How Classroom Management Prepared Me for Stakeholder Alignment

I remember one implementation at Instructure where the IT team was hostile from day one.

They hadn't wanted Canvas. They'd been overruled by the academic leadership. They saw us as invaders, as more work, as a threat to their existing systems.

The temptation was to work around them. Go directly to the academics who actually wanted this. Let the IT team be grumpy in the corner while we got things done.

But I'd spent years in classrooms. I knew exactly what happens when you try to work around someone who doesn't want to cooperate.

They find ways to make your life difficult. They slow things down. They create problems. They poison the well with everyone else.

So I did what any experienced teacher would do. I taught them.

The Skill You Don't Realise You Have

Every teacher manages stakeholders with competing needs. Every single day.

You have students who want less work. You have parents who want more challenge for their kids. You have administrators who want higher test scores. You have colleagues who want you to align with their approaches. You have the curriculum that demands certain outcomes regardless of what anyone else wants.

Everyone has legitimate needs. You can't give everyone everything. So you navigate. You prioritise. You communicate. You build relationships that survive disappointment.

In business, they call this "stakeholder management" or "stakeholder alignment." Companies pay consultants to teach it. There are entire frameworks and certifications devoted to it.

You've been doing it since your first parent-teacher night.

What Stakeholder Alignment Actually Means

Let me translate the business jargon.

Stakeholder: Anyone who has an interest in what you're doing. In a classroom, that's students, parents, admin, colleagues, and the system. In a product team, that's engineering, design, sales, marketing, support, leadership, and customers.

Alignment: Getting people to move in the same direction despite having different priorities. Not forcing them. Not tricking them. Helping them see how their interests connect to a shared outcome.

Management: The ongoing work of maintaining relationships, communicating changes, addressing concerns, and adjusting course when needed.

None of this is new to you. The words are different. The skill is identical.

The Competing Priorities You Already Navigate

Think about a typical week in your classroom.

Students want: Less homework. More fun. To be treated fairly. To not be embarrassed in front of their peers. For the content to feel relevant to their lives.

Parents want: Their child to succeed. To be informed about progress. For any problems to be addressed quickly. For their child to be seen as an individual.

Administration wants: Good results. Compliance with policies. No complaints. Smooth operations. Evidence that learning is happening.

Colleagues want: You to pull your weight. To not make them look bad by comparison. To share resources. To align on standards and approaches.

The curriculum wants: Coverage of specific content. Achievement of defined outcomes. Evidence of differentiation. Documentation of everything.

These priorities conflict constantly. The parent who wants more homework for their kid. The student who wants less. The admin who wants higher test scores. The approach that would raise scores but bore students to tears.

You navigate this every day. You make tradeoffs. You communicate decisions. You build enough trust with each group that they give you the benefit of the doubt when you can't give them exactly what they want.

That's stakeholder alignment. You just call it teaching.

The Hostile IT Team (And What I Learnt)

Back to that Canvas implementation.

The IT team didn't want us there. They had legitimate concerns. They were already overworked. They'd been burned by technology projects before. They worried about security, about integration with existing systems, about support burden after we left.

If I'd ignored them, the implementation would have failed. You can't successfully implement technology in an organisation if the people who maintain the systems are working against you.

So I taught them. Not the software, initially. I taught them why we were there. What the academics were trying to achieve. How Canvas could actually make their lives easier rather than harder.

I listened to their concerns. Really listened. Not the nodding-while-waiting-to-talk kind of listening. The kind where you change your approach based on what you hear.

I addressed their concerns seriously. I showed respect for their expertise and their existing systems. I didn't pretend I knew their world better than they did.

By the end of the implementation, they were some of our strongest advocates. Not because I'd manipulated them. Because I'd treated them like intelligent people who deserved to understand what was happening and why.

That's teaching. That's also stakeholder alignment. It's the same skill.

The Parent Meeting and the Executive Briefing

Let me draw another parallel.

You've had difficult parent meetings. The parent who's angry about a grade. The parent who thinks you're not challenging their child enough. The parent who's convinced you have it in for their kid.

What do you do in those meetings?

You listen first. You let them say everything they need to say. You don't interrupt with explanations or defences. You let them feel heard.

