Why Transformations Fail: Sponsorship Isn't a Kickoff Email

Claire Monroe

Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington. Edwin, McKinsey's number keeps coming up on this show, that large transformation efforts fail around seventy percent of the time. Today I want to know why, because it's not for lack of vision.

Edwin Carrington

It's almost never vision, Claire. It's execution, specifically that people never actually change their day-to-day behavior. You can announce a transformation beautifully and still fail completely, because announcing something and living it are two different jobs.

Claire Monroe

And that gap shows up as something very specific in mid-sized companies, doesn't it. Not a dramatic collapse, more of a slow drift.

Edwin Carrington

A slow drift is exactly right. Role confusion, duplicated work, shadow processes where people quietly route around the new system because it's easier. Manager burnout from constant escalation. And eventually, engagement drops and you lose people you wanted to keep. None of that looks like "the change failed" on a status report. It just looks like a rough quarter.

Claire Monroe

There's a Gartner number cited by Harvard Business Review that stopped me cold, employee willingness to support enterprise change dropped from seventy-four percent in 2016 to forty-three percent in 2022. That's not a small shift, that's people actively bracing for change to not stick.

Edwin Carrington

And when willingness drops like that, it's rational, not cynical. People have lived through enough half-finished change efforts to stop believing the next one will be different. Which is exactly why the first element matters more than any communication plan. Strong sponsorship.

Claire Monroe

Prosci's research on this is stark. Seventy-nine percent of projects with extremely effective sponsors met their goals, versus twenty-seven percent with extremely ineffective sponsors. That's not a small correlation, that's most of the outcome.

Edwin Carrington

Because sponsorship isn't a kickoff email, Claire, it's three specific behaviors. Consistency, the message doesn't change every two weeks depending on who's in the room. Presence, the sponsor shows up in the moments that actually feel risky, pushback, tradeoffs, missed targets, not just the celebration slide. And resourcing, time and budget and priority get protected when conflict shows up, not quietly deprioritized.

Claire Monroe

So if a leader can't commit to naming the actual reason for the change, defining what "done" looks like in measurable terms, and being explicit about what stops to make room for it, that's not really a change initiative.

Edwin Carrington

Call it what it is, a communication campaign. Nothing wrong with communication campaigns, but don't expect behavior to change because of one.

Claire Monroe

Okay, but here's what I think gets missed. Executives open the door. They don't determine whether anyone walks through it.

Edwin Carrington

That's the real bottleneck, and it's middle managers, every time. They're the ones translating the change into what actually happens in a Tuesday team meeting. What "good" looks like now, what gets escalated versus handled locally, what stops being tolerated. If middle managers are confused about any of that, the entire organization will be confused, no matter how clear the executive vision was.

Claire Monroe

And most companies pick the people leading that translation work based on, honestly, who's available or who speaks confidently in a meeting.

Edwin Carrington

Which is how you end up with visible leadership and invisible follow-through. The better selection questions are behavioral. Can they stay calm under ambiguity? Do they actually drive decisions, or seek consensus forever and call it collaboration? Do they handle conflict directly without torching trust in the process? Do they reliably follow through on routines, not just big moments?

Claire Monroe

That's a very different hiring bar than "who's free next quarter."

Edwin Carrington

It is, and it's exactly the kind of signal behavioral data was built to surface. You can shortlist change leaders by the profile that actually fits high uncertainty and high stakeholder negotiation, coach the specific gaps in a manager's style before they become adoption risk, and even pair a vision-driver with an operator so the change stays both credible and executable.

Claire Monroe

If you're picking who leads your next change effort and want more than gut feel to go on, OAD has a free Top Performer Profile that surfaces exactly those behavioral patterns, about seven minutes, results in twenty-four hours, no credit card. That's O-A-D dot A-I.

Edwin Carrington

Get the sponsor and the middle managers right, and you've already fixed the most common way these efforts die.

Claire Monroe

Perfect place to leave it. Thanks, Edwin.

Edwin Carrington

Always, Claire.