Why most programme sponsors never actually sponsor
The arithmetic behind the empty chair, and the system for building the sponsor you were supposed to be given
92% of executive sponsors believe they communicate effectively with their programmes.
47% of the people running those programmes agree.
That gap, measured by PMI a decade ago and never meaningfully closed since, is the sponsorship problem in one line. From above, the role feels done. From below, it feels absent. I told two stories about that absence on LinkedIn this week; a post can carry the lesson, but not the system.
This is the system: the evidence for why appointed sponsors don’t sponsor, the construction kit that fixes it from below, the three ways the fix backfires, and what building your sponsor signals to the people above the room.
Appointment is not activation
Start with the strangest fact in the delivery literature: the most important success factor is also the most reliably absent one.
Prosci’s benchmarking has ranked active and visible executive sponsorship as the top contributor to change success in every study it has run since 1998, cited roughly four times more often than any other factor. In the same research, programmes with highly effective sponsors meet or exceed their objectives about three times as often as those without. And yet the same benchmarking finds that roughly half of sponsors do not adequately understand what the role requires, and PMI’s global data has actively engaged sponsors on only about two projects in three, a figure that sat flat for years. In PMI’s 2018 study, a quarter of organisations named inadequate sponsor support as the primary cause of their failed projects.
A note on the numbers, because I hold this newsletter to the standard I hold business cases. Much of this evidence is practitioner self-report, and Prosci sells the interventions its research recommends. What makes the finding credible is convergence: a change-management vendor, a project-management association, the strategy firms, and a national audit office reach the same verdict from entirely different data. Bain’s transformation research lands the hardest version: only 12 per cent of transformations achieve their original ambitions.
So the single most valuable behaviour in delivery is missing from a third to a half of the programmes that depend on it. The interesting question is why.
The single most valuable behaviour in delivery is missing from a third to a half of the programmes that depend on it.
Why the chair stays empty
The comfortable answer is character: we got a weak sponsor. The evidence says structure, four ways.
First, the arithmetic never worked. Sponsoring one major programme properly takes something like 10% to 15% of an executive’s working week. PMI found sponsors averaging 3 concurrent projects and around 34 hours a week on sponsorship duties on top of the day job. Nobody survives that maths, so the role quietly collapses into what fits the diary, which is symbolism.
Second, the symbolic fallacy. Most sponsors believe the job is to approve the business case, appear at kickoff, and return for the victory lap, because nobody has ever told them otherwise. They are deeply trained in running operations and almost never trained in sponsoring change, so they look to the programme team to deliver it and assume their part is done. Appointment gets mistaken for activation on both sides of the relationship.
Third, the default assignment. Whoever heads the department gets the badge, capacity and appetite unchecked, and when the diary bites they delegate to a proxy who has interest but no clout, which makes the sponsorship politely toothless.
Fourth, and least discussed, the role outlives nobody. The National Audit Office looked at major UK equipment programmes and found a median programme duration of 77 months against a median Senior Responsible Owner tenure of 22. The structure guarantees that most long programmes burn through several sponsors. Universal Credit ran through six SROs in its first four years, an average tenure under six months, one of them, the NAO later revealed, working a single day a week through serious illness. The Institute for Government’s verdict on that churn: it “did immense damage”. The counter-proof matters just as much: the programme stabilised only when one sponsor stayed for a decade.
Nobody survives that maths, so the role quietly collapses into what fits the diary, which is symbolism.
Underneath all four sits an incentive truth the frameworks tiptoe around. Sponsors are measured and paid on business as usual, not on benefits realisation. The programme learns that in the first hard quarter.
None of this excuses an empty chair. It explains it, and the explanation is the point: if the causes are structural, waiting for a better sponsor is not a plan. Building one is.
The construction kit
On Tuesday I described the 30-minute conversation that turned my quiet sponsor into a working one. That conversation is the front door. Here is the whole house.
One decision they own. Named, minuted, and genuinely theirs. Not “support the programme” but “you own the go decision on the finance cutover”. A sponsor with a decision has a reason to stay engaged; a sponsor without one is an audience.
Two doors only they can open. Name the rooms and the peers the programme cannot reach without them, and ask for exactly those. Specificity is what converts goodwill into action.