You acknowledge their perspective. Even if you disagree, you validate that their concern comes from caring about their child. You don't make them wrong for having feelings.

You explain your reasoning. Not defensively. Calmly. You help them see the factors they might not have considered. You show your work.

You find common ground. You both want what's best for the student. You might disagree on what that looks like, but the shared goal is real. You build from there.

You agree on next steps. You don't leave with vague promises. You establish specific actions, timelines, and how you'll communicate progress.

This is exactly what good stakeholder management looks like in business.

The executive briefing where leadership is frustrated with product direction. The sales team meeting where they're angry about features that aren't being built. The customer escalation where someone's threatening to cancel.

Same structure. Same skills. Different context.

What Teachers Understand That Most Professionals Don't

Here's why this skill is rare outside education.

Most professionals operate in silos. They talk mainly to people who share their function, their priorities, their language. The engineer talks to engineers. The salesperson talks to salespeople. The marketer talks to marketers.

Teachers can't do that. You're constantly switching between audiences. In a single day, you might explain something to a struggling student, then to an advanced student, then to a concerned parent, then to your head of department, then to the whole class.

Each audience needs different language. Different framing. Different emphasis. You adjust instinctively.

This is called "code switching" in linguistics. "Audience adaptation" in communication. "Stakeholder communication" in business.

You do it fifty times a day without thinking.

The Translation Guide

Here's how your classroom experience translates to business stakeholder management:

The situations are different. The underlying skill is the same.

The Microsoft Mute Button Story

Here's another example from my own experience.

During Covid, teachers were telling us they needed a mute button in Microsoft Teams. They were desperate for it. It seemed like an obvious feature request.

But what they actually needed was classroom control. The mute button was just the most obvious symptom of a deeper issue: Teams had been built for adults in offices, not for teachers managing children.

Understanding this difference required stakeholder alignment across multiple groups.

I had to help teachers articulate their real needs, not just the surface request. I had to translate those needs for engineers who'd never been in a classroom. I had to convince product leadership that this wasn't just a niche education feature but something that would benefit all users. I had to coordinate with the Australian education team to build a compelling case.

Each group had different priorities. Engineers cared about technical feasibility and architecture. Leadership cared about business impact and resource allocation. Teachers cared about surviving their next Zoom lesson without a student unmuting to make fart noises.

The skill wasn't just understanding each group. It was translating between them. Finding the frame that connected a teacher's frustration to an engineer's interest to a leader's priorities.

Teachers do this translation constantly. You take a curriculum standard and make it relevant to a teenager who doesn't care. You take a student's struggle and explain it to a parent who's defensive. You take admin's requirement and sell it to colleagues who are already overwhelmed.

Same skill. Different stakes.

Practical Application

If you're moving into business, product management, or building something of your own, your stakeholder skills give you a massive advantage.

In interviews: When they ask about stakeholder management experience, you have years of examples. Translate them. "In my role as a teacher, I regularly navigated competing priorities between curriculum requirements, student needs, parent expectations, and administrative directives. For example..." Then tell the story.

In the job: You'll be better than most at reading rooms, adjusting your message for different audiences, and building relationships that survive conflict. These skills take most professionals years to develop. You already have them.

Building your own thing: You'll understand that customers, partners, suppliers, and team members all have different priorities. You won't make the mistake of optimising for one stakeholder at the expense of all others.

Your Homework

This week, notice your stakeholder management in action.

Every time you navigate competing priorities in your school, pause and recognise what you're doing. The parent who wants one thing, the student who wants another, the admin who wants something else entirely.

Notice how you translate between them. How you build trust. How you find solutions that aren't perfect for anyone but are acceptable to everyone.

Then ask yourself: where else could I apply this skill?

If you were building a product, who would your stakeholders be? What would they want? How would their priorities conflict? How would you align them?

You already know how to do this. You've been practising in one of the most complex stakeholder environments imaginable: a school full of students, parents, colleagues, and administrators.

Every difficult parent conversation was preparation for customer success. Every staff meeting was training in cross-functional alignment. Every time you got buy-in for something new, you were doing stakeholder management.

The business world makes this sound complicated. You've been doing it for years.

This reframe is from "Teach Yourself Out," which shows teachers how to translate classroom skills into products, income, and options. If you want the full translation guide, the book goes deeper.