How to Connect with the Best Sponsor For Your Career Advancement [Pt. 2 #SponsorshipSeptember]

It's #SponsorshipSeptember, a month-long series where I outline a few common traps I see emerging leaders make when it comes to sponsorship.

To refresh, the first trap was revealed here...

But let's get back to sponsors. I'm not talking about a mentor who advises you, or a manager who gives you great reviews but can't or won't promote you.

A sponsor. A leader within your org who advocates for you. Specifically for the purposes of promotion.

Research shows this relationship is crucial to women and people of the global majority. The Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) calculates that 85% of women and 81% of multicultural professionals need this “navigational support” to succeed in the workplace but don’t receive it with the regularity that men do.

For more on the sponsor/mentor distinction, here's a breakdown from SLAC, Stanford's National Accelerator Laboratory:

To keep it most real, which I believe we must, I am a mentor who helps you find the right sponsor 😁

But who in your org would be best? Let's dig in with a story...

Trap 2: Wrong Focus, Wrong Sponsor

Anita knew she had what it took to make Director. Two years and several stagnant promotion cycles after earning her MBA while raising two young kids and performing at a Fortune 100 company, she earned a reputation for being a “pinch hitter” and got great reviews by her manager, but was not clear on her career trajectory and the manager didn't have time or skill to extract it.

Three weeks into our engagement, we did an exercise where she painted the picture of her 5 year vision. Here she saw herself as the senior leader responsible for training and managing other high level leaders. Without a brand or story, she relied on her work to do the talking. Before a clear professional trajectory, her actions painted her as an executor when she wanted to be on the executive track -- a very different story.

Within a month, we identified a crisp value proposition based on past experience that moved her from generalist to expert at converting heritage systems to the digital realm. She translated this new narrative to her manager by proposing stretch projects that both reinforced her newly articulated expertise and required her to set a vision and execute it. Like this, she converted the manager into mentor. Now, instead of haphazardly vaulting herself to the next available promotion, we identified the perfect strategic sponsor that would value her exact expertise for her next role. With the help of her mentor she initiated contact and began a dialogue pitching herself at the solution to the digital conversion the sponsor's team needed solving.

Here's her email to me, 2 months later:

To know your strategic sponsor, it helps to know the end of your career story then figure out your value prop, then identify who is in a position to position you to fulfill it.

Given who you want to be in 5 years,
who at your org would is the best sponsor to help you get there?

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