7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor

The sponsor is the executive leader with overall line authority who legitimises and approves the change. CM3 sets out ten specific responsibilities for how a sponsor most effectively supports a change.

The ten responsibilities

1. Maintain and articulate a clear and attractive vision for the change, showing how it links to the organisation's strategy
2. Gain the commitment and involvement of senior and line management, using every opportunity to advocate the change and where necessary challenging those who would block the path
3. Champion the change, building and maintaining a sense of urgency and priority for it throughout
4. Align the organisation's infrastructure, environment and reward systems with the change initiative, especially the way performance is measured and managed
5. Communicate about the change consistently, using a variety of media, listening and providing good channels for effective two-way communication, especially with impacted groups
6. Create, coach, support and maintain a network of people across the organisation who are active and committed agents for change
7. Train, mentor and coach line management, remaining accessible to them — and to those impacted by the change — throughout
8. Genuinely act as a role model for new behaviours and walk the talk, establishing new norms firmly in their own immediate team
9. Ensure ongoing alignment of the particular initiative with other organisational initiatives and with the organisation's wider strategic goals
10. Ensure that resources for the change, especially people and training, are provided — this specifically includes funding for dedicated change management resources

The three that get neglected

Most sponsors do responsibilities 1, 3 and 5 reasonably well — vision, championing and communication are visible, and they feel like sponsorship. Three of the ten are routinely neglected, and they are the ones that determine outcomes.

Aligning reward systems (4). If the performance management system still measures people on the old outputs, no amount of communication will change behaviour. Staff are not being difficult when they prioritise what they are measured on; they are being rational. This responsibility sits with the sponsor because only executive line authority can change how performance is measured and managed — a change manager cannot.

Role modelling (8). Walking the talk and establishing new norms firmly in their own immediate team is where sponsorship becomes credible or does not. A sponsor who champions a new collaborative way of working while running their own leadership team by email destroys the message more effectively than any resistance could. This connects directly to Carolyn Taylor's mechanisms and to the observation that leaders send powerful non-verbal signals about beliefs and values through how they spend their time and what they reward.

Ensuring resources including dedicated change management funding (10). The explicit inclusion of change management funding is deliberate. Organisations routinely fund the project and expect the change to happen alongside people's day jobs, and the sponsor is the only person who can fix that.

Alignment with other initiatives

Responsibility 9 — ensuring ongoing alignment with other organisational initiatives — is the sponsor's answer to change saturation. A change manager can see that their initiative is competing with three others for the same people, but cannot resolve it. Only someone with executive standing can go to peer executives and sequence the portfolio.

What the change manager owes the sponsor

CM3 is explicit that, given the significance of the sponsorship role, some of the most important contributions a change manager can make relate to it:

• Building and maintaining a strong professional relationship with sponsors
• Helping sponsors to understand the role they should play
• Providing supportive feedback and coaching to help them fulfil the role well

This reframes the relationship. The change manager is not simply a supplier reporting progress upward; they have a professional obligation to develop the sponsor. Most sponsors have never been taught what sponsorship involves — they were given the role because of their position, not their change expertise.

In practice this means three habits. Brief the role explicitly at the start — walk the sponsor through the ten responsibilities and agree which need most attention in this change. Give specific, timely feedback — "in that town hall, the question about job security was answered generally; the group needed a direct answer" is coachable; "communications could be stronger" is not. And make the ask concrete — sponsors respond far better to "I need you to speak to the operations director about competing priorities this week" than to a general request for more visible support.

Doing this well requires the sponsor to accept coaching from someone junior to them, which is why the professional relationship comes first in CM3's list. Without trust, feedback reads as criticism.