“In literature and in life we ultimately pursue, not conclusions, but beginnings.”
—Sam Tanenhaus1
Much like Sam Tanenhuaus’s quote about conclusions, reading this summary is not the end but just the beginning of a journey for leveraging sponsorship as a strategic tool. We have tried to establish a foundation for why sponsorship matters and provide tools for assessing an organization’s current state and building a sponsorship improvement plan; the next steps rely on taking action. This entails engaging in dialogue about the health of your sponsorship program and exploring how to make sponsorship more effective.
Additional Benefits of Sponsorship
Throughout the book the emphasis has been on using executive sponsorship strategically to deliver successful projects. In Chapter 2, we emphasize leveraging sponsorship as a leadership development tool across several levels of the organization. What is not explored is leveraging executive sponsorship as an external strategic tool, with clients or suppliers to drive more business, strengthen relationships, and build stronger partnerships. There are a number of opportunities for effective sponsorship to benefit an organization externally. As an example, well-executed, externally facing projects with effective executive sponsorship engagement demonstrate the commitment an organization has to ensuring project successes to external constituents. This action alone exudes good will and aids in building trust and healthy relationships. This topic could be another chapter or even a book in itself.
Take-Away Messages
There are several take-away messages we would like to leave you with, as a book is only as good as the value it brings its readers.
Take-Away Message #1: Evolving Good to Great
We hope that by examining and improving how an organization engages in sponsorship, it can evolve from good to great,2 from doing an adequate job to doing a superior job in delivering successful projects. Successful projects are a competitive advantage for all organizations, reducing waste and improving quality, delivery time, and cost efficiency. Whether your executives are self-taught or formally trained sponsors, there are opportunities for improvement of senior management, Project Management Office leaders, and project managers in strengthening their sponsorship program. If sponsor roles and responsibilities are not on par with the recently released Global Alliance for Project Performance sponsorship standards, or an organization does not currently assess sponsors to determine if they are modeling the behaviors and roles as expected, there are opportunities for improvement. Creating a plan for improvement is worth the time invested if it will produce more successful projects, better leaders, stronger project managers, and enhanced client and supplier relationships.
Take-Away Message # 2: Great Management Lessons Apply
Some of the lessons from the great management books of the past 25 years apply to sponsorship. For instance in Michael Porter’s Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, the emphasis is on analyzing the value chain to identify what creates value and causes the product or service to be differentiated.3 We believe effective sponsorship is a differentiator that creates value because it influences the delivery of successful projects. We contend that with the proper environment and formalized standards, roles, responsibilities, and training, sponsors can be more effective in executing their roles thereby leading to more successful project outcomes. It is prudent, therefore, to investigate the health of your project sponsorship program and determine gaps where improvements can be made with the intent that these improvements will increase the likelihood of project success.
In Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, the author contends that organizations survive and thrive by becoming “learning organizations.”4 Our message is, don’t succumb to “skilled incompetence, in which people in groups grow incredibility efficient at keeping themselves from learning.”5 Use examination of the sponsorship program as an opportunity to shift the mindset of the executive management team and find more effective roles, responsibilities, and behavior that bring desired results. Require sponsor training and leverage sponsor assessments to ensure newly introduced tools, techniques, and processes are understood and being modeled.
Finally, in John P. Kotter’s Leading Change, he maintains that organizations fail to change because they fail at altering behavior.6 If an organization is seeking changes in sponsorship then it must focus on the behaviors it wants executives to model. We argued that if senior managers walked-the-talk then they would influence how others supported sponsorship. We maintained that if an organization expects certain desirable sponsor behaviors then it must assess sponsors and be willing to take corrective action for nonperformance in order to alter those behaviors. Chapter 5 highlights six desirable behaviors and temperaments: communicating effectively, handling ambiguity, managing self, and being responsive, collaborative, and approachable. These are essential to effective sponsorship, and leadership in general.
Take-Away Message #3: Call to Action
Improving executive sponsorship is more likely to be achievable when senior leaders believe it is worth the investment of their time. That is not to say a bottom-up approach cannot work, but our experience says the top-down support garners the most momentum and provides the best opportunity for lasting change.
Treat the sponsorship initiative as a strategic project—charter it, understand the stakeholders, establish a plan, execute the plan, monitor activities, control the quality of the outcomes, and close each phase. Use the framework for building or improving a sponsorship program to guide your plan. Pick the tools that address specific weaknesses and use them as is or customize to fit local needs. If there is room for improvement and potential benefit from investing the time to make enhancements, the key first step is engaging senior management in discussion. As talks progress and interest is solidified, initiate a sponsorship enhancement project and begin the journey.
Closing Thoughts
We hope you have found this book insightful and that it will be useful as a reference in the future. We welcome opportunities to hear about your sponsorship challenges, successes, or questions as well as your experiences using or building upon the ideas we have presented.
| Dr. Dawne E. Chandler, PMP | Payson Hall, PMP | |
| [email protected] | [email protected] |
Notes
1. Sam Tanenhaus. 1986. Literature Unbound, (New York, NY: Ballantine Books).
2. James C. Collins. 2001. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap-and Others Don’t, (New York, NY: HarperBusiness).
3. Michael E. Porter. 1998. The Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, (Republished with a new introduction, 1998), (New York, NY: The Free Press).
4. Peter M. Senge. 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, (New York, NY: Doubleday).
5. Senge, 1990, p. Book jacket.
6. John P. Kotter. 1996. Leading Change, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press).