Welcome

Welcome back to ValueKey Labs — your newsletter for all your Project related content. This issue we dig into how to build trust with your Project Sponsor, not surprisingly honest communication is at the heart of it.

The No Surprises Policy: Why Your Sponsor Should Never Learn Bad News From Someone Else.

A few years into my career, I sat in a Steering Committee meeting watching a Project Sponsor find out in real time, in front of her own leadership team — that a project I was managing (not well I might add) was three weeks behind. Not from me. From a slide someone else had put together. I still remember the look on her face. It wasn't anger, exactly. It was something worse: the realisation that she couldn't trust her own Project Manager to tell her things before they became public.

That moment taught me more about Sponsor relationships than any course or certification ever did.

Here's the thing about Project Sponsors: their job is to manage expectations upward, sideways, and outward — with their leadership, their peers, their stakeholders. They can only do that well if you keep them accurately informed. Every time you sit on bad news, you're not protecting them — you're leaving them exposed the next time someone asks them a question they can't answer.

So I've operated on one simple rule ever since: "No surprises" .

There's an old saying I lean on constantly: good news travels fast, bad news travels faster. If there's a problem on your project, someone will find out — a stakeholder, a vendor, a team member venting in the wrong Slack channel. The only question is whether your Sponsor hears it directly from you first, with context and a plan, or from someone else, without either.

And here's the part PMs often get wrong: they often delay escalating bad news hoping they can resolve it themselves or it'll resolve itself with a bit more time. It almost never does. Bad news doesn't get better with time. A schedule slip you could have flagged calmly on Tuesday becomes a credibility problem by Friday.

Your sponsor doesn't need you to have all the answers. They need to never be blindsided. Tell them early, tell them straight, and bring a plan — even an imperfect one.

That's really what the no surprises policy boils down to. It's less of a communication technique and more of a trust-building one. Every time you flag a risk early, own a delay honestly, or walk into a hard conversation before you're forced into it, you're making a small deposit in an account your Sponsor will remember drawing on.

Do that consistently enough, and something shifts: they stop needing to double-check your updates, stop cc'ing themselves into your team's channels, and start giving you the room to actually run the project. Honest communication isn't the soft skill people think it is. It's the thing that earns you real authority."

Until next time, happy Projecting.

Guy Thorpe - aka The Project Guy

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