Mentorship vs. Sponsorship: Why a mentor isn’t enough
Mentorship is really having a moment. It’s now a mainstream buzzword, discussed in listicle-style articles and morning show soundbites. While mentorship is an essential career development tool, the term has become a bit of a catch-all for the various roles that others need to play in your career. There’s one such influencer that every employee should have: a sponsor, who is distinct from a mentor. When it comes to career progression, sponsorship is equally important to mentorship but gets less air time.
A sponsor is a leader in your organization who will enthusiastically advocate for your career progression. This person recognizes your unique capabilities among your peers and believes in your potential. She will go to bat for you in a promotion discussion or argue that you’re the right person for a new role when others see you as a stretch candidate. She will point to specific accomplishments, skills, and leadership traits to make the case why your organization should invest in you as a high-potential employee, promote you, or trust you with an important project.
Even if you have a great relationship with your boss, it’s crucial to have at least one sponsor in your company -- and ideally more than one -- who is not your boss. A story I heard recently highlights the importance of this distinction and why you should care about cultivating sponsors.
Jake (all names have been changed) has spent the last several years working for a well-known tech company. He has an excellent relationship with his boss, Steve, who assured him of his strong performance and told him to expect a promotion during the lead up to a recent review cycle. The evaluation period came and went, and Jake did not receive a promotion. It was the second time at this company that Jake had expected a promotion that did not come to fruition, and he was starting to feel extremely frustrated by what he perceived to be mixed messaging and the workings of a system beyond his control.
What was the problem? Jake lacked a sponsor. During the leadership team’s promotion discussions, no one in the room advocated for Jake. When someone raised questions about skills they hadn’t seen Jake demonstrate directly, or objected to his promotion based on outdated information, there was no one there to provide counterexamples. None of the leaders were invested enough in Jake or his career progression to familiarize themselves with his accomplishments and push for him to receive the promotion.
Where was Jake’s boss Steve? Steve was too junior to have a seat on the promotion panel, a common scenario when the boss is a mid-level manager or junior executive. While Steve should have better prepared his own boss to speak on Jake’s behalf, the fact remains that Jake should have fostered his own sponsor. Even if his hypothetical sponsor hadn’t secured Jake’s promotion the first time, she would have provided Jake with feedback that explained the decision, told him which skills he needed to demonstrably improve, and then used examples of that improvement in her advocacy efforts during the second promotion meeting.
The lesson of this story is to take your career progression into your own hands by fostering relationships with more senior leaders and turning them into willing and enthusiastic advocates on your behalf. How do you do this? Excelling in your role is necessary but far from sufficient, as Jake learned. The next article in this series shares some tips on how to attract sponsors who will get you promoted. Check it out.