The Real Role of a Project’s Executive Sponsor

Executive sponsors for projects are often told their job is to remove roadblocks encountered by the project team. This has led many sponsors to view their role as primarily a reactionary one. But good executive sponsors are not reactionary. Instead they proactively seek to clear the road for their project team so that the team never encounter a roadblock in the first place.

26 March 2024

Most people understand how important good executive sponsorship is to a project’s success. Numerous studies have been conducted on this, and it is easy to find detailed analyses of the multiple ways in which good executive sponsorship helps a project succeed. What is much less well understood is what constitutes good and bad executive sponsorship. While there are several characteristics that make a good executive sponsor, the most important is arguably proactiveness.

For years executive sponsors have been told their job is to remove roadblocks encountered by the project team. This has rightfully led many executive sponsors to view their role as primarily reactionary in nature. Executive sponsors with this view typically stay a few steps removed from a project until an issue is brought to them. They then work hard to quickly address the problem and keep the project on track. Once the issue is resolved, they step back again from the project until something else is brought to them.

While removing roadblocks to a project’s success is definitely one of the responsibilities of an executive sponsor, it is more appropriate to think of an executive sponsor’s role as preventing roadblocks from arising. This is a much more proactive responsibility than removing roadblocks once they have already popped up. To meet this more proactive responsibility, executive sponsors cannot maintain a position a few steps removed from their project team. Instead, they need to regularly and routinely interact with the team to maintain an understanding of the roads the team is going down.

One of the best ways an executive sponsor can stay up-to-date on what is going on with their team is by regularly attending project team meetings. However, for this to be effective, it needs to be done in the right way. Having an executive sponsor attend project team meetings can change the dynamics of the meetings and make it harder for the project team to get work done. To keep this from happening, the executive sponsor should make it clear that they are just attending to listen in and see where they can help prevent roadblocks, and the project team should be encouraged to proceed with the meetings just like they would if the sponsor was not attending.

Having a project’s executive sponsor attend project team meetings runs the risk of these meetings becoming report-out sessions to the sponsor. To avoid this, the executive sponsor should attend project team meetings right from the start of a project. This will make the sponsor’s attendance feel normal to the project team and ensure that the sponsor stays on the same page as the rest of the team. The executive sponsor should also intentionally avoid asking questions during project team meetings that are not directly connected to them clearing the road for the team, and the sponsor should politely redirect project team members if they start down the road of reporting out to the sponsor during a project team meeting.

Utilizing the information obtained by regularly attending project team meetings, executive sponsors should continually look for ways to promote the project and smooth the road ahead for the project team. This can take the form of anything from informal conversations with other executives about upcoming project events that their team will be involved in to more formal discussions with colleagues about areas in which the project team is encountering difficulties.

The key to being a good executive sponsor is not removing roadblocks encountered by the project team. It is keeping roadblocks from popping up in the first place, and continually looking for ways to keep the road as smooth as possible for the project team. In many ways, the role of a project’s executive sponsor is akin to that of a blocker in football. The sponsor’s job is to proactively identify barriers to the project’s success and move them out of the way before they impact the project team’s progress. Executive sponsors should not be sitting back and waiting to try to remove roadblocks to a project’s success after they are impacted by the project team. They should push them out of the way before the project team gets to them.

For years project sponsors have been trained that their responsibility is to remove roadblocks to a project’s success that are encountered by their project team. This makes the role of an executive sponsor reactionary, and therefore this training needs to change. An executive sponsor’s real role is to proactively identify and remove potential roadblocks before they impact the project team’s work. To do this, executive sponsors need to stay very close to their project teams so they know where these teams are going and can clear the road ahead. One of the best ways to do this is for executive sponsors to regularly and routinely attend project team meetings – just like all other project team members.