The Change Sponsor

The sponsor owns the change on behalf of the organization. The responsibilities usually include:

• Authorizing the change and setting its direction and priority against other work.
• Securing resources: budget, people and time.
• Taking decisions that are beyond the authority of the project or change team, and removing obstacles.
• Holding other leaders accountable for supporting the change in their areas.
• Modeling the change by adopting the new ways of working personally.

In formal project governance, the same person often holds a governance title such as executive or senior responsible owner. The governance title covers the business case; the sponsor role covers leading people through the change. Daryl Conner described sponsors as those with the power to legitimize a change, and distinguished the initiating sponsor from the sustaining sponsors who keep it alive in each area.

The change sponsor is therefore accountable for the change as a whole, not only for approving it.

Three behaviors recur in the change management literature.

1. Active and visible participation. The sponsor stays involved from start to finish: attending key events, asking about progress, and being seen to use the new ways of working. Visibility after the launch matters as much as at the launch.
2. Building a coalition of leaders. One sponsor rarely controls every area a change touches. Effective sponsors enlist peers and managers across those areas so that they back the change consistently. Kotter calls this group a guiding coalition.
3. Communicating the why. People want to hear the reasons for a change from the leader with authority over it. The sponsor explains the business reasons, the risk of not changing and what the change means for the organization, and repeats the message over time.

An effective change sponsor combines all three: presence, allies and a clear case for change.

Sponsors are busy and often new to the role. The change manager helps them to do it well:

• Coaching the sponsor on what the role requires, especially for a first-time sponsor.
• A sponsor roadmap that shows when the sponsor needs to appear, decide or communicate over the life of the change.
• Key messages drafted for the sponsor to adapt into their own words.
• Briefings on feedback, resistance and adoption, so that the sponsor hears problems early.
• Preparation for hard questions before town halls and team visits.

At Brightwater Health, the change manager for a new patient-flow process gives the chief operating officer a one-page roadmap with six moments that need her presence, from the launch briefing to a review with ward managers after three months.

A change manager supports the change sponsor but cannot replace the sponsor, because the authority belongs to the sponsor.

Weak sponsorship rarely announces itself. The warning signs are indirect:

• The sponsor appears at the launch and is not seen again.
• Other senior leaders send mixed messages, or quietly give the change a low priority.
• Line managers treat the change as optional because nobody asks them about it.
• Decisions wait weeks for the sponsor's attention.
• People describe the change as "the IT project" or "the HR initiative" rather than as a business priority.

The change manager's response is to raise the issue directly with the sponsor, using evidence such as attendance, feedback and adoption data, and to agree specific actions. If the sponsor cannot give the time, the honest options are to find additional sponsors or to rescope the change.

Weak sponsorship of a change is a risk to be managed openly, not a problem to work around quietly.