Effective high-level project sponsorship is a necessity for complex enterprise initiatives. Senior business leaders play a significant role in ensuring project success by applying select soft skills, such as those that drive team engagement, ensure accountability, and foster collaboration. With a growing segment of strategic projects focusing on ambitious outcomes, from large-scale digital transformations to operational restructuring, the role of executive sponsors has evolved to be more hands-on, interactive, and thoughtful.
Business leaders seeking to elevate their project outcomes should focus on a few key areas and practical strategies to maximize their high-level influence and achieve outstanding project results.
Enthusiasm and commitment to project success
Business leaders can be instrumental in driving excitement about a project, particularly when the effort is likely to be difficult, politically divisive, or disruptive to day-to-day operations. Initiatives with extended time horizons also benefit significantly from sustained support, where executives can help stakeholders remain engaged and enthused about their ongoing contributions.
Executives should also focus on demonstrating visible commitment to project success. That means not only acting as a champion during progress reviews and other gatherings, but also in ways that are unique to their positions, such as securing sufficient funding, approving the necessary staff resources, supporting the time commitments needed for training, and similar efforts.
The senior staff’s energy shouldn’t be directly only toward what will happen, but also on what the team has already accomplished. Executive sponsors can carry the team’s enthusiasm forward by recognizing and celebrating milestone achievements and applauding stakeholders when they go beyond the call of duty in support of the project.
Accountability
Driving accountability is a key component in project success, but it shouldn’t be limited to individual or departmental levels. Instead, executives can use their influence to ensure that senior sponsors also remain accountable for project activities in their areas. This requires a willingness to address potential conflicts at the executive level head on, which relieves other team members of the burden of trying to gain consensus or resolve issues with multiple executive sponsors.
Leaders can also help drive accountability by setting and emphasizing clear expectations for project outcomes to reduce confusion or doubt about each stakeholder’s responsibilities. When senior business leaders create and nurture a culture of ownership and responsibility, they help prevent common pitfalls such as misaligned priorities, lapses in focus, and late-stage escalations. In addition, executives who diligently follow through on their own commitments to the project team—consistently attending and participating in stakeholder group discussions, chasing resource approvals that are outside their sphere of authority, etc.—act as role models that junior-level project participants can learn from and emulate.
Collaboration
Each functional area may have its own perspective on how much information should be shared with other project stakeholders and when to share it. People may naturally want to keep some information guarded, but executives can turn this around by encouraging participants to actively and authentically collaborate with the rest of the project team and to be transparent in all communications. Senior management should also actively listen and engage during project meetings to help spark conversations that may not have happened otherwise.
Business leaders can further elevate collaboration by encouraging stakeholders to participate in brainstorming sessions and to consider innovative solutions that may not fit traditional strategies. Embracing transparency and providing clear communications around priority shifts, risk mitigation strategies, and other potentially impactful actions—along with candid context around the high-level rationale driving these decisions—also helps to create an environment where other project stakeholders are more likely to feel comfortable raising concerns, sharing ideas, and working to pursue the very best project outcomes.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.