stakeholder management that has driven successful change across her 25-year pharmaceutical industry career.

Discover how to map stakeholders on an influence/impact matrix, create tailored engagement plans, and maintain alignment throughout the change journey. Hardeep reveals the telltale signs of stakeholder disengagement (like canceled meetings) and shares tactical advice for turning fence-sitters into advocates by deliberately showcasing early wins.

Beyond techniques, Hardeep explains why focusing relentlessly on people—not just process and technology—is crucial for transformation success, and how to reframe office politics as "corporate intelligence" to better navigate complex organizational dynamics.

Whether you're struggling with resistant stakeholders or trying to maintain momentum during shifting priorities, this episode offers immediately applicable strategies to improve your stakeholder management approach and increase your transformation success rate.

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Connect with:

⁠⁠Nellie Wartoft⁠⁠

CEO of ⁠⁠Tigerhall⁠⁠

Chair of the ⁠⁠Executive Council for Leading Change (ECLC)⁠⁠

nellie@tigerhall.com

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• 00:00 - Introduction: Why stakeholder management consumes so much of a change leader's time
• 01:10 - "Stakeholders can make or break your project" - The importance of effective management
• 01:45 - The three stages of stakeholder assessment and management
• 02:20 - Using the influence/impact matrix to prioritize stakeholder engagement
• 03:30 - Tailoring your approach: When to involve stakeholders vs. simply informing them
• 04:35 - Understanding stakeholder preferences to create effective engagement plans
• 06:20 - Managing stakeholders with conflicting interests or changing priorities
• 08:15 - When to stop change initiatives that no longer have stakeholder support
• 10:10 - Strategies for turning fence-sitting stakeholders into advocates
• 11:50 - How often to update your stakeholder map throughout the change journey
• 13:25 - The unique cross-organizational thinking required in change management
• 15:15 - Warning signs of stakeholder disengagement and how to address them
• 16:50 - Key questions to ask in stakeholder meetings to focus on people, not just process
• 18:35 - The three-legged stool of transformation: People, process, and technology
• 20:05 - How to measure and quantify the people aspect of transformation
• 21:30 - Finding the balance between AI and human elements in change management
• 24:20 - Preparation strategies for effective stakeholder meetings
• 26:35 - Reframing office politics as "corporate intelligence" to navigate relationships
• 28:30 - Top three takeaways for more effective stakeholder management

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