Executive Sponsorship Is Broken, Whose Fault Is It?
Your Executive Sponsor Doesn’t Need Training. You Need a Better Engagement Strategy.
Waiting on your executive sponsor to rescue your at-risk project is a misguided expectation. It leads to one destination: guaranteed failure.
One of the most common complaints in our profession is ineffective project sponsorship. You’ve probably seen it, PMs sitting around, venting about sponsors who don’t understand project management, don’t read reports, and don’t show up.
But maybe it’s time to flip the paradigm.
What if the effectiveness of a sponsor isn’t just about their capability but also about how well the project manager enables them? Is that too much to expect? Or is it actually a critical success factor for delivering complex transformation, products, and services?
What Is a Sponsor Supposed to Be?
A project sponsor isn’t just someone with a fancy title or a reserved seat at the steering committee. They’re supposed to be the one person who:
Owns the outcome
Champions the project at the executive level
Unlocks resources because they either fund the project or control the budget
Clears political and organizational blockers
Makes decisive calls when delivery teams hit the wall
That’s the theory.
What about in practice? We often get sponsors who are barely involved, lack authority, or are too busy to engage. Yet we keep assigning them, inviting them to meetings, and expecting them to magically transform into project champions.
Then when they don’t, we blame their lack of engagement on their lack of project management knowledge, instead of asking whether we’ve set them up to succeed in the first place.
Why This Role Matters So Much
Projects rarely fail because of bad plans or messy Gantt charts. They fail because decisions aren’t made, or they’re made too late. Often, political friction or conflicting perspectives stall momentum. When that happens, the work loses visibility, urgency, and relevance. Ultimately delivery fails.
A strong sponsor can prevent all of that, if they’re engaged the right way.
The sponsor isn’t the project manager’s boss. They’re the person ultimately accountable for success or failure. They benefit when the project delivers, or they feel the heat when it doesn’t. They own the outcome, they usually also own the budget, or at least control the funding.
But it’s important to clarify: the sponsor isn’t always the “customer” of the project. They’re typically the business owner whose world changes as a result of the outcome. The project manager, on the other hand, is the leader responsible for orchestrating the delivery. They’re deeply affected by the outcome, but they don’t own it in the same way.
When project management and sponsorship operate in sync, the difference is obvious. It’s the difference between navigating roadblocks and getting stuck behind them.
What Good Sponsorship Looks Like
Good sponsors don’t hover. They don’t micromanage. And they don’t need to be project management experts.
But they do:
Show up (strategically, not constantly)
Make timely decisions
Ask the right questions
Support the PM publicly
Escalate what matters and back off what doesn’t
That doesn’t mean they spend hours poring over schedules. Think about the CEO who only gave us 5 to 15 minutes per week. That was all we got, and all we needed. Her deep understanding of the organization and willingness to engage when it mattered made a huge impact. Her oversight, support, and speed were enough to steer the ship, even if she was never at the helm day-to-day.
Now contrast that with the so-called “sponsor” who wasn’t authorized to act or decide. A middle manager with no budget, no real authority, and no strategic reach. His main function was passing messages up the chain, not leading.
That’s not bad sponsorship. That’s a broken system, and no amount of training would fix it.
Why We Blame Sponsors So Often
It’s easy to blame sponsors.
We expect them to know exactly how to lead a project, even if no one ever told them what that means. We assume they hold magical powers just because they sit higher on the org chart, even when they lack the authority or resources to actually make things happen.
But here’s the truth:
Many sponsors are ineffective because no one clearly defined their role.
Some struggle because the project manager didn’t manage up effectively.
And in far too many cases, the wrong person was assigned, and that’s a failure of organizational design, not individual performance.
Final Thought: Stop Waiting, Start Enabling.
Do you want better sponsorship? Then stop waiting for training, stop hoping for PM-certified executives, and stop expecting someone else to fix it.
Start by shifting the expectation. Build an engagement strategy that fits their world. Triage issues, show up with options, be clear about what you need and when you need it.
Also, remember that sponsors, like PMs, operate within constraints. No one escapes the iron triangle. The real power comes when both roles work together to navigate it.
Sponsorship isn’t broken, our approach to it is.