Jesse Jacoby
Talk to any transformation leader long enough, and the same story comes out. The project had a sponsor on paper. The kickoff deck named one. The steering committee charter assigned one. But somewhere between launch and landing, no one was actually steering the ship. The team made its hard calls in a vacuum, hit organizational resistance no one cleared the path through, and the initiative slid into the long tail of “almost worked.”
A decade ago, when I first wrote about this, sponsorship felt like one of six characteristics of a successful project. Today, with most organizations running continuous transformation rather than episodic projects, sponsorship has moved from a success factor to the success factor. It correlates more directly with outcomes than methodology, technology, budget, or governance design. When sponsorship is strong, the rest of the machinery can fail in places and the work still gets through. When it is weak, no amount of project management discipline saves the work.
The harder part is that the bar for “strong” has gone up. The era of the once-a-quarter executive cameo at a town hall is over. Today’s sponsors operate in distributed environments, against fragmented attention, alongside three or four concurrent initiatives, with a workforce that has learned to recognize symbolic engagement from a long way off. And as I wrote in The Sponsor Changed, The Story Can’t, sponsors themselves rotate mid-flight, so the narrative they carry has to be transferable.
What Strong Sponsorship Actually Looks Like
Strong sponsorship is not a personality type. It is a set of observable behaviors anyone in the organization can see, name, and look for. Below is the framework I use with executive sponsors at the start of every engagement. The left column is the behavior. The right column is the evidence you should be able to point to within the first ninety days.
| Sponsor Behavior | What You Should See |
|---|---|
| Articulates a compelling vision | Communicates the future state in clear language. Connects the change to specific business outcomes. Describes how the day-to-day experience of work will be different. |
| Gets buy-in from other leaders | Invests one-on-one time with peers to walk them through the objectives. Solicits input on the strategy and future state. Names the level of involvement being asked of each leader. |
| Provides active sponsorship | Owns accountability publicly. Shows up visibly and consistently. Removes obstacles when the team flags them, rather than asking the team to escalate twice. |
| Leads by example | Adopts the new behaviors and processes first. Treats themselves as the pilot user, not the exception. |
| Manages resistance | Steps into the difficult conversations the team cannot have alone. Helps strategize how to address resistance rather than dismissing it as noise. |
| Communicates proactively | Shapes the communication plan, doesn’t just approve it. Carries key messages personally rather than delegating them entirely to a comms team. |
| Provides opportunities for feedback | Makes themselves directly reachable. Sets up multiple channels so feedback flows in, including channels they cannot fully control. |
| Celebrates wins | Recognizes desired behaviors in high-profile ways. Names the individuals and teams who model the change. |
| Defines desired behaviors | Articulates the mindsets and behaviors they want to see in the future state, in concrete terms: how should people think, feel, and act differently? |
| Champions change management | Ensures change management capability is embedded in the project, not bolted on. Pushes for integration with the project plan, not as a parallel workstream. |
Print this. Walk through it with your sponsor in your first one-on-one. Ask which behaviors come naturally and which will require deliberate practice. The conversation alone tends to surface the gaps, and it gives the sponsor language they can use when they catch themselves drifting.
Why It’s Harder Now
A few things have shifted that make strong sponsorship harder than it was when I first wrote on this topic.
Continuous change. Most organizations are no longer running a single transformation. They are running portfolios of them, often with overlapping populations and competing priorities. Sponsors get pulled in multiple directions, and the ones who do not actively triage end up sponsoring nothing well.
Distributed teams. Visibility used to mean walking the floor or hosting the town hall. Now it means showing up consistently in video, in Slack threads, in async written updates, and in the rhythms where people actually consume information. Sponsors who default to in-person presence end up invisible to half the organization.
Sponsor turnover. Boards rotate executives. Mandates shift. The sponsor who launched the initiative is often not the one who lands it. The work has to be set up so that the next sponsor can pick it up without the story collapsing.
AI and automation pressure. Sponsors are increasingly being asked to lead changes that affect roles, headcount, and the implicit contract between employer and employee. This raises the temperature on every sponsor conversation. The behaviors in the table above stay the same. The stakes go up.
How to Cultivate It
Sponsorship does not appear because you put a name in a charter. It appears because someone, usually the change leader, actively cultivates it.
Onboard the sponsor like you onboard a new hire. The first working session should not be about the project. It should be about what good sponsorship of this project looks like, what specific actions you will be asking them to take, and where their visible support will matter most. The framework above is a useful artifact for that conversation.
Build a cadence they can actually keep. The fastest way to lose a sponsor is to overspend their time. Design a rhythm of short, high-leverage touchpoints: a weekly fifteen-minute decision review, a monthly visible communication, a quarterly all-hands appearance. Predictable beats heroic.
Give them words. Most sponsors are not natural change communicators, even the ones who are otherwise excellent leaders. Hand them a one-page narrative they can adapt for their next leadership meeting. Make their job easier and they will show up more often.
Coach the difficult cases. When resistance from another executive shows up, do not just brief your sponsor on the issue. Rehearse the conversation with them. Most sponsors fail at this not because they lack courage, but because they walk in unprepared.
Plan for succession from day one. Document the sponsor’s commitments, the decisions they have made, and the rationale behind them. If they hand the project off mid-stream, you want to be able to brief the next sponsor in an hour, not a week.
A Quick Self-Check
If you are wondering where your project’s sponsorship sits today, run a small test. Ask three people on the project team, separately, to name one specific thing the sponsor has done in the past month that moved the work forward.
If you get three concrete answers, sponsorship is alive. If you get vague gestures toward “support” without anything you can point to, you have work to do.
Stronger sponsorship is one of the highest-leverage investments any change leader can make. The behaviors are not exotic. They are just rare in the wild.
