Many women have put real thought into building their networks, seeking advice from people they respect and maintaining relationships with former managers and colleagues who want to see them succeed. What tends to be missing, and what often accounts for more of the gap between performance and progression at the senior level, is a sponsor.
Mentors and sponsors are often grouped together, treated as variations of the same thing. But they are actually quite different, and serve different things for your career. A mentor is someone who offers guidance and perspective, usually in conversations you have sought them out to have, while your sponsor is someone who uses their own credibility to advocate for you in conversations you are not in.
When a promotion panel gets together or a high-profile account needs a lead, a mentor might have told you to go for it, while a sponsor is the person who can put your name forward.
Research from Catalyst has consistently found that women at senior level are significantly more likely than male peers to have mentors and significantly less likely to have sponsors, and their data suggests this asymmetry is one of the primary explanations for why women who perform well in professional services still tend to advance more slowly than male peers in equivalent roles.
In this post
- Why sponsorship takes longer to build than mentoring
- How to identify a potential sponsor
- Having the conversation
- What this requires from you
- Next steps
Why sponsorship takes longer to build than mentoring
The reason sponsorship relationships are harder to develop than mentoring relationships is that the sponsor is using their own credibility to help you advance.
While mentoring someone is an act of generosity that carries little personal risk, sponsoring someone requires that person to advocate and be confident in their judgment of how you will perform in a specific role, or on a project. That kind of trust develops over time and through close observation of how you operate, which means it cannot come from a one-off coffee meeting or mentoring chat.
This means building a sponsorship relationship requires making yourself worth sponsoring before you focus on who to approach.
The relevant question is whether the people with real influence in your organisation are seeing your best work in contexts where your thinking and judgement are on show, rather than contexts where you are simply executing a task that someone else asked you to do.
Keeping a clear, ongoing record of your contributions and their impact, in the way described in career tracking, matters here because it creates the material you need to make your capabilities obvious to the people who could advocate for you.
How to identify a potential sponsor
A potential sponsor is typically someone two or three levels above you who has decision-making influence in the areas relevant to your career and who has already shown some investment in your progress.
A potential sponsor is someone who has asked your perspective in senior meetings or mentioned your name to people you have not yet met, without you having asked them to. If someone in your professional orbit is already doing either of those things, your relationship with them may be further along than you think.
Sponsors can also sit outside your immediate organisation, and former managers and senior clients can play this role just as well as someone inside it, provided the relationship has enough substance behind it.
The reason building a deliberate advisory network matters is that it forces you to think clearly about which relationships have real advocacy potential rather than assuming that a broad network will lead to sponsorship.
Having the conversation
Once you have built a relationship with a potential sponsor, they have seen your work and understand your ambitions, the most effective approach is to be direct in asking them to be your sponsor.
Waiting for the relationship to evolve into active sponsorship without naming it may not produce the results in the timeframe you are looking for, because most people are not going to assume you want advocacy rather than occasional advice unless you tell them.
A natural way to raise it is to share where you are trying to get to and ask whether they would be comfortable supporting that in specific ways. Most people respond well to that kind of directness, particularly when the relationship has been built over time before that conversation happens.
The intentional approach to relationship management covered here helps you to keep your network in good shape once it is established.
What this requires from you
Sponsorship develops when strong performance and deliberate visibility work alongside being transparent about your ambitions. The women who tend to get sponsored are the ones who have made it easy for someone senior to both believe in them and say so clearly.
That means doing the work to be visible in the right contexts, being direct about where you are trying to get to, and maintaining your relationships. A sponsor does not appear because you have performed well, but because you have given someone the material, confidence and the opportunity to suggest your name.
Next Steps
Write down the names of two or three people in your professional orbit who fit the profile of a potential sponsor senior enough to have real influence, close enough to your work to speak to it specifically, and someone who has already shown some interest in your progress. If you cannot name anyone, that is useful information in itself and shows that this is an area where you need to focus on growing your network.
For each person on that list, honestly assess what they know of your recent work. Have they seen you operate at your best, or only in execution mode? If there is a gap, think about one concrete way to change that in the next 90 days, this could be on a project, in a meeting or a conversation where your thought process is visible rather than just your output.
Review whether you have been explicit about your ambitions with the people who matter. If your manager or a key senior stakeholder does not know where you are trying to get to, that conversation is important to put on the calendar before the end of the month.
Start keeping a record of your contributions and their impact if you do not already do so. Sponsorship requires you to be able to articulate your value clearly and specifically.
Finally, if you already have a relationship with someone who could sponsor you, consider whether you have had an explicit conversation about your goals or whether you have been assuming the relationship will develop on its own. If it’s the latter, schedule a conversation to make your request.
Continue Reading
- The 4×6 Method: Your Strategic Roadmap To Career Acceleration A structured framework for thinking about where you’re going and how to get there
- The Relationship Management Hack That Changed How I Network How to build and maintain professional relationships that actually support your career
- Tired Of Being Too Available At Work? Try These Boundary Setting Techniques Practical strategies for protecting your time and energy at work
- The #1 Simple Thing You Should Be Doing To Get A Promotion Why tracking your accomplishments is the career move most people overlook
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- Professional Email Templates Collection highly relevant for someone new in a role who needs to communicate professionally from day one
- Coffee Meeting Guide and Conversation Starters ties directly to the one-to-ones and informal relationship-building advice in the post
- Networking Tracker supports the stakeholder mapping and relationship-building sections
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