Is your Executive Sponsor an ally or anchor?

Controversial Salesforce take: your Project Lead has the greatest influence to make a project successful, while your Executive Sponsor has the greatest opportunity to tank it.

Watching the currently-sinking ship of Twitter, we're seeing firsthand the impact of leadership on project success, morale and execution.

Looking back, almost all of my highly successful projects or launches featured a project sponsor who truly believed in the project and knew how to engage with the stakeholders, consulting team and leadership in such a way that set the bar for success.

Similarly, the toughest projects have been those with a pessimistic and/or disengaged lead. When you have multiple stakeholders or product owners with competing priorities and requirements trying to step up to share the role, sometimes it can feel like project by jury.

This is when your sponsor has the opportunity to provide the final vision and say in project direction, to truly serve as "Champion" rather than just "Sponsor".

When you kick off a new project, be sure to identify your Project Champion and help set expectations for what success looks like in the role.

6 Top qualities of an amazing Project Champion:

1. Appropriately engaged: joins key demos and milestones, but not so in the weeds so as to hinder progress or micromanage the team.

2. Advocate for Change: most projects involve change and most end users are against change, so your champion must help ease concerns that the change is "worth it".

3. Can garner support from other involved parties, from leadership all the way down to your entry-level end users.

4. Champions the people, project and processes to help drive buy-in and keep project engagement and sentiment high.

5. Helps resolve competing stakeholder priorities and balance project goals and expectations against the greater company goals.

6. Should be a key source of messaging to end users, whether notifications about project progress or launch (tip: have someone else draft the message, then have the sponsor send it).

Have you ever been on a project with a sponsor that set the bar for leadership, adoption and success? What other expectations or suggestions would you suggest to someone looking to effectively champion a Salesforce Project?