Study guide
7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor
APMG Change Management Foundation Exam
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1 Chapter 1: The v3 Foundation Exam and the Organisational Context
1.1 Exam Structure, the Five Syllabus Areas and the Certification Path 1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change 1.3 Change Management, Benefits and Dis-benefits
2 Chapter 2: Understanding the Change Context
2.1 Kelman's Three Levels of Adoption 2.2 VUCA and the Cynefin Framework 2.3 Planned Change versus Emergent Change 2.4 Systems Thinking in Change 2.5 Organisational Culture and Its Three Levels
3 Chapter 3: Diagnosing and Structuring the Change Approach
3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis 3.2 Co-Design 3.3 The ADKAR Model 3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators
4 Chapter 4: Delivery Strategy, Agile Practices and the Change Strategy
4.1 Delivery Strategy: Big Bang, Phased, Voluntary and Iterative 4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices 4.3 The Continuous Change Management Cycle 4.4 The Change Strategy
5 Chapter 5: People and Change — Individual Difference and Response
5.1 Differences in People and Personality Preferences 5.2 Neuroscience and Change: SCARF, Mindset and Insight 5.3 The Change Curve 5.4 Bridges' Transition Model
6 Chapter 6: Motivation, Resilience and Learning
6.1 Rewards, Punishment and Pink's Three Motivators 6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry 6.3 The Beckhard-Harris Change Formula and Schein's Two Anxieties 6.4 Competence, Learning and the Learning Dip 6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford
7 Chapter 7: Key Roles in Change Leadership
7.1 Key Roles in the Change Process 7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor 7.3 The Change Agent's Role and Personal Influence 7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change
8 Chapter 8: Psychological Safety, Leadership and Culture
8.1 Psychological Climate and Psychological Safety 8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture 8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate
9 Chapter 9: Teams and Change
9.1 Team Structures and Change Agent Networks 9.2 Tuckman's Stages of Team Development 9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness 9.4 Harvesting the Value of Team Diversity
10 Chapter 10: Stakeholder Identification, Analysis and Engagement
10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification 10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping 10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power 10.4 Barriers to Engagement 10.5 Planning Stakeholder Engagement
11 Chapter 11: Communication Theory, Messaging and Emotional Connection
11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process 11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases 11.3 Messaging: Setting Context and the Tell, Sell, Include Approach 11.4 Appealing to Hearts and Minds
12 Chapter 12: Communication Channels and Planning
12.1 Ways of Communicating and VARK Language Style Preferences 12.2 Communication Channels: One-Way, Two-Way, Lean and Rich 12.3 Communications Planning
13 Chapter 13: Assessing Change Impact and Severity
13.1 Change Management as Risk Management and the Two-Step Assessment 13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas 13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring 13.4 Step 2: Change Impact Severity
14 Chapter 14: Resistance to Change
14.1 Causes of Resistance and Oreg's Four Neural Factors 14.2 Common Reasons for Resistance and How to Deal With Them 14.3 Building a Strategy to Manage Resistance
15 Chapter 15: Change Analytics and Exam Readiness
15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard 15.2 Building a Change Analytics Strategy 15.3 Exam Technique and Final Revision
7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
The sponsor maintains and articulates a clear, attractive vision linked to organisational strategy
Sponsors must align the organisation's infrastructure, environment and reward systems with the change, especially performance measurement
Sponsors act as role models for new behaviours, walking the talk and establishing new norms in their own team
Sponsors ensure resources are provided, specifically including funding for dedicated change management resources
Change managers should build a strong professional relationship with sponsors, help them understand their role, and give supportive feedback and coaching
Last updated: September 2026
The sponsor is the executive leader with overall line authority who legitimises and approves the change. CM3 sets out ten specific responsibilities for how a sponsor most effectively supports a change.
The ten responsibilities
Maintain and articulate a clear and attractive vision for the change, showing how it links to the organisation's strategy
Gain the commitment and involvement of senior and line management , using every opportunity to advocate the change and where necessary challenging those who would block the path
Champion the change , building and maintaining a sense of urgency and priority for it throughout
Align the organisation's infrastructure, environment and reward systems with the change initiative, especially the way performance is measured and managed
Communicate about the change consistently , using a variety of media, listening and providing good channels for effective two-way communication, especially with impacted groups
Create, coach, support and maintain a network of people across the organisation who are active and committed agents for change
Train, mentor and coach line management , remaining accessible to them — and to those impacted by the change — throughout
Genuinely act as a role model for new behaviours and walk the talk , establishing new norms firmly in their own immediate team
Ensure ongoing alignment of the particular initiative with other organisational initiatives and with the organisation's wider strategic goals
Ensure that resources for the change, especially people and training, are provided — this specifically includes funding for dedicated change management resources
The three that get neglected
Most sponsors do responsibilities 1, 3 and 5 reasonably well — vision, championing and communication are visible, and they feel like sponsorship. Three of the ten are routinely neglected, and they are the ones that determine outcomes.
Aligning reward systems (4). If the performance management system still measures people on the old outputs, no amount of communication will change behaviour. Staff are not being difficult when they prioritise what they are measured on; they are being rational. This responsibility sits with the sponsor because only executive line authority can change how performance is measured and managed — a change manager cannot.
Role modelling (8). Walking the talk and establishing new norms firmly in their own immediate team is where sponsorship becomes credible or does not. A sponsor who champions a new collaborative way of working while running their own leadership team by email destroys the message more effectively than any resistance could. This connects directly to Carolyn Taylor's mechanisms and to the observation that leaders send powerful non-verbal signals about beliefs and values through how they spend their time and what they reward.
Ensuring resources including dedicated change management funding (10). The explicit inclusion of change management funding is deliberate. Organisations routinely fund the project and expect the change to happen alongside people's day jobs, and the sponsor is the only person who can fix that.
Alignment with other initiatives
Responsibility 9 — ensuring ongoing alignment with other organisational initiatives — is the sponsor's answer to change saturation. A change manager can see that their initiative is competing with three others for the same people, but cannot resolve it. Only someone with executive standing can go to peer executives and sequence the portfolio.
What the change manager owes the sponsor
CM3 is explicit that, given the significance of the sponsorship role, some of the most important contributions a change manager can make relate to it :
- Building and maintaining a strong professional relationship with sponsors
- Helping sponsors to understand the role they should play
- Providing supportive feedback and coaching to help them fulfil the role well
This reframes the relationship. The change manager is not simply a supplier reporting progress upward; they have a professional obligation to develop the sponsor . Most sponsors have never been taught what sponsorship involves — they were given the role because of their position, not their change expertise.
In practice this means three habits. Brief the role explicitly at the start — walk the sponsor through the ten responsibilities and agree which need most attention in this change. Give specific, timely feedback — "in that town hall, the question about job security was answered generally; the group needed a direct answer" is coachable; "communications could be stronger" is not. And make the ask concrete — sponsors respond far better to "I need you to speak to the operations director about competing priorities this week" than to a general request for more visible support.
Doing this well requires the sponsor to accept coaching from someone junior to them, which is why the professional relationship comes first in CM3's list. Without trust, feedback reads as criticism.