By Ritvars Mētra, Founder of ReadinessCompassYour sponsor has missed the last three steering committees. Decisions are being deferred, two functions are in an unresolved argument, and requests for people are met with sympathy and no movement.
Most advice on this subject is written for the sponsor. This is written for the person who has to deliver anyway.
Diagnose before you escalate
Absence has several causes and they need different responses. Getting this wrong wastes the one escalation you may get.
| Cause | How you can tell | What helps |
|---|---|---|
| Overloaded | Engaged when present, apologetic, sponsors three other things | Reduce the ask. Bring decisions pre-worked with a recommendation and a deadline |
| Wrong person | Cannot actually authorise what you need — the resources sit elsewhere | Name the real decision-maker and get them added, formally |
| Assigned, not committed | Inherited the role in a reshuffle, never chose it | Ask directly what they would want from this programme. Sometimes there is a genuine interest nobody asked about |
| Does not believe in it | Supportive in public, absent in private, never spends capital | This is information about the programme, not about them. Escalate the question of whether it should continue |
The fourth row is the uncomfortable one and it is more common than programmes admit. A senior person who consistently declines to spend political capital on something has usually made a judgement, and the honest response is to surface that judgement rather than to work around it for another two quarters.
What you can do without them
Find local sponsorship. A functional director who genuinely wants the outcome can release their own people and settle their own disputes. Programmes over-invest in one distant senior sponsor and under-invest in three engaged ones closer to the work.
Narrow the scope to what you can actually deliver. If cross-functional arbitration is unavailable, stop planning work that requires it. Delivering a smaller thing well builds the credibility that may earn attention later; failing at a larger thing removes it.
Make decisions by default, in writing. “Unless we hear otherwise by Friday, we will proceed on the basis that finance owns customer master data.” Sent to the right people, this converts absence into a decision and creates a record. It also, reliably, produces a response from whoever disagrees.
Record what is not being decided. Keep a short log of open decisions, how long each has been open, and what it is blocking. Bring it to every governance meeting. This is not passive aggression; it is the only mechanism that makes an invisible problem visible before it becomes a delay.
Make the gap legible upward
Programmes tend to absorb sponsorship failure quietly, reporting green while working around it. That is understandable and it removes the organisation’s ability to fix the problem.
The National Audit Office found this pattern in government programmes: resets were viewed negatively, so bodies kept trying to resolve unresolvable issues rather than admit a reset was needed, and across fourteen surveyed programmes there were twenty-four resets — most often triggered by product or output failure rather than by any checkpoint. Absorbing the problem does not remove it. It defers the reckoning to the most expensive possible moment.
Report it factually rather than as a complaint. “Four decisions have been open for more than thirty days. Two are on the critical path. Here is what each is blocking and what it will cost per week of further delay.” That is a governance report, and it is very difficult to receive twice without acting.
Knowing when the answer is no
Sometimes sustained sponsor absence is the organisation telling you something true: this is not a priority, and the resources it would need are committed elsewhere.
Continuing to push in that situation is where change practitioners burn out, and it is rarely rewarded. McKinsey’s transformation research found that visible senior support, while necessary, is not on its own sufficient — and the corollary holds: without it, very little else works, whatever the programme team does.
The professional response is to say so clearly, once, in writing: here is what cannot be delivered without decisions only a sponsor can make, here is what we recommend, and here is the reduced scope we can commit to instead. Then deliver the reduced scope well.
More on governance and readiness evidence in the Change Readiness Hub, or read what active sponsorship actually consists of.