From the Minister’s Office to the Boardroom: What a Decade of Government Relations Teaches You About Managing Stakeholders

By Chike Agbasi

Every stakeholder relationship eventually gets tested. A funding announcement gets delayed. A policy position draws public criticism. An election changes who’s in the room. Over more than a decade working across federal ministers’ offices, a national infrastructure agency, and a 4,000 member professional association, I’ve come to believe that how an organization performs in that moment is decided long before the moment arrives. It’s decided in the relationships, systems, and discipline built when nothing was on fire.

Here’s what that decade has taught me.

Build the relationship before you need it

The instinct in government relations is to reach out when there’s an ask: a meeting request, a submission deadline, a piece of legislation moving through committee. That’s the wrong sequence. As Chief of Staff in the Offices of the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities and the Minister of Seniors, the relationships that actually moved files, with provincial and territorial counterparts, with the Prime Minister’s Office and Privy Council Office, with departmental officials, were the ones built well before a specific ask existed.

That’s true at the association level too. At the Ottawa Real Estate Board, sustaining relationships with elected officials, senior public servants, and organizations like GOHBA and OBOT wasn’t a campaign with a start and end date. It was a standing practice, because the day you need a relationship to already exist is not the day to start building it.

Treat every stakeholder group as a coalition, not a contact list

Multi stakeholder work fails when it’s treated as a series of one off relationships instead of a coordinated effort. Delivering bilateral infrastructure agreements with all ten provinces and three territories, including work on files as large as the $17 billion Ontario Line, only worked because provincial, territorial, Indigenous, and municipal partners were engaged as a coalition with shared interests, not as ten separate negotiations running in parallel.

The same logic applies to advocacy on housing policy. Government relations work is rarely won by one organization speaking alone. It’s won by aligning positions across peer organizations, showing up together at forums like the City Building Summit, and making sure that when policymakers hear from the sector, they hear a consistent message.

Political transitions are the real test of an organization’s discipline

Elections and cabinet transitions expose exactly how disciplined an organization’s operations are. Leading a Minister’s office through the 2019 federal election and cabinet transition, while keeping a multi billion dollar infrastructure plan moving and preparing transition materials for an incoming Minister, and then doing it again through the 2021 election in the Office of the Minister of Seniors, taught a hard lesson. Continuity doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because briefing materials are current, relationships don’t depend on a single point of contact, and the team understands the file well enough to keep it moving when the political leadership changes overnight.

Boards and executives should ask the same question of their own organizations. If the people in the room changed tomorrow, would the work survive it?

Build the insight function before you need to react

A recurring pattern across every role has been the value of building forward looking capacity, horizon scanning, impact assessment, decision support, before an issue becomes urgent. At OREB, that meant building out a monitoring and advocacy function that let the Board and CEO anticipate municipal, provincial, and federal shifts on housing policy rather than respond to them after the fact.

Reactive government relations is expensive. It costs credibility with policymakers, and it costs internal trust when leadership is surprised by something they should have seen coming. The organizations that do this well treat policy insight as infrastructure, not as a project that gets stood up when a crisis hits.

Be the calm, credible voice when the file is public

Serving as a principal spokesperson on a live, high scrutiny issue, housing policy at OREB, infrastructure spending during a period of intense public attention, seniors’ benefits through a pandemic, requires a specific discipline. Never let advocacy outrun what the organization can actually defend. Positions have to be tested against legal, risk, and reputational guardrails before they’re public, not adjusted afterward. Once an organization has established that its public positions are careful and dependable, it earns something valuable. Policymakers and media start taking the next thing it says at face value.

The throughline

None of this comes down to a single tactic. It comes down to treating government and stakeholder relations as an ongoing discipline rather than a series of transactions, one relationship, one file, one election cycle at a time. Boards and executives who invest in that discipline before they need it are the ones whose organizations still have a seat at the table when the file gets hard.

Chike Agbasi has spent over a decade at the intersection of government, advocacy, and organizational leadership, including senior roles in federal ministers’ offices, Infrastructure Canada, and as Manager of Government and Community Relations for the Ottawa Real Estate Board.