Role of Sponsors, Stakeholders and Managers in Agile + Training Checklist
This post will help you prepare a training program for Agile Leadership?
👋 Hello, I’m Vibhor, and welcome to the 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly Training Series powered by Winning Strategy. Every week, I answer two reader questions and publish 2 posts about Agile Products, Role-Based Skills, and anything else that you need answered about your Career Growth. You can send me your questions here.
On to this week’s question.
Q: Please provide some guidance on preparing the Agile training for Sponsors, Managers and Stakeholder roles in an Agile environment. I attended the CAL certification course a few weeks ago, and all I got was a class on moral values. I need concrete pointers to prepare training material for leadership in my company and a checklist, if possible.
Thank you for the question.
I am glad you raised this issue and highlighted the gap between what you learned with the certification and what is required in the trenches.
Finding answers to the question of integrating leadership in Agile is the key to a successful Agile implementation.
Why?
Because let’s be honest: more than the capability of the team, it is the capability of the “leadership” that determines the success of a product or a project.
Agile Leaders create the environment for the team to thrive.
And yet, when we talk about Agile transformations, we often focus heavily on team-level practices while ignoring the critical role of managers, sponsors, and stakeholders.
This creates confusion, which is further amplified by the numerous Agile certifications that often gloss over the practical, real-world application of these roles.
They tend to focus on the mechanics of Scrum or Kanban, which leaves a gap in understanding how leadership truly supports and enables Agility.
In this post, we will learn:
What is the role of sponsors and stakeholders within a project?
What is the role of managers?
What are some common real-world challenges I've faced with these roles, and some insights into how I’ve handled them?
PLUS, you can download detailed checklists to help you prepare those training programs for Leadership roles.