GaneevEcoWhy most of these programs fizzle
Champions get named at a kickoff, given no ongoing time allocation, no clear mandate beyond "be enthusiastic," and no forum to actually share what's working — so the energy from launch day has nowhere to go after the first few weeks, and it quietly dissipates as everyone's regular workload reasserts itself and the champion role becomes an unpaid, unstructured extra that's easy to let slide.
This isn't a failure of the people chosen as champions — it's a structural failure of the program design itself. Enthusiasm alone, without any protected time, forum, or mandate to act on it, predictably fades under the pressure of everyone's actual day job, and blaming individual champions for that outcome misdiagnoses what actually went wrong.
What actually holds up
- A defined, protected time allocation — even just an hour a week — not an unpaid extra duty stacked on top of an already full workload with no adjustment made for it.
- A recurring forum, even just thirty minutes monthly, where champions share real wins and real frustrations with each other rather than reporting up a chain in isolation.
- A clear, narrow mandate: help their immediate team, don't try to own adoption company-wide, which is both more achievable and more sustainable over time than an unbounded remit.
Keeping the program alive past the first quarter
The programs that last tend to treat the champions themselves as a genuine feedback channel into how the rollout evolves, not just a distribution mechanism for messages flowing downward from leadership. Champions who feel genuinely heard — whose feedback visibly shapes what happens next — stay engaged considerably longer than those who feel like they're just relaying information in one direction without any real influence over the program itself.
It's also worth rotating recognition regularly rather than letting the same one or two champions carry the program's visible energy indefinitely. Publicly highlighting a different champion's specific win each month, however small, keeps the role feeling genuinely valued rather than like an unrewarded extra duty that accumulates quietly in the background of someone's actual job.
It's also worth being deliberate about who gets asked to be a champion in the first place, rather than defaulting to whoever volunteers loudest at a kickoff meeting. The strongest champions tend to be people already respected informally by their peers for being genuinely helpful, not necessarily the most senior person in the room or the one who spoke up first when volunteers were requested.
Programs that last also tend to give champions a small but real budget or authority to solve problems directly — permission to reach out to IT on a colleague's behalf, or a modest allowance for team lunches when introducing a new workflow — rather than leaving them purely as an informal, unresourced role with responsibility but no actual means to act on it.