Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor. Sylvia Ann Hewlett
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“I’m definitely on his radar” she says, citing a conversation where he seemed pleased to learn she was working on a mission-critical project. “I haven’t gotten a promotion out of him yet, but I’m confident he sees my potential.”
Two ambitious women, two different career strategies. Top performers with a great deal of potential, each attracted the attention of a superior positioned to help her navigate a particularly tricky curve in her career trajectory. But whereas Marina is still waiting for her promotion, Pat has ascended to the “C-suite” (the domain of CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and other chief executives).
What accounts for these vastly different outcomes? Why do so many women, like Marina, stall out short of the leadership positions they have the potential to fill? Why do so few women, like Pat, fulfill their dreams and attain positions of true power and influence?
After two years of exhaustive inquiry, I can tell you why: high-potential women have mentors but lack sponsors. They fail to cultivate strategic alliances with individuals capable of propelling them into leadership positions and protecting them from other contenders. Often, like Marina, they have would-be advocates, senior-level leaders who’ve taken note of their capabilities. But they don’t know how to turbocharge these relationships. They don’t understand the quid pro quo, the mutual investment that ensures both parties remain incentivized to help each other over the long run. So, like Marina, they put their heads down, work harder, and wait, hoping that their mentors and role models will see to their success.
This mistake is all too common and one that women and professionals of color are particularly prone to making. I myself have made it. But as my own career path demonstrates, it’s never too late to seize hold of your dreams, win sponsors, and pull yourself out of a career stall. If you’re on a slow road to nowhere, consider changing your strategy. Forget a mentor. Find a sponsor.
Mentorship versus Sponsorship
Don’t get me wrong: mentors matter. You absolutely need them. But they’re not your ticket to the top. Mentors give, whereas sponsors invest.
Let me clarify.
Mentors are those people who take an interest in counseling you because they like you, or because you remind them of themselves. Mentors will listen sympathetically to just about anything you care to bring up. Indeed, the whole idea of having a mentor is to discuss what you cannot or dare not bring up with your boss or colleagues. Your mentor will listen to your issues, offer advice, and review which problem-solving approaches to take and which to discard. Mentors give generously of their time. In return, you listen and try to heed their advice. It may be that they enjoy drawing on their experience and sharing their wisdom, or they’re paying back their own early supporters, or they’re paying the debt forward. In any case, it’s an asymmetric relationship. The energy is flowing one way: toward you.
A sponsor, as we shall explore, is also someone who takes an interest in you and your career, but not out of altruism or like-mindedness. A sponsor sees furthering your career as an important investment in his or her own career, organization, or vision. Sponsors may advise or steer you, but their chief role is to develop you as a leader. Your role is to earn their investment in you. Indeed, throughout the relationship, you’re delivering outstanding results, building their brand or legacy, and generally making them look good. You’re driving the relationship, making sure that whatever dividends you realize in the way of promotions, pay raises, or plum assignments are manifestly dividends that you earned. Sponsorship, done right, is transactional. It’s an implicit or even explicit strategic alliance, a long-range quid pro quo. But provided you’re giving as good as you’re getting, there’s nothing about this dynamic that warrants distaste. Sponsorship isn’t favoritism or politics; it doesn’t rig the game. On the contrary, it ensures you get what you’ve worked for and deserve. (See figure 1-1 for a comparison of the two roles.)
FIGURE 1-1
Sponsor versus mentor
Sponsors can be role models, leaders you relate to and aspire to emulate. But they needn’t be, and often aren’t. What’s important in sponsorship is trust, not affinity. It’d be nice if the person who can most help you turns out to be a person you like or most want to be like. But trust can arise between two people who are vastly different. This difference imbues sponsorship with power, because each party gains from the complementarity of the other. The alliance is then greater than the sum of its individual parts.
This is not to belittle the role that supporters, by which I mean both mentors and role models, play in your career. Role models serve as vital inspiration, boosting your drive and giving form to your ambition. Mentors, who are often role models, can offer empathetic support, help you figure out what you want, and determine with you what steps will get you there. A good mentor will decode the unwritten rules, demystify the way things work, and offer you tips on navigating the organization. People who are mentored feel less isolated (especially if they’re entrepreneurs), more connected to their company, and less stressed than those who lack such attention and guidance. Multicultural professionals in particular benefit from the emotional support and pledge of solidarity that mentors and role models of color provide.
But neither mentors nor role models can give you real career traction. Research we conducted at the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) shows that sponsors, not mentors, put you on the path to power and influence by affecting three things: pay raises, high-profile assignments, and promotions. When it comes to asking for a pay raise, our research finds, the majority of men (67 percent) and women (70 percent) resist confronting their boss.3 With a sponsor in their corner, however, nearly half of men and 38 percent of women will make the request—and, our focus-group research suggests, will succeed in getting the raise. When it comes to getting assigned to a high-visibility team or plum project, some 43 percent of male employees and 36 percent of females will approach their manager and make the request. With a sponsor, the numbers rise to 56 percent and 44 percent, respectively.
Our research also shows that the individuals who are most satisfied with their rate of advancement are individuals with sponsors. Fully 70 percent of sponsored men and 68 percent of sponsored women feel they are progressing through the ranks at a satisfactory pace, compared to 57 percent of their unsponsored peers. That translates into a “sponsor effect” of 23 percent for men and 19 percent for women. CTI research shows that sponsors affect women’s career trajectory even more profoundly than men’s in at least one respect: 85 percent of mothers (employed full-time) who have sponsors stay in the game, compared to only 58 percent of those going it alone. That’s a sponsor effect of 27 percent.
The sponsor effect on professionals of color is even more impressive. Minority employees are 65 percent more likely than their unsponsored cohorts to be satisfied with their rate of advancement.
Even in companies with robust mentoring programs, mentoring doesn’t deliver on its promise, or at least not for women and people of color. Research conducted by Catalyst (an advocacy organization for women in business) shows that while more women than men have been mentored, more men have won promotions—15 percent more, according to a 2008 study.4 Mentors are no silver bullet, no matter how heavily Fortune 500 corporations invest in mentorship programs. So if, like Marina, you’re waiting for your role model or mentor to part the waters and set you up on the distant shore, you’re wasting precious time.
I wrote this book to make sure you don’t make Marina’s mistake: to show you why you need sponsors (and you need more than one) to help you achieve your vision, whether that’s a leading role in a large company, a strategic role in a small company, founding a business of your own, or steering a nonprofit or educational organization to fulfill its mission and mandate. I created the road map you’ll find in part II to show you exactly what you need to do to attract sponsors, win their advocacy, sustain their interest, and leverage their backing throughout your career. Because even at the pinnacle of your career, you’ll find that these skills serve you. Fabulously successful entrepreneurs and CEOs alike still need powerful voices to get them onto boards, introduce them to investors, or secure them a spot at the World Economic Forum at Davos.