One sentence of air cover. Drafted by you, adapted by them, rehearsed before it is needed: the line they will say to their peers when the programme hits weather. Air cover that has to be composed during the storm arrives late.
The contracting conversation, thirty minutes. Frame it as respect, not remediation: “there are three things on this programme only you can do.” Executives do not resent being given a defined job; they resent discovering, mid-crisis, that they had one.
The fifteen-minute rhythm. Fortnightly, one page, three items: the decision coming toward them, where their sentence lands next, and what their peers should be hearing from them. No status theatre; status by exception only.
The no-surprises rule, both directions. They are never surprised in a room because of you; you are never surprised by their diary. This rule is the currency everything else is bought with.
Why the kit works is worth naming, because each part answers one of the structural causes. Decisions arrive as decision asks, options with costs and a recommendation, because busy executives act on what is structured and defer what is open-ended. The talking points and the sentence are drafted by you because a saturated sponsor performs what is prepared and postpones what is not; the research politely calls these frictionless assets. Coalition-building gets the most help because it is the role sponsors fail at most, the weakest-rated behaviour in Prosci’s data, so the lead maps the coalition and hands the sponsor named asks rather than a vague plea for support. And the pre-briefing discipline from the previous issue is the delivery mechanism for all of it: the meeting before the meeting is where a built sponsor actually earns their keep.
A sponsor with a decision has a reason to stay engaged. A sponsor without one is an audience.
One calibration: the job you build changes shape over time.
Early, it is backing the programme leader and fixing priorities.
In the middle, it is communication and politics.
At the end, it is refusing to let the organisation declare victory before the benefits land.
Re-contract at each turn, and re-contract within a fortnight of any new sponsor, because the churn statistics say you will get one.
Where this backfires
Honesty requires this section, because the construction move carries three real hazards, and the literature that ignores them is doing you no favours.
The first is the puppet fallacy. If you script everything the sponsor sees and says, you have not built a sponsor; you have built an echo, and you have quietly removed the one person positioned to challenge your programme’s assumptions. The test is simple: if your sponsor has never pushed back on you, the construction has gone too far. You build the role. They must inhabit it.
The second is the transferred accountability trap. Manage upward too completely and the organisation quietly re-homes executive accountability onto you: when benefits slip because a peer division resisted, the question becomes why you failed to manage your sponsor. Keep the accountability where governance put it, in writing, in the charter and the minutes.
The third is fragility. A relationship you constructed leaves the building with either of you. Institutionalise it: the decision in the charter, the rhythm in the calendar, the sentence in the record, so the role survives its occupants.
If your sponsor has never pushed back, you haven't built a sponsor. You've built an echo.
And one honest limit. Everything above assumes a sponsor who is passive, not hostile. For the executive who is politically invested in the programme’s failure, no kit exists, in the literature or anywhere else. The professional move there is to escalate the gap itself, early and in writing, because an unsponsored programme dressed up as a sponsored one is a governance defect, and naming it is protection, not betrayal.
What this signals above the room
The people who decide whether you make a Programme Director are, overwhelmingly, the population that sponsors programmes. When you construct a sponsor well, the person experiencing your most senior work first-hand is exactly the person whose opinion of you decides what you lead next. Running a team well is expected at your level. Constructing the executive layer above your programme, quietly, without ever making the executive feel managed, is scarce, and it is visible to precisely one audience: theirs.
There is a compounding effect the frameworks never mention. A sponsor who succeeded because of you does not just remember it; they can describe it, from evidence, in rooms you will never enter. The sponsorship you built for the programme becomes sponsorship for you, and it is the only kind that survives a promotion discussion, because it is testimony rather than impression.
And the sustainability arithmetic, since this letter is also about not burning out: the kit costs perhaps two hours a month. One unsponsored crisis consumes weeks and a piece of your reputation. The version of this career that lasts is the one where the executive layer works, and the executive layer works because somebody built it.
An appointed sponsor is a name on a governance slide.
A built sponsor is the difference between air cover and silence.
Reply to this email and tell me about the sponsor you had to build, or the one you couldn’t. I read every reply, and the next issues get built from what comes back.
Roman