10 Skills for Stakeholder Relationships
Understand repeated problems with clients, partners, or colleagues, prepare difficult conversations, and propose clearer ways to work together.
Improve a strained working relationship
Each skill gives your AI assistant instructions for a specific task.
For founders, managers, and HR leads in teams of about 20–200 people. Use one skill for a specific problem, or work through the pack step by step.
Explain the situation and what you want to achieve. The assistant will ask questions and help you prepare. Before using its suggestions, check the facts and make sure they fit the situation. Ask the people involved for any information you are missing.
A client keeps reopening decisions after approving them. Help me check my assumptions and prepare a conversation about how we make decisions.
Choose a skill for your situation.
Open a skill below to see what it helps you do. After installing the skill or pasting its prompt into your assistant, use the suggested starting phrase.
Map the Working Relationship
Clarify who needs what from whom, separate facts from assumptions, and choose one problem in the relationship to address.
Run stakeholder-relationship-map.
Download instructionsGet Their Perspective
Prepare questions about the other person’s goals and constraints, then use their actual answers to check your assumptions.
Run stakeholder-get-perspective.
Download instructionsFind Shared Interests
Compare each side’s needs and limits, then develop practical options with clear benefits, costs, and decisions still needed.
Run stakeholder-interests-and-constraints.
Download instructionsClarify a Trust Concern
Identify the specific concern behind a lack of trust and propose a practical way to demonstrate improvement.
Run stakeholder-trust-check.
Download instructionsStart With One Reliable Commitment
Plan one useful commitment with a clear result, deadline, early warning, and a review with the other person.
Run stakeholder-reliability-trial.
Download instructionsRepair a Broken Commitment
Draft an acknowledgment of what went wrong, practical remedies to offer, and steps to prevent the problem from recurring.
Run stakeholder-repair-plan.
Download instructionsAgree How Approvals and Handoffs Work
Draft an agreement covering required inputs, who approves the work, response times, and what happens when something is late or incomplete.
Run stakeholder-interface-agreement.
Download instructionsPrepare Useful Updates and Early Warnings
Draft a concise progress update and risk notice, and plan when each should reach the people who need it.
Run stakeholder-update-and-warning.
Download instructionsSet Limits and Ask for Support
State what you can and cannot provide, offer feasible alternatives, and prepare a request for help from the right person.
Run stakeholder-boundaries-and-escalation.
Download instructionsReview the Working Relationship
Compare commitments with what happened, include both sides’ feedback, and decide what to continue, change, or stop.
Run stakeholder-relationship-review.
Download instructionsOne download. Several ways to use it.
Unzip the download, then follow the instructions for your assistant.
Open one prompt file in portable/, copy its contents into a chat, and describe your situation.
To keep the whole pack in a project, upload portable/ALL-SKILLS.md as a project source, then paste the contents of PROJECT-INSTRUCTIONS.md into the project's instructions. If the assistant does not follow an uploaded prompt, paste that prompt directly into the chat.
In Claude, upload the individual skill ZIPs from install/ using the custom Skills feature. For another assistant that supports Agent Skills, copy the skill folders you need from skills/ into the directory that assistant uses for skills.
See README.md for installation options and a list of the included files.
Free for internal and client work under the Polar Bear license. Not for resale. Available features and results depend on the assistant you use.
Understand the research behind the pack.
The research notes explain which studies informed the skills, what those studies found, and where the findings may not apply. We have not tested whether these AI skills improve workplace outcomes.
Replace real names with placeholders and share only the information the assistant needs. You are responsible for checking facts, making decisions, and speaking with others. If the assistant predicts how someone might react, treat that as one possibility. Ask the person directly when you need to understand their view.
Download the research notes