Sponsorship: Defining the Relationship
A conversation with Rosalind Chow
To get ahead at work, we need support from people besides our boss. Sometimes that comes in the form of mentorship, where a person with more experience gives us advice or guidance on how we can improve. But there is another kind of support that is equally if not more important: sponsorship, where someone with a lot of power in the company advocates on our behalf.
Having a sponsor—someone who can use their influence to push your career forward—is invaluable. But how exactly sponsors do this, and what your role is in making it happen, isn’t always clear-cut. Who should we be seeking to sponsor us? Should sponsors be candid with their protégés about what they’re doing on their behalf?
Women at Work cohosts Amy Bernstein, Amy Gallo, and Nicole Torres posed these questions and others to Rosalind Chow, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business who studies sponsorship. She helped clarify some of the ambiguity and discussed what should be transparent and what should stay unspoken.
NICOLE TORRES: To start with, could you help us understand the distinction between mentorship and sponsorship?
ROSALIND CHOW: Mentorship is about changing the mentee. It’s about developing either the skill set of the person who’s being mentored or giving them advice. Sponsorship, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily have to engage the protégé physically in the moment at all. Someone could get sponsorship without knowing. It’s a purely external form of support that a sponsor can provide. It’s not about changing how the protégé thinks about themselves; it’s about changing how other people perceive the protégé and creating situations where they have opportunities to shine.
NICOLE: I love that distinction.
ROSALIND: Another kind of important distinction I would make between mentorship and sponsorship is that mentorship is more about the provision of time. Being a mentor means putting a lot of time into someone—one-on-one meetings where you’re listening to them or giving them advice on how they ought to proceed in a tricky situation. But sponsorship is really about the provision of social capital.
For instance, if you invite someone to a conference that they would never otherwise have gone to, you may not yourself go to that conference, but you have provided this incredible opportunity that they wouldn’t otherwise have had access to. That’s not really you making extra effort or spending time. But it is in a way about putting your reputation on the line in a way that mentorship doesn’t necessarily require. Another way to think about it is, “If this person succeeds, does it impact my reputation?” With mentorship, it’s not clear that if the mentee succeeds or doesn’t succeed, that the mentor is actually going to be impacted. With sponsorship, if the protégé does really well, that reflects well on the sponsor; but if the protégé fails, that has negative ramifications. So the interconnection of the reputation becomes intertwined in a way that I don’t think is true of just pure mentorship.
AMY BERNSTEIN: We’ve heard of situations where protégés never actually ask to be sponsored. Is that typical?
ROSALIND: Yeah, I think that’s probably typical.
AMY B.: Is that what you would recommend? Or do you think that would-be protégés should make an explicit ask?
ROSALIND: I would say that they probably should make an explicit ask, but only after the relationship has already been firmly established. I don’t think this is one of those things where you go in and say, “Hey, I’m looking for a sponsor. Would you want to be my sponsor? And if you say yes, I promise that I’ll work my hardest on the projects that you give me.”
It’s more that the protégé has to establish their credibility with the sponsor first. And they have to establish some sort of value proposition to a sponsor. Maybe that’s by demonstrating their exceptional motivation or expertise in the areas that are highly relevant to what the sponsor cares about. But sponsors have to see in their own mind the capabilities of a protégé and believe that those outcomes are due primarily to the protégé’s efforts; that’s when the sponsor is going to say, “OK, I have such deep confidence in the capabilities of this individual that I am now ready to vouch for them to other people.”
NICOLE: If there is someone who you have a good relationship with, and you think that they trust your competency, how do you ask them to sponsor you?
ROSALIND: I think it’s about being really explicit about where you want to go and asking them for their advice on how to get there. That way, you’re not saying, “I want your help.” You’re saying, “I’d like your advice on how to reach this goal.” But in charting out that path, that then makes them have to think about the kind of concrete things that you could be doing. And then when those opportunities arise, they’re more likely to think of you.
AMY GALLO: So it’s more about making yourself available to be sponsored, or making it clear that you want to be sponsored, rather than saying, “Hey, will you be my sponsor?”
ROSALIND: One way is to focus on how protégés can make themselves more visible to sponsors. Another tactic that is relatively underexplored is how sponsors can understand what behaviors that they’re engaging in that are particularly helpful. Are they treating employees systematically differently in terms of how they dole out those opportunities? And how are they determining who they decide they’re going to advocate for versus who they won’t advocate for?
