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How do I get senior management to sponsor change?” is a question often asked by change professionals and project leaders. Getting time from senior leaders to engage with their vital role as sponsors is a major hurdle. Here’s a hack that’s worked for me.
First, you get agreement to train middle managers on how to lead their teams through change. Executives are easily persuaded that their middle managers lack the wherewithal to lead their people through change given people’s propensity to resist it. As you get close to delivering the training to middle managers, you offer an Executive Briefing to senior management (lasting ½ day, which you may need to bargain down to 2½ hours) to take them through the highlights of the managers’ course. This is pitched as an opportunity to understand the tools and techniques their middle managers are going to learn so that executives can support them and ensure they are diligently putting their training into practice. It also offers executives / senior managers a face-saving way to get trained up on something they don’t understand.
Then it is over to you to knock their socks off, warning them of the dangers of poor leadership of change and showing them the principles and techniques necessary for success. All of this is initially couched in terms of ‘things your middle managers need to do to succeed.’
The first time I did this, one executive turned to me, after a few lightbulbs had gone off in his head, and said with a knowing smile, “Ok, so what do you need from us?”. Even if you don’t get such an open invitation, you will reach a point in the session when you have won them over to your ideas. You can then pivot to focusing on what they need to do in their roles as Executive Sponsors. Easy! 😉
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