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Sponsorship and the Power of Protégés

Who’s delivering for you? Who has your back? Who’s burnishing your brand? Who’s expanding what you can get done in this world? Do you have loyal lieutenants who extend your reach?

If the answer to any of these questions is no or I’m not sure, then you’re stacking the odds against yourself—whether you want to rise to the top of your organization or expand what you can do once you’re there.

Consider basketball superstar LeBron James. Like many athletic stars, he has a few old friends who have accompanied him on his rise to fame. But unlike many stars, he didn’t just hand out money to his old buddies. He sent them to school and steered them to internships where they strengthened their management and marketing skills—skills that he didn’t have himself. His old friend Rich Paul, for example, now has his own talent agency, and another friend, Maverick Carter, runs a production company. Paul, Carter, and the rest of James’s inner circle have more than repaid the money he spent on them. In 2016, for example, Carter secured an endorsement deal for James with Nike that will, over time, be worth $1 billion.¹

What sets LeBron James apart from so many athletic stars—and so many corporate leaders—was that he had the foresight to invest in the smart people he found. He didn’t just keep in touch and write a few checks. He became a sponsor, powering up his talented friends with education and access. He helped them become high-performing, loyal protégés who could do for him what he couldn’t do for himself: find and develop lucrative business opportunities that will ensure that he remains a successful and influential man long after he leaves the basketball court.

What Sponsorship Is—and Why You Should Care

Successful men and women understand that no matter how brilliant and driven they are, their time and energy are finite. They can’t do it all. Every current leader or emerging star needs people around them who can increase their bandwidth, have their back, and provide a substantial value add, as Maverick Carter did when he produced that ten-figure endorsement contract for LeBron James.

Sponsorship is what enables this kind of opportunity. Sponsorship is a professional relationship in which an established or rising leader identifies and chooses an outstanding junior talent, develops that person’s career, and reaps significant rewards for these efforts. As a mutually beneficial relationship, sponsorship is much deeper and more rewarding than traditional mentorship, a relationship in which a senior person “pays it forward” by giving guidance to someone more junior, often casually and for not very long.

Sponsorship relationships, on the other hand, require a commitment and an investment—for both sponsor and protégé. The sponsor must devote serious attention to identifying top junior talent, developing their skills, scrutinizing their progress, and advocating on their behalf. Protégés must deliver for their sponsor with stellar performance, rock-solid trustworthiness, and a differentiated skill set that adds value to the team and the organization, as well as to the individual sponsor.

Sponsorship thus isn’t charity or granting a favor; it’s a powerful leadership capability. Are you an entry- or mid-level manager, hoping to work better, grow your influence, and get promoted faster? The right protégé can fill gaps in your skill set, take responsibilities off your plate when your calendar gets crowded, offer moral support when you need it, and build your personal brand. Are you at the top of your organization or near it, seeking loyal lieutenants and the capacity to extend your reach throughout the enterprise? The right protégé will complement your leadership skills and style, provide honest feedback, make you feel that you have extra hours in the day, and enable your influence to persist even after you’ve moved on to your next role or opportunity.

If you’re at the top, you may know the benefits of sponsorship already: leaders who rise to senior levels of their organization have almost always invested heavily in a select group of outstanding protégés who boost their productivity and become the next generation of the organization. But if you’re not actively looking for these individuals, now is the time to start.

The Center for Talent Innovation (CTI), the think tank that I founded, recently conducted a nationally representative survey of full-time employees in white-collar jobs, ranging from entry-level professionals to C-suite executives. To cite just one sample from the data we collected, which I’ll present throughout this book: for men, 38 percent of those with protégés report receiving a promotion in the last two years, compared to 22 percent of those without. That’s a percent increase of 73 percent. For women, the difference is 27 percent versus 18 percent, or a 50 percent sponsor effect.²

For protégés, the data is equally telling. In my 2013 book, Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor: The New Way to Fast-Track Your Career, I quantified the value to protégés of winning a sponsor: male employees with a sponsor are 23 percent more likely to get that next promotion than those without. For female employees the figure is 19 percent.³ In subsequent research, I showed that this benefit crosses geography and culture as well as gender. Employees at multinational companies get a particularly big bump when they earn sponsorship.

But how do protégés and sponsors give each other so much value?

As figure 1-1 illustrates, sponsorship is a two-way street and an investment: both parties put in effort and have skin in the game. As stated earlier, protégés provide multiple benefits for their sponsors; but sponsors also deliver for their protégés—believing in them and using up precious political capital for them, advocating for them, and providing them with “air cover” to take the risks that success often demands.

Unlike a mentorship relationship, a sponsorship relationship places both the sponsor and the protégé in the position of actively and publicly working for each other’s success.

That mutual commitment and effort (although, as we’ll see, the protégé needs to do most of the work) leads to a relationship that boosts both parties. Consider the example of Larry Summers, eminent economist and former US Treasury Secretary, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. In 1990, when Sandberg was just a junior at Harvard, Summers—then a respected professor, but not well known outside his field—recognized Sandberg’s value, believed in her potential, and singled her out for opportunities. She followed him to the World Bank as a research associate and then to the Treasury, where he made her his chief of staff. He then opened doors for her in the business world.

