Logical tips for getting sponsors aligned

Often the hardest thing in Organisational Change Management isn’t getting the frontline teams onboard and engaged. It’s getting the Executive Team and sometimes even the Sponsor themself all aligned. I’ve worked on changes where the Sponsor themselves pulled the plug on a project at the last minute, and others where one of the Board Members approved the business-wide change was ironically the biggest roadblock. Without executive buy in and alignment, you can have all the best plans for implementing a change to a hungry workforce who are excited, ready and waiting but it can be stalled and sabotaged by the very people who signed off on the change and are responsible for its success! Here’s 3 tips to help Executive Teams and Sponsors get aligned to your change.

#1 - Run a Future State Workshop

A great way of aligning the Executive Team and Sponsor’s expectations and commitment is through crafting a common Inspirational Change Vision. I wrote about this in detail in last week’s blog post (see my blog post Checklist for communicating the change vision here). The brilliant part is that if you’re a Change Management Consultant (or a change advisor more broadly in the business) you can do this super early on, before the project has even kicked off and even before the Project Manager has even been hired.

#2 - Have Change Management report into the Sponsor

Another big reason misalignment happens at the Executive or Sponsor level is when the Change Manager reports to the Project Manager. So often this leads to a launch and leave, set and forget, deliver and disappear approach to Change Management, where Change is brought it in at the very end just before implementation and the whole project disbands after go live. Change needs to be at the table earlier, and if Change Management reports into the person responsible for the change success rather than the project delivery, you can usually get better buy in and commitment. While in a lot of projects the Program Manager / Project Manager sort of "heads" the project and resources, in most of my own experiences I have reported directly into the Sponsor, Head of IT, Transformation Director. Especially if there's a Change Management practice in the organisation and the project is in fact a dotted line of leadership versus the actual reporting line into Change Management Director / Head of. This often allows the Project Manager and Change Manager to be on equal par - both having a seat at the table, being heard, working together for a great outcome.

#3 - Feel free to coach your Executive Team and Sponsor

There are many times when an Executive Team or Sponsor don’t even know how to lead a transformation or be the advocates for the change. It may be that they’ve never led a change or been a sponsor before, or the organisation has been through a major transformation (like is the case for many of my medium-sized consulting clients). For some of my consulting clients, I’ve literally run workshops for the Executive Team training them on how to lead organisation-wide change, how to support their direct report leaders, and how to walk the walk. In other cases, it might be coaching the Sponsor and talking through what the ways of working look like, what they think their role is, how they can best support the project, and what they need from you to do so. I once did this with a major workforce transformation project, sitting down with the Transformation Director to better understand how we could work together to get better traction on the change.

All my belief, 

Lata xx

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