No Sponsor? No Problem: 7 Strategies When Your Project Lacks Executive Support

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is a leading expert in project management and strategy implementation, recognized by Thinkers50 with the prestigious award “Ideas into Practice.” He is the creator of concepts like The Project Economy and the Project Manifesto. He is author of Lead Successful Projects (2019, Penguin) The Project Revolution (2019, LID) and The Focused Organization (2012 Gower). He has been teaching project management for more than a decade to senior executives at Duke CE, Skolkovo, Solvay Business School, and Vlerick. Antonio has held executive PMO positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, BNP Paribas, and GlaxoSmithKline. Former Chairman of the Project Management Institute, he is the co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute and the global movement Brightline.

  Leadership   Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

I’ve led dozens of transformation projects over the years across industries, geographies, cultures and business models. And there’s one lesson I learned early that changed everything: The quality of your project sponsor is often a matter of luck.

If I were lucky, I would have a fabulous, engaged executive sponsor, someone who championed the vision, removed roadblocks, made fast decisions, showed up for the team, and helped us keep momentum when things got tough.

But honestly? That only happened one time out of five.

The rest of the time, the sponsor was either missing, disengaged, or worse, micromanaging every detail and undermining the team’s confidence. Sometimes I was left filling in for their absence. Other times, I had to manage around them to avoid disruption.

Sound familiar? I bet.

At one point, I finally asked myself: Why am I leaving something so critical to project success up to luck?

That question changed how I looked at sponsorship forever. From then on, I stopped treating sponsors as an external dependency. I made it my responsibility to ensure we had the right executive sponsor in place, someone who was aligned, informed and committed. If I didn’t have that from the start, I wouldn’t have started the project.

I said no. Politely. Professionally.

And I used that moment to explain exactly what I expected from a …

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