Sandberg certainly benefited from this relationship, but Summers did too. At first, she showed her value by being an enormously competent number two, but after she struck out on her own, her support of him remained unwavering. Years later when Summers made some ill-considered remarks about women, stating that they weren’t equipped to succeed in STEM fields, Sandberg used her megaphone as a successful female executive to defend him as a man highly supportive of women—and she spoke up for him again and again.⁴

Sponsorship’s reciprocity sets it apart not only from mentorship; it also sets it apart from standard corporate leadership development. Sponsors aren’t just grooming someone to rise higher. They certainly are looking to fill organizational needs, but they’re also taking a bet that their own careers can benefit if they invest in a promising individual’s talent, skill sets, and trustworthiness. The ability to be an effective sponsor is a competency that can make the sponsor a better leader, both in the short term—with a value add and a boost to productivity—and in the medium and long terms, through bonds of loyalty and trust.

When Mellody Hobson, for example, started at Ariel Investments, she was just an intern, fresh out of college. Fiercely ambitious and hardworking, she soon attracted the attention of John Rogers, the chairman and CEO. Seeing her chance, she ramped up her energies to earn his serious support. In an interview, she told me that she became Rogers’s “grasshopper,” jumping and leaping to his every need.

Startled by her word choice, I asked her to dig deeper. What exactly did she do? Hobson hesitated, but after some thought she described learning to anticipate Rogers’s wants, protect his time, and leverage his energies—making him a more effective leader and rainmaker. She also made it her business to feed him new marketing ideas. She was particularly creative in figuring out how to better reach African American women—a natural target for Rogers’s firm. Her success in opening up this market has boosted the growth of the firm over many years.

Hobson is emphatic: her extraordinary commitment to Rogers is based on more than appreciation and promotions. He inspired her. She was and is a huge fan of his vision and what he has created at Ariel Investments. In her words, “It was easy to get totally vested in the mission of the most successful minority-owned investment company in America.”

Hobson delivered for Rogers and he delivered for her: by age thirty-one she had become president of the firm, a title she holds to this day.

So protégés help sponsors, and sponsors return the favor. The reciprocal relationship should help both sponsor and protégé build a ladder to the top—and then thrive once there. But success demands that as a prospective sponsor you find the right people and take the right measures to help them become stellar protégés.

That requires a strategy for identifying talent, and this strategy should include people who are different from you and who can fill in some of your gaps. It often requires inspiring them to deliver over the long run for you and your organization; instructing them in skills (especially soft ones) that they lack; inspecting them to make sure they’re living up to potential; and then instigating an explicit deal before you finally go full throttle on your investment in them.

This book offers a playbook to build this potent relationship and discover extraordinary payoffs. Sponsorship at its best is a long-term investment whose benefits keep compounding over the years and decades.

The Risks of Sponsorship

The flip side of sponsorship’s power is a certain level of risk. In mentorship, if your mentee disappoints, no one holds you responsible; few may even know about the relationship. But what happens if your protégé, in whom you’ve publicly invested time, responsibilities, and reputational capital, disappoints? Maybe he or she, when push comes to shove, can’t grow the bottom line, impress important stakeholders, or take work off your shoulders. Your own productivity and brand could take a hit.

And here’s an even bigger risk: What if your protégé, who thanks to you has gained some power, turns on you and betrays your trust? That could threaten your own success and even your role in the organization.

Given this risk, as well as the enormous potential benefits, protégés need to earn a sponsor. To put it bluntly, no one will take on a protégé unless that protégé has clearly demonstrated their potential worth and loyalty. Sponsors, for their part, must devote effort and energy to identifying, including, inspiring, instructing, and inspecting a potential protégé before they instigate a deal and fully invest their precious clout and capital.

Consider what is perhaps the ultimate instance of sponsorship: a presidential candidate choosing a vice president for the ticket. This rides on trust, but also on a deep belief that your pick can deliver performance, loyalty, and a value add.

During the campaign, the vice presidential candidate must help the man or woman at the top of the ticket win: by acting as an effective proxy in debates and on the stump (performance); by bridging the party’s ideological divides or providing geographical diversity (a value add); and by always deferring to the opinions and needs of the presidential candidate (loyalty).

Should the candidate win the stakes rise dramatically, as the vice president will be in the spotlight and have access to enormously sensitive information. Most critically, he or she will be a heartbeat away from the top job itself.

But in 2008, in his run for the presidency, the late senator John McCain chose a woman he hardly knew, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. Palin proved anything but loyal, likely damaged his campaign, and is now widely seen as a blemish on his legacy. That’s what can happen when a sponsor fails to choose and develop a protégé correctly.