For some—I’m thinking ethnic minorities and women—it’s so difficult to get that social capital that you’re a little more cautious about who you’re willing to lend it to through sponsorship in case it might come back to be a bad decision. But I think there’s a lot of work that could be done on men in terms of understanding how they could engage in sponsorship.
AMY G.: Let me ask about that, because your research shows that men are more effective sponsors of women than men. Why is that?
ROSALIND: The research indicates that male sponsors are more effective than female sponsors regardless of the gender of the person who’s being sponsored. So if you’re a woman working with a man, you’re just as well off as a man working with a man. Comparatively speaking, female sponsors, regardless of whether or not the protégé is male or female, tend to be less effective—and by less effective, I mean their recommendations are seen as less credible and they’re not as influential in actually getting the people that they recommend hired.
So why do I think that is? That is an excellent question that my doctoral student Elizabeth Campbell (I’m sponsoring her) and I are working on. We have found that tenure in the organization does seem to mitigate some of the hit that female sponsors take. The general gist is that women who are able to overcome the well-known gender discrimination in the promotion and retention process to achieve leadership positions are seen as especially competent. It’s a phenomenon called the “female leader advantage.” If you think about it in that light, then if the really senior woman is high-powered, super competent, and willing to recommend someone, it probably means that she sees a lot of value in them. So protégés of really senior women actually end up doing just as well as protégés of men. The big difference here is that you can be a relatively inexperienced male sponsor and still be really effective for your protégés, but if you’re an inexperienced female sponsor, your protégés do not benefit from that.
AMY G.: So what’s the takeaway on that for our listeners in terms of who they should be looking for to sponsor them? Men and high-powered women can be more effective. What’s the lesson for people?
ROSALIND: I hesitate to give concrete recommendations about how to choose sponsors, because protégés don’t choose sponsors. Sponsors choose protégés. And so for protégés to want to be strategic about it, I just don’t think that there is necessarily one best tactic. I think you decide where you want to go and you make yourself indispensable to the people who are relevant to getting you to where you want to go. And they will typically take it from there.
Now, obviously, if you’ve been a real star performer but you don’t feel as though you’re getting the recognition you deserve, I think regardless of where you are, that’s an opportunity to talk to your supervisor and to say, “Hey, I’d like to have a conversation about my future here in the organization. Can we talk together to chart a path forward?” And that’s just a very natural way to have that frank, explicit conversation about your career goals and brainstorming and bringing them into the conversation about things they could do.
NICOLE: Can more junior female sponsors “cosponsor” a protégé with someone more senior? You told us earlier that you did that with your students. You “co-advised” them on their dissertations to bring in a senior person who had that social capital. Did you tell your students that you were doing that? Did you make that explicit?
ROSALIND: Yes. I did. It was a very explicit conversation—but in a way, it was apologetic! It was like, “I’m so sorry that I can’t do this for you. And even though I know that I’m the one that you’ve primarily worked with, if we’re resting your career on the basis of my recommendation, I worry that it’s not going to go as far as I would like it to. And so the best way forward in my mind is to get someone else involved so that they can leverage their reputation on your behalf in a way that I won’t be able to.”
AMY B.: Are there moments when a sponsor should explicitly tell the protégé about work she’s doing on their behalf? Are there times when that’s inappropriate? Help us navigate that.
ROSALIND: I don’t think that that needs to happen. You risk turning the relationship into a quid pro quo. I think what’s most special about sponsorship relationships is that they are such close, personal relationships, not transaction-oriented relationships, where “I’m going to do something for you, and then you’re going to do something for me.” If a sponsor is constantly cataloging, “OK, I did this opportunity for you, so now I need you to do this for me,” I feel like that would change the relationship in a way that would make the relationship less satisfactory to both parties.
AMY G.: So what we see is that you have to be strategic about what you share and what you don’t. But if it’s not explicit, how does the protégé even know that it’s happening? One of the things I’m trying to wrap my head around is that it feels like you just put yourself out there—“Here are my career goals”—and then you hope someone leverages their influence for you. But where is this sort of accountability in all of this?
ROSALIND: That’s an excellent question. People talk about having a sponsor, but you don’t want just one. It’s like any other resource in life. You should diversify, have more than one. I consider it like building your coalition of allies. Some of those people are going to end up being sponsors. Some of those people are not. But regardless of what you do, having allies, having supporters, is always important. And also you just don’t know how those connections will end up becoming relevant.
