We all agree that project management is a skill you can learn. So why do we still act like project sponsorship is something a leader either has or doesn’t?
I’ve spent thousands of hours in front of a room teaching project management. Essentials courses. Advanced technical classes. Learning labs. Sessions for the accidental project managers who never asked for the job and got handed it anyway.
Now here’s the number of hours anyone has ever paid me to make their project sponsors better sponsors. Eighty.
And it’s not just me, either. Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez ran two surveys in 2020 for the HBR Project Management Handbook and found that only 13% of executives had ever been trained to be effective sponsors.
Project managers get curriculum, certifications, tools, templates, coaching. A sponsor gets a title and a standing invitation to the steering committee.
Then we’re surprised the two of them aren’t equally good at their jobs.
Influence without authority is helpful. But authority without skill can be catastrophic.
It’s a curious thing to watch. We’ll do gymnastics to avoid telling a sponsor we need more from them. Instead, we pour money into teaching project managers to “influence without authority” and “lead up.” We spend almost nothing developing the people who are actually “up.”
I think that’s a problem.
We know, from instinct and from experience, how much a sponsor shapes the way a project turns out. We know, from instinct and from more painful experience, what bad sponsorship does to our projects.
Handing someone authority over a project (with almost no support, coaching, or understanding of the role) is lunacy when you say it out loud.
“An absent or difficult sponsor gets treated as a fixed obstacle, something you can nudge but never budge.”
Sponsorship takes skill. Skill can be built and sharpened. But in too many PMOs, an absent or difficult sponsor gets treated as a fixed obstacle, something you can nudge but never budge. So we train our PMs to be nudgers, and our PMO leaders to run interference when it gets bad enough.
That approach has a ceiling. You can only sharpen “influence without authority” skills so far. Past a certain point the PM is as good as they’re going to get, and the real constraint is sitting one level up with a backlog of decisions nobody is helping them clear. (I’ve asked before whether influence without authority is a broken model.)
Plenty of organizations have taken PM training as far as it goes without ever looking upstairs to ask why the gains stopped.
Why we think a growth mindset ends at the C-suite
PMO leaders already know the sponsor is the bigger lever. I ask them about it constantly, and the reason they haven’t touched sponsor development comes back fast and almost word for word: “We know it’s a problem. But there is no way in hell our sponsors will sit through training.”
“We act like a growth mindset comes with an expiration date, and it expires right at the C-suite.”
I understand the fear of the upchuck. I’ve met the sponsor whose entire personality is “I don’t have time for this.” I still think we quit on them far too early. We act like a growth mindset comes with an expiration date, and it expires right at the C-suite.
This Stanford study is old (2013), and I still find it interesting. Researchers asked more than 200 CEOs, board directors, and senior executives about coaching. Nearly two-thirds of the CEOs were getting none of it from an outside coach. Almost all of them said they’d welcome it, and that they’d act on the feedback.
That tells me the people we’ve written off as un-coachable are waiting to be asked.
And let’s not forget that the sponsor has real stakes in how the project turns out. If there’s something they could do differently to get a better result, more of them are willing to work at it than we assume. They just need to know what good sponsorship looks like, and what good will get them.
A few years ago I got to test that directly. A large client wanted to move from a project-oriented waterfall world to a product-aligned agile one. My spidey sense said the whole effort would fail if the executive sponsors kept operating the way they always had. So I made two requests before I’d take the work.
First, I asked the C-suite leaders to spend 90 minutes with me in a session I called “Are You Sure You Want to Do This?” I focused on the many significant ways their own involvement would have to change, from the phrases they’d need to stop using to the jump in time and attention their product teams were about to need from them.
Second, I asked those same leaders to sit through the identical two-day agile training their teams were getting.
Remarkably, they did both. Years later they’re still scaling the framework, with throughput several multiples above where they started. It’s the most successful agile transformation I’ve led, by a mile, and I wouldn’t run one any other way now.
Their yeses came down to one thing. They showed up because somebody asked them to, and told them why.
Sponsor learning can be your PMO’s biggest unlock
Back in June I wrote about what blaming the sponsor costs a PMO. I stopped one question short. Whose job is it to make sponsors better?
“They’ve taught the methods and funded the certifications, and the gains have gotten smaller every year.”
I keep wondering how many organizations have already hit the point of diminishing returns on project management training. They’ve taught the methods and funded the certifications, and the gains have gotten smaller every year. (I’ve argued before that a lot of training doesn’t change behavior anyway.)
We’ve been working one side of the equation. The other side is untouched, which is exactly why there’s so much room left on it.
Working around a weak sponsor is a tactic. Designing for a strong one is a structural choice. Almost every PMO does the first, and that’s playing not to lose. The best PMOs do the second, and that’s playing to win.
Designing your organization for strong sponsorship doesn’t have to mean training at all. Real sponsor support could mean:
- Better role clarity
- Honest conversations
- Clear asks
- Easier processes
- Steering committee meetings they pay attention to
- Coaching (or coaching-in-disguise) from the PMO leader
You could argue that some of these things are influence without authority by another name. The difference is directness. We’d be acting like we believe a sponsor can get stronger with help. We’d stop trying to neutralize the weak ones and start equipping and empowering them to be an asset.
It’s how the best PMOs are winning.
If You Only Do One Thing
Start with the sponsor you already have who’s unusually good at it, and go ask them their secret. Find out what gets in their way, and what might be stopping everyone else from running that excellent sponsor’s playbook. Use their answers to build your sponsorship empowerment plan.
And if sponsor training ever does make sense later, that person should be standing at the front of the room with you. A respected sponsor teaching sponsorship will get through to their peers in a way your slide deck never will.