Sponsorship: A Key to Business Agility

Business agility, like any major business transformation process, is not accomplished through a single initiative or focused effort. Rather, business agility depends upon leadership agility along with an ongoing investment in the transition. Organizations playing the long game outperform organizations adopting for the quick win. Like financial investing, marginal gains invested and reinvested over time begin to impact the organization in a major way. Furthermore, sponsors not engaged in the process and aware of more agile ways of operating, will inadvertently undermine and underfund the entire effort. 



Insufficient sponsorship is a challenge to business agility

Research reflected in recent annual reports from the Business Agility Institute (BAI), identify insufficient sponsorship by management as a key challenge that organizations are facing in their business agility journey. Findings in consecutive annual reports show the trend is not improving with insufficient sponsorship moving up in rankings of the highest challenges in the path to achieving business agility. Furthermore, the 2020 BAI report indicates “Respondents rate business agility maturity significantly higher when the C-suite or Board of Directors lead the journey, compared to those led by a Line of Business Leader”.

Identifying common causes of the sponsorship challenge

So, if business agility is increased when sponsored by senior leaders in the organization, what are some root causes contributing to insufficient sponsorship being a key theme for challenges in the business agility journey?

While each organization and its culture is unique, according to Prosci’s findings based on over two decades of studies in organizations leading change and transformation initiatives, the following are three common causes of insufficient executive sponsorship:

1. Change saturation — the amount of concurrent change that is undertaken will impact the sponsors’ ability to provide effective stewardship to each initiative.
2. A disconnect in roles — sponsorship demands a level of personal engagement that is beyond mere support and/or delegation.
3. Lack of knowledge and ability — many assume senior leaders naturally have sponsorship knowledge and skills in leading change initiatives, however many need coaching, mentoring, and/or training.

Illustrating a real-life sponsorship challenge

The following is a real-life example of experiencing the challenge of insufficient sponsorship of business agility in a large, traditional, hierarchical project-based organization. All of the previously listed common causes were observed.

Competitor disruption coupled with intense market demands made the senior leadership team recognize the need for a “transvolution”. They recognized a need to transform the culture of the organization to a more agile mindset and to have an evolution of practices and team structures to address the competitor threats and market demands.

The transvolution initiative was first kicked off by a sector leader and VP and within less than three months, all of the previously identified causes of the challenge were manifested to varying degrees. 

Firstly, change saturation quickly set in as the sponsoring VP of the agile transformation was under considerable internal pressure, in addition to which the focus was shifted to two other major change initiatives to 1) merge the organization with another sector and 2) to introduce new technologies as part of a major modernization initiative of legacy systems and client applications.

Secondly, the VP was initially the leader of an effective executive coalition team established to lead and guide the transvolution initiative. Eventual lack of VP attendance and active participation in this coalition team was due to a disconnect in roles with the VP expecting the coalition team to lead and implement the VP’s vision.



Lastly, the established coalition team of senior leaders was very experienced in their own respective functional areas but not in leading a major change initiative that exposed the third common cause of insufficient sponsorship, lack of knowledge and ability. With the transvolution initiative sputtering, the VP started to blame the coalition team for lack of progress and results.

Addressing the sponsorship challenge

Struggling with the transvolution initiative, the VP engaged an external firm experienced in agility and major change initiatives who leverage an Agile Leadership Journey™ approach to leadership development and shaping culture. Observing the symptoms of insufficient sponsorship in action, the firm shifted the focus of the VP and coalition team toward their own leadership.

The firm first addressed the lack of knowledge and ability by providing education and coaching for leaders on how differences in leadership presence, power and style impact the initiative itself, the organization and all of the people impacted by the change. Through this work, leaders were introduced to expert, achiever, and catalyst leadership (based on the research in Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs book, Leadership Agility) and came to understand the importance of identifying and balancing assertive and accommodative power styles. With this new awareness and focus on their own leadership, the leaders could see and understand how their biases and relationships were undermining their own efforts. While the coalition focused towards expert-orientation and tactical problem-solving using a collaborative and accommodative power style, the VP focused strategically on outcomes and applied a stronger and more assertive power style. The interaction between them was broken and the workshops helped expose and simulate a new engagement model. Both the VP and the coalition team members grew into true change agents by being more self-aware and situationally adaptive toward their goals.

The firm further addressed the disconnect in roles through a Catalyst Conversation™ coaching technique to help clarify the misunderstandings and expectations of the coalition team and VP roles. As common to all human systems, and as presented through David Rock’s research, emotional threat conditions trigger when status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness (SCARF) (1) are  challenged. Organizational change will set off every one these emotional tripwires. The VP and coalition team members were able to reframe perspectives and move past these threats to more quickly connect, engage, co-create, and empower forward movement.

Both the VP and the coalition team realized that they were on the same team and needed to be accountable for the success of these change initiatives together. Expecting the other to be responsible and blaming them when not accomplished was counter-productive. An article in Forbes expanding upon the importance of accountability to executive sponsorship and illustrated by a Ladder of Accountability resonated with all the stakeholders and how they wanted to be part of the solution rather than being part of the problem.

Lastly, the firm facilitated a session to address the change saturation. A simple, focused goal- setting and alignment tool called the Catalyst Canvas™  helped the VP better understand, visualize, and prioritize various change initiatives. This led to the creation of smaller experimental change initiatives run by the coalition connected to the broader strategic vision articulated by the VP and validated based on feedback and empirical results.

In less than two years, the transvolution initiative objectives had been met (approximately one year ahead of initial forecast), the VP was promoted to Senior VP and along with the coalition team members shared their experiences of the importance of leadership and sponsorship with other sectors of the organization.

Transformations cannot be sustained without sponsorship. Having a sponsor really means that someone with power is ready to emotionally engage with people in a way that other organizational actors aren't able to. This enables initiatives to engage directly with their intended audience, and the leader is willing to obtain the highest level of visibility within the organization.