By contrast, consider the benefits that President George W. Bush drew from his relationship with Condoleezza Rice. Bush’s father introduced him to Rice in 1998, as he was gearing up to run for the presidency. In the coming years, as she and George W. Bush bonded and he made her his protégé, she became his most trusted foreign policy adviser and perhaps his most trusted adviser, period. In a White House full—as every White House is—of men and women with their own personal agendas, Bush knew that Rice had only one agenda: his. “We are completely in sync,” Bush told a gathering of diplomats when Rice was secretary of state. “When she speaks, you know that she is speaking for me.”⁵ Besides boosting Bush’s foreign policy chops, Rice also helped create one component of his legacy that even his political foes have praised: his aid to Africa.⁶

A protégé’s role in establishing a legacy is powerful in the business world too—and it applies whether you’re retiring after rising to a high level in the organization, or moving on to new opportunities while your protégés stay with your former employer. Later in this book, I’ll show just how powerful this legacy payoff can be. Whether it’s Steve Howe, the US chairman and managing partner of professional services giant EY, handing off the baton to his longtime protégé; Steve Jobs ensuring that Apple would have sound leadership after his death; or an economist who vaulted to fame in 1919 extending his influence into our own day, sponsorship is the key to perpetuating your vision.

Sponsorship in Practice

Throughout this book, I show—through hard data and real-world examples, including interviews with several sitting CEOs—how sponsorship works in practice, how it can benefit you and the organization, how to maximize this investment’s value, how to avoid common dangers, and how to make the benefits last. This book is not only grounded in CTI survey data, which shows how different tools and tactics have (or have not) worked for a broad swath of sponsors; it also features in-depth narratives, based on one-on-one interviews with sponsor-protégé pairs who share their experiences. Through these stories and conversations, you’ll be able to see how each of these leaders found their protégés and developed the close relationships that opened up their organizations to new opportunities, broadened their individual sphere of influence, and perpetuated their vision.

Chapter 2 describes the essential properties of sponsorship, alongside data on the key benefits to sponsors. It also describes in detail common mistakes that keep sponsors from fully realizing the benefits of this relationship.

Chapter 3 zeroes in on some of the specific payoffs that sponsorship provides. As we’ll see, protégés can enormously enhance their sponsors’ reach and productivity, allowing them to progress further and faster. To illustrate how sponsorship can transform careers in every sector of the economy, I draw on examples from financial services, the media, Hollywood, and technology.

Part 2, the heart of this book, is a multi-step playbook for sponsors, as outlined in the sidebar, “Seven Steps to Effective Sponsorship.” Understanding the details of each step in this playbook is crucial not just for maximizing value, but also for mitigating risks. If you’re going to sponsor someone—linking their career to yours—they’re going to be walking around with your brand on their forehead. How do you contain risk? What tools and tactics work best? How do you take these steps toward practical action? Each chapter in this section offers answers—summed up in how-to sections at the end of each step—based on data from our survey and tales from the trenches: the shared experiences of leaders who have succeeded in building sponsorship relationships that boost their careers and organizations.

Seven steps may sound like a serious expenditure of time—and time is the last thing that most readers of this book have to spare. But when done right, sponsors find that they can align the balance of investment and reward in their favor from the start. For example, sponsorship immediately increases your bandwidth since a well-chosen protégé will take over some of your more onerous work tasks, freeing up your time for your highest priorities.

The final section of the playbook puts all seven steps together by featuring one-on-one interviews with leaders from EY, one of the world’s biggest professional services firms. The voices of four EY sponsor-protégé pairs allow the reader to appreciate how this highly reciprocal relationship works at a concrete, granular level for managers at the midpoint in their careers, as well as those at the top of the ladder. These voices also demonstrate how sponsorship cascades through an organization, as others see the value of both earning sponsorship and developing protégés themselves.

In part 3, we shift the discussion to two additional pieces of the sponsorship puzzle: the potential trip wire of sexual relationships (and related fears) and the potential boon of a long-term legacy. Chapter 12 offers a guide to sponsorship in the age of #MeToo, a movement that has led not only to focused and valuable attention to an ancient problem, but also to new anxieties. It is important to have sponsorship relationships cross the lines of gender and generation, otherwise many highly qualified employees stall out in midcareer, or take their skills and energies elsewhere. But many leaders are hesitant to align themselves too closely with someone of the opposite sex because of gossip and risk. In this chapter I show how to avoid any hint of impropriety while building the bonds that sponsorship requires. With a few simple steps, men and women can create respect-filled spaces to sponsor one another without any danger to careers, reputations, or the organizations they work for.

Chapter 13 concludes the book with a look at how sponsorship—which helped you move up the ladder—can deepen your legacy going forward. Whether you’re a CEO looking to find a successor, or a middle-level manager shifting roles, you’ll want the person who fills your shoes to value your contribution and honor your vision long after you’ve gone. This chapter provides data on the impact of sponsorship on reputation going forward. It also provides vivid examples of how legacy can shine—or falter—based on the strength of a sponsor-protégé relationship.

From start to finish, sponsorship is a rich journey, one that will transform how you look at the talent that surrounds you—and your own career. Let’s get started.