Hi Leah,

We have done something similar as a 360 degree feedback exercise, whereby it was 'sold' to all participants as team development, which it can certainly be viewed as. Obviously the main subject (in your case the senior member of staff) should know the reason for the feedback being sought or there is an element of underhandedness (if that's a word!) about it.

I hope this is helpful,
Sue

One approach I’ve used is to gather brief, qualitative feedback through informal check-ins or quick prompts that feel like part of a normal engagement or collaboration review, rather than something tied to performance issues. Keeping the questions broad, about communication, follow-through, or partnership, helps it feel routine. We track this kind of feedback in Teamflect, but the key is making the process look like a general effort to understand team dynamics rather than a targeted assessment.

build stronger stakeholder relationships

First, stronger than what?

I assume you mean "stronger than they are right now", which means that you need to define why you think they are insufficiently strong now, how you have measured this strength and at what point you will measure the strength again in the future.

Given that they are already in performance improvement, therefore, whatever method you use to assess the improvement in strength of relations will need to be logically consistent with whatever method was used to decide that this should be a feature of performance improvement.

I'm not a big fan of such qualitative measures in PIPs for very much the reasons you are now having to deal with. I would normally recommend, rather than trying to measure "stakeholder relationship", measure the things that either typically lead to stronger relationships (more in-person attendance at stakeholder meetings and activities, for example) or things that flow from such relationships: things that can be accurately quantified and evidenced.

360-degree appraisal is, of course, a thing. But if you don't already have it in place, it's a bit of a wavy flag.

Whilst all the comments are helpful, I think Robey's reply hits the nail on the head.

If you don't know exactly what you are looking for and/or and know what the current relationship is now specifically, then how will you measure success - or in this case, whatever the improvement is or might be?

Hi Leah, my feedback and reflections would be very much aligned with Robey and David on this one.
PIPs really need to have clear and measurable means to show improvement. You need to have data on what the performance problem is and a clear direction on how to meet the expectations of the role.

Whilst qualitative data gathering is possible and I'd hope is part of your usual performance management process, I'd recommend articulating what are the expectations with stakeholder management, where they are now and what needs to be different. I'd avoid putting the person or their stakeholders or peers in a difficult situation especially when the stakeholders expectations might vary and their feedback skills might also vary.

Hopefully you have other, objective and quantifiable measures that will be easy to validate as a means of showing performance improvement. Good luck.