It’s just like networking. Really good networkers aren’t going around and trying to find high-value propositions in the moment. That’s not how they’re thinking about the world. It’s more like, “I’m going to get to know you, and I don’t know how I might be useful for you or you might be useful for me at some point. You may not be useful for me right now, or I may not be useful for you at this moment. But there may come a time when the resource, knowledge, connections—whatever—become important. And so I’m just going to hold that in the deck and see what happens.” I would approach sponsorship in very much the same kind of way.
…
NICOLE: Can we talk about a specific sponsorship moment involving Amy B. and myself? Because as I’ve reflected on sponsorship, I look back and see that, “Oh, I have been sponsored in the past.” It was not something I went in asking for or that I thought about consciously. But this specific instance feels like a textbook case of what Rosalind was talking about. Amy B. and I got together one night, we were having a meeting, and she asked me, “Where do you want to be in the future, in five years?” And I said, “I want to be where you are. That’s kind of the trajectory that I want to go towards—leading people and determining coverage.” And she said, “Well, here’s what you need to start doing. You need to start taking these opportunities. You need to manage. You need to do XYZ things.” So I was doing the thing of saying, “Here’s my vision for where I want to go.” And then she had that in mind for, “This is kind of what Nicole’s aspiring to.”
And I think the next day, or a few days later, I found out that Amy had found an opportunity. She put me on a big editing project. And it was something I’d never done before. So that not only gave me the opportunity, it gave me the confidence to seize an opportunity to do something that I had no specific prior experience doing before.
AMY B.: Actually, I had not remembered that, that conversation, but here’s what I do remember: I suddenly understood who Nicole wanted to be. And I knew who I thought she could be. And there was a lot of match there. And so, when she put it out there, what she wanted, it was easy to make a match. That’s what it seemed like. I would never have asked her that initial question if I hadn’t believed in her in a very big way. So it was not the formal, “Would you sponsor me?” or “May I sponsor you?” conversation. I think we’d both puke before we had that conversation.
NICOLE: We’d literally puke!
AMY B.: But, you know, it was a really honest moment of, “Tell me what you want,” and when she had the guts to say what she wanted, it made it all very easy, from my perspective.
NICOLE: I would think that that is how a lot of sponsorship comes to be.
Rosalind Chow Answers Questions from Listeners About Sponsorship
How should one goes about thanking their sponsor? Am I showing enough thanks? Am I thanking too much? Am I showing enough excitement about having been helped?
—C.
First, there’s no harm (as far as we know, based on the research) in expressing gratitude. If anything, people underestimate how meaningful it is to others to be thanked for their efforts, because most of us don’t get thanked a lot! So if a person notices that I’ve gone out of my way to help them and they go out of their way to acknowledge my help, that usually builds a stronger relationship between us.
Now, there is a possibility that if women thank others too much, especially for things that are truly rather inconsequential, then they run the risk of implying “I can’t do anything on my own without help.” So one option is to thank the other person for providing the opportunity and discuss how you will or have already begun to execute and perform well, which means that they opened the door, but you’re the one doing the work.
The other way to interpret the question is: Are there certain forms of sponsorship that are more worthy of appreciation than others? Again, giving thanks is always good, in my book. But taking the question at face value, I would suggest thinking about how much reputation your sponsor has put on the line for you. The more they had to actively insist on others’ consideration of your abilities, the more “costly” that sponsorship is—and thus, more valuable. If someone says positive things about you in general, that’s nice but not overly costly to them. But if they strategically introduce you to the other person and say, “This is the person I was telling you about! The one you should hire,” that’s a more active form of sponsorship that probably warrants a thank-you note.
It’s one thing to have a sponsor, but then what? It’s not always the smoothest ride; much of it is impacted by forces beyond your control, basically power struggles and office politics. What happens when your sponsor leaves the company and/or they get pushed out and you become collateral damage?
—G.
This relates to something I alluded to in the podcast: You don’t want to have only one sponsor; like stocks, you need to diversify. The more senior you get, presumably, the more opportunity powerful people in the organization have to directly observe your talents, so you won’t be as reliant on your sponsor.
But sometimes you pick the wrong horse (or the wrong horse picks you). Depending on what your relationship is with your sponsor, you can ask them for help and they can try transitioning you to another sponsor in the firm. You could also leave with your sponsor, assuming that they have found a position in another firm that you’d be interested in.
Adapted from “Sponsorship: Defining the Relationship,” Women at Work podcast season 4, episode 2, October 29, 2019.