Sponsored Goals

This article lays out a methodology for agencies to achieve the following via sponsored goals:

• Improved odds of planning impactful, cross-functional company goals
• Stronger buy-in and understanding of company-wide goals within leadership
• Reduced dependence on partners and greater accountability within leadership

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Mercifully, 2025 is almost over. For a few sterling agencies, they’ve reviewed their annual goals for the final time this year and are heading into the holidays with a complete scorecard of their wins and losses, ready for the new year.

For many agencies, however, the annual goals laid out heading into 2025 are a long distant memory. Maybe they were explicitly thrown out at some point in the year between ChatGPT-4 and GPT-5. Or maybe they still linger in the shadows of an Asana goals view or Notion dashboard, an estranged version of our former selves.

Take a moment to pull up those goals. Go through them and note a status: completed, to do, let go, missed (i.e., “in progress” or “to do” as the year ends).

Now let’s look at the completed goals. This was the work that was prioritized – the focus areas that business leaders championed to move the needle. And hopefully it did for the most part. But more likely than not, there is some completed work that missed the mark, and here are a few symptoms of that:

• The completed goal didn’t produce an intended outcome (e.g., improve employee satisfaction scores)
• The completed goal achieved an intended outcome (e.g., improved employee satisfaction scores), but that outcome had less impact on the business than expected (e.g., did not retain key employees)
• The completed goal improved one department at the cost of another (e.g., employee satisfaction amongst developers increased but decreased amongst designers)

When goals are completed but they don’t improve conditions in the business, I look at a few culprits:

• Goals created without explicit criteria for success
• Goals that were fast-tracked by individual team members without collective buy-in
• Goals that addressed a problematic symptom, rather than the underlying condition

Sponsored goals is a concept that addresses many of the pitfalls that agencies setting goals fall into.

Sponsored goals

Regardless of the goal-setting framework your agency uses, you can apply the concept of sponsorship: goals do not get actioned unless they have sponsors beyond the team that created the goal.

How it works

Once the CEO has laid out the vision for the agency, Directors hunker down to figure out how the business gets there. That process can be an article all its own in the future, but let’s just say we come out of a planning process with a collection of goals that are well-defined and correlated to challenges and opportunities the agency has.

To decide what goals get actioned, have the team that developed the goal “nominate” the goal to move in progress.

In order for the goal to move from its draft status to adopted and “in progress,” require at least 2 other team members to sponsor the goal. Sponsorship means that these team members feel:

1. The goal is well-defined
2. The goal will achieve its desired outcome when complete
3. The goal will benefit their functional area of the business

By sponsoring the goal, these team members are assuming some responsibilities:

1. They will be the stakeholders for the team doing the work to complete the goal
2. They will hold the project team accountable for the quality and timely delivery of the work
3. In the spirit of continuous improvement, they will lead the retro if the goal is completed but doesn’t produce the desired outcomes

So a goal is nominated to be sponsored. It receives sponsors, and those sponsors check in with the team doing the work throughout the life of the project.

When the goal completed, the leadership team should revisit the challenges and opportunities it was intended to address to confirm it has done so.

Why it works

Sponsorship addresses some of the primary culprits in goals that miss the mark:

Goals created without explicit criteria for success

People won’t sponsor a goal that they don’t feel confident they can later deem as “complete.”

Goals that were championed by individual team members without collective buy-in

Requiring multiple sponsors ensures that team members can’t push work through unilaterally.

Goals that address a problematic symptom, rather than the underlying condition

When you have cross-functional teams evaluating goals, they’re more likely to see the systemic nature of challenges that exist in the organization. So having a diverse leadership team evaluating goals improves the odds of underlying issues being addressed instead of linear thinking triaging surface-level symptoms.

Sponsorship also creates the conditions for leaders to step up.

In agencies where the founder or partners are perpetually expected to hold others accountable, sponsorship incentivizes participation (i.e., advancing goals a leader believes in) and distributes the responsibility of holding each other accountable team-wide.

Conditions for success

For Sponsored Goals to be successful, the following conditions need to exist:

• CEOs must present a clear, compelling vision for their leadership team to define goals around
• The highest-ranking team members (i.e., CEO, founders) need to step back and let their leadership team own the goal-setting process
• Earning sponsorship for a goal should not be easy; to reduce the risk of approving goals that miss the mark, potential sponsors should ask lots of questions and interrogate a goal during the nomination process until it’s rock-solid
• Sponsors need to feel real ownership for the goals they’ve sponsored
• Limit the number of goals an individual can sponsor at a given time; this puts the onus on other leaders to sponsor work and prevents any single team member from rubber-stamping goals