When your champion won't let anyone else in

I raised this problem in The Stepping Stones Problem: usage concentrated in one person feels safe until that person leaves. A reader asked the obvious follow-up in a comment on the LinkedIn series that shaped that post: what do you actually do about it? The Accidental Gatekeeper series was my answer.

I've seen this play out directly. A scientist at a global multinational bought a global license, then kept it largely to himself and one or two colleagues. Usage stayed flat for years. As he approached retirement, he wanted to run a validation exercise before handing anything off, but retirement arrived before the validation did. The license sat without an active owner until another user at a different site stepped in as the primary contact. Usage picked up from there, but only because someone else happened to take over. Nothing about the account had made that likely, and without that person, the license would have sat unused until it wasn't renewed.

The instinct in that situation is to go around your champion to find another stakeholder, run your own training, and get others exposed to the product. Resist it. Going around a champion reads as disloyalty, and it usually backfires. The better move is to bring them with you before you rely on luck.

Why this happens

Champions don't restrict access to block you. Sometimes it's caution: a scientist's credibility is tied to how the rollout goes, and if it adds work to colleagues without an obvious payoff, that reflects on them. So, the pilot stays small, validation goals slip, and training offers are declined.

Just as often, it's the opposite. The champion is enthusiastic and quietly building toward a big reveal: the finished validation, the polished result, the moment they can show what they've done rather than what they're still working on. Until that moment arrives, nobody else gets pulled in.

Either way, the effect is the same. Usage stays with one person, and nobody outside that person can tell whether it's caution or ambition holding the door shut.

Three strategies

1. Reduce the burden. Stop asking for more of their time. Start giving them material that does the work for them. If internal validation is the bottleneck, propose running it yourself using public data or a comparable dataset from a completed study. Build the case study for their specific department's problem, not a generic one. The goal is to become the partner that makes their job easier, not another task on it.

2. Reach the team directly, with their blessing. If a champion won't train others, or it simply hasn't occurred to them to, offer a workshop on a problem the wider team already has, one your product happens to solve. Frame it as education, not a demo, and invite the champion to present their own results as part of it. That framing doesn't require going around anyone, and it gives the champion a reason to invite people in rather than screen them out.

Sometimes the invitation to present is enough on its own, even without a formal workshop. I worked with an enthusiastic user whose uptake had stayed narrow, not out of protectiveness; it had just never occurred to him to widen it. We encouraged him to present his results, with screenshots, at a project meeting he was already attending. Afterwards, a couple of colleagues approached him with questions. Two weeks later, we ran a training session off the back of that interest.

Either way, the champion isn't asked to organise anything or feel exposed. They talk about their own work, and the results speak for themselves.

3. Bring in their manager. Request a business review and invite the champion's boss, or budget holders, to the meeting. Let your champion present their wins directly, prepared in advance so there are no surprises. Use the session to agree next steps with leadership present.

I worked with a champion who was fully engaged: heavy daily use, validation studies, even co-authored publications with us. None of that had translated into wider use across his team. We set up a business review with the senior leadership and asked him to showcase the work. They were impressed, and asked the question we hadn't been able to get asked internally: why isn't the rest of the team using this? That gave us the opening to present a plan to socialise the results and support it with training. The champion's work was recognised rather than overshadowed, and leadership now had a reason to back wider use.

Once leadership has seen the value and asked for more themselves, there's an expectation that wasn't there before. The champion can stop being the bottleneck and start leading it. You've also moved from vendor to partner, which is a harder relationship to churn.

A champion who won't widen access isn't deliberately trying to keep you out. Sometimes they're worried about failing in public. Sometimes they're just not ready to show something unfinished. Either way, your job isn't to work around them. It's to remove whatever’s holding them back so that they can do what they wanted to do from the start: bring the rest of their team along.

I compiled this series into a short PDF to help you spot the red flags, apply the strategies, and shift from gatekeeper to guide. Download it below.