We climb in community. For women this is especially true. While mentorship is focused on guidance, sponsorship is the ability to connect individuals to opportunities by leveraging influential networks.  

Many studies have shown the power of sponsorship: 73% of women with sponsors achieve higher positions, 85% of women understand sponsorship, while only 45% of women have experienced it.

How to sponsor? It is a deliberate activity. You may do things like:

• Recommend protégés for promotions
• Involve someone in a high profile project when you didn’t have to
• Acknowledge their achievements in rooms of influence
• Bring them into rooms of influence.

Sponsoring others isn’t just good for others. It’s good for you, too: 53% of senior leaders who sponsor someone else are promoted themselves within two years.

Women are often mentored more than they are sponsored.

Janice Omadeke writes in the Harvard Business Review to think of sponsorship as “phase two” of mentorship. You feel compelled to invest in your protégé.

In a Forbes article in March on this topic, Julia Korn going so far as to say we have focused too much on mentorship and we have to make the pivot: sponsorship is vital. Just 29% of women hold C-suite roles across Fortune 500 companies, and mentorship hasn’t closed that gap. While a mentor guides your career, “a sponsor can transform it,” it can “drive career progression”. When you use your political capital to advocate for opportunity and visibility for others, the results can be powerful. It puts people in the right rooms.

She admits, it can also be risky. It requires using your proximity and status to lift someone else up. Her advice to you? Start connecting with people, yes, but make your impact clear.

“Make your work visible.”

Sponsors can more easily back you when you do the work to demonstrate your value over time. Tie the work that you do to outcomes, share concise information on impact, basically, help people become familiar with your work. This reduces risk for them, because it will be obvious more and more the value that you bring, because you are making that value clear.

This is why my framework, Lead with How, has been powerful for me not just to develop, but to live out and experience. Pointing to vision, purpose and “the why” is always what grounds you and helps people get a sense of the overall direction that you are taking across life and in your work. But that only goes so far.

Lead with How helps make your work visible, because it clearly connects what you do to why you do it by detailing exactly how you get there. What key move do you actually make to carry out your mission to achieve your vision? How do you get there and how do you articulate it? I love helping leaders get clear on the steps that they take in their daily routines and across the work of their organization by helping them bucket those moves into categories, and layering in the stories that show impact with the data that shows scale.

This leads to the powerful point across these ideas: you need to sponsor yourself before others will sponsor you.

This is the uncomfortable truth that you need to get very comfortable with. You have to be your own advocate.

In Take the Lead a powerful book (review coming!) about women who drive success through innovation, the authors point to studies that show when women were put in a simulation around salary increase, they were more inclined to ask for more and with more clarity and determination when sponsoring others than when advocating for themselves. We need to flex that muscle to advocate and advance our work as if we were advocating for someone we admire.

Sponsorship is a powerful way to advance others, and help them uncover their talent, showcase their strength, and remove barriers they are facing by putting them in rooms both in reality, or by speaking their name and honoring their work. And while you’re at it: don’t forget to sponsor yourself as well.