By Nick Leeder, CEO, International Centre for Industrial Transformation
You signed the budget off in March, and since then you have touched the programme once a month, for an hour, on a Teams call where everything is amber at worst. And if I’m honest, that is usually where these things start to go quietly wrong.
Not because the technology fails, but because the one person who could unblock key issues only sees the programme once the slides are already made.
So, I want to argue something quite narrow here. Your own diary is the most reliable early warning signal you have on a digital programme, and almost nobody treats it as the leading indicator.
Awareness was never the gap
The gap is not knowledge, because your board understands the case as well as anyone else’s board does. The gap is what happens between the monthly calls, and whether anyone with real authority is close enough to notice.
There is a lot of focus on the UK manufacturing industry’s recruitment challenges, and globally the need to retrain, upskill, and preserve retiring manufacturing knowledge is widely talked about. However, do most think of leadership when they hear about the pressing need to upskill?
Make UK’s findings highlight why we need to think about upskilling leadership. When manufacturers were asked in the Make UK Executive Survey 2026 where they most need to retrain and upskill, leadership and management came top at 66 percent. That put it ahead of higher-level technical skills at 58 percent and digital skills at 37 percent. The sector has already worked out that the binding constraint is upstairs.
This is backed up by SIRI assessment work. In fact, there is a finding in the SIRI assessment work that stopped me short the first time I read it, because it cuts against how most boards talk about this. Across thousands of assessed manufacturers, the “Leadership scores of the best performers and the bottom performers are not far apart. Everyone’s management team knows what Industry 4.0 is, and everyone can say the words.
What separates them sits in the next SIRI dimension along, which is how well those firms actually collaborate, both inside the business and outside it. Surely, there is a failing in leadership if management cannot get teams to collaborate and communicate effectively?
What Saumya Sanyal said, and why it lands
In July’s issue of the Manufacturing X.0 Insights newsletter, Saumya Sanyal of Ford made what I think is the sharpest point written on this in a while. He said leaders consistently underestimate their own impact, and that the engagement of the principal sponsor is the single clearest indicator of whether a transformation succeeds.
He also said something rather less comfortable, which is that this is stated clearly in all the literature and full leadership engagement is still very rare.
Both of those can be true at once. We know the answer and we still do not do it.
The reason, I think, is that sponsorship gets treated as a feeling rather than a quantity. You either back the programme or you don’t, so there is nothing to measure, and nothing gets measured, and nothing ever changes.
Four things you can actually count
Here is the practical part, and it is far less work than it sounds. Sponsorship is not a mood, because it leaves a trace, and that trace sits in your calendar and your sent items.
Four numbers, and you can pull all four before lunch.
- Hours. How many hours did you spend on this programme last quarter, outside the steering call? Not hours thinking about it on the drive home, but hours in the room with the people doing the work.
- Floor time. How many times did you stand on the line where the thing is actually being used, and talk to the people using it? Once a quarter is a very different programme from once a month.
- Escalation age. When the team raised a decision to you, how many days did it sit before it was closed? The team already knows that number, by the way, and they have never once told you.
- Decisions taken. Of everything escalated, how many did you close, and how many did you send back for more analysis? That second pile is where programmes quietly go to die.
None of that needs a system or an outside pair of hands, because it needs an hour with your calendar and an honest look at what you sent.
The common mistake, which is the opposite one
Now the honest caveat, because I have watched this go the other way more than once. A sponsor reads something like this, gets alarmed, and starts running the programme themselves.
That is worse. You end up with a very engaged sponsor and a team that has stopped deciding anything, because they are all waiting to find out what you think.
The job is not to take the work back. It is to be reachable, to close decisions quickly, and to be visible in the place where the change is actually landing.
There is an old line about wanting one neck to choke, and it usually gets aimed at vendors, but it applies just as well inside your own building. If nobody can name the person accountable for this programme in under three seconds, you do not have a sponsor. You have a steering committee, which is a different animal, and I have yet to see one unblock anything.
That is what I have seen, not what a survey says.
Where this leaves you
Pull the four numbers before your next steering call, and do not share them with the team yet. Just look at them, and ask whether they describe someone genuinely close to this, or someone being kept politely informed.
If it is the second one, the programme is probably drifting already, and the status report will be the last place it shows up.
Owning it is only half the problem, mind you. The other half is knowing whether any of it actually worked, and that is a harder question than most benefits reviews are willing to admit. I will come back to that one next time.
For now I am curious about something specific. When one of your programmes started to slip, what was the first signal that reached you, and how long had the team known before it did?
Sources
SIRI Learner’s Guide, Module 2, International Centre for Industrial Transformation.
Executive Survey 2026, Make UK.
Saumya Sanyal, Manufacturing X.0 Q+A, MX.0 Media, 28 July 2026.
