Rosalind Chow is an associate professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. She currently serves as the faculty director of CLIMB, which prepares Black and Latino professionals for leadership roles in accounting. Rosalind is also affiliated with the Social and Decision Sciences group at Dietrich College.
What’s the big idea?
Sponsorship is critical to climbing the career ladder, building trust, and creating an inclusive workplace. The act of sponsorship is distinct from mentorship. A mentor will talk to someone and provide direct guidance, whereas a sponsor talks positively about someone when they are not in the room. By helping other people achieve their dreams or solve their problems, you, as a sponsor, will strengthen your network, influence, and positive impact on society.
Below, Rosalind shares five key insights from her new book, The Doors You Can Open: A New Way to Network, Build Trust, and Use Your Influence to Create a More Inclusive Workplace. Listen to the audio version—read by Rosalind herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Sponsorship and mentorship are not the same.
When I talk about sponsorship, I am not referring to business and brand deals but rather a kind of support we can give one another. Mentorship is talking to someone, whereas sponsorship is talking about someone. Perhaps the best way to understand the difference is with an example. I want to tell you the story of how David Weinlick and Elizabeth Runze found true love.
Back when David was in college, his friends and family were nagging him about how he needed to find a wife. To get them off his back, he picked a random date—June 13, 1998—and told them that he was going to get married that day and to leave him alone. Which they did, until January 1998 rolled around, when David and his friends and family all realized that his plan wasn’t going to work out because he had just ended a relationship.
One friend jokingly suggested to David that they treat his marriage like a political convention, where they would canvass the community for potential bridal candidates. David’s friends and family would then whittle down the list of potential candidates to a shortlist, who would then go to the Mall of America on June 13, 1998, to personally campaign for themselves. David’s friends and family would then cast their votes for a winner, whom David would then be committed to marrying, on the spot. Was he game?
“Mentorship is talking to someone, whereas sponsorship is talking about someone.”
He was, and so the campaign for a Mrs. Weinlick began. David’s friends filmed a promotional advertisement, which was picked up by news outlets, and hundreds of women applied. They were narrowed down to 20 or so finalists, and when June 13 rolled around, David’s friends and family overwhelmingly voted for Elizabeth Runze. David and Elizabeth were married one hour later and were happily married for 19 years before David tragically died from cancer.
When David wasn’t in a relationship in January 1998, his friends could have given him advice on how to find a new partner. They could have told him to go work out more or spend more time meeting women. But that’s not what they did, because they didn’t see the issue as David not being good enough. The problem wasn’t David. The problem was that other people didn’t know how great David was. So, they filmed a video about how wonderful he is. They gave him opportunities to give interviews about his search. They made David known. That’s sponsorship—making other people known.
2. Sponsorship is Networking 2.0.
Lots of people dislike networking because it feels self-centered and inauthentic. But what if, instead of networking for ourselves, we network with the intent of finding opportunities to sponsor others? I’m sure many of David’s friends and family wouldn’t have approached random women on their own behalf. But for David? Sure. Because instead of meeting people for themselves, they were meeting people to solve someone else’s problem: to find someone who would be a good match for David.
“Think of networking as an opportunity to find people with problems and people who could be solutions.”
Instead of thinking of networking as finding the people who can solve our problems, think of networking as an opportunity to find people with problems and people who could be solutions. We do this by asking good questions and being great listeners of people’s challenges and aspirations. We can then use people’s aspirations to suggest them for opportunities that would make those dreams come true, simultaneously solving another person’s problems.
3. You don’t need power to be a sponsor.
Lots of people believe that only people who have power can be sponsors. But David’s friends didn’t have power over David or Elizabeth, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. What they did have was trust.
David trusted their judgment on who would be a suitable match. Elizabeth trusted their judgment on whether she was a good match. The most effective sponsors are people whom others trust, and that’s not tied to how much power they have. It’s tied to how much status they have.
4. Sponsorship is a set of many different behaviors.
Sponsorship is the act of creating or enhancing other people’s positive impressions of a protégé. It is also the act of mitigating negative impressions. We can accomplish this in different ways.
For instance, inviting someone to attend an exclusive event or meeting is a form of sponsorship because there is information inferred from who is invited. Being invited means you are part of the “in” group, so people assume you must be there for a good reason.
“Sponsorship is the act of creating or enhancing other people’s positive impressions of a protégé.”
Sharing other people’s good news is also sponsorship. Introducing people to each other, speaking up when someone unfairly criticizes someone else, and providing additional information about a situation so that someone isn’t seen as completely at fault are all forms of sponsorship.
5. Not all sponsorship is good.
Sponsorship has another name: nepotism. Favoritism. Bias. When we see people we believe are undeserving being sponsored, we see that as unfair and anti-meritocratic. But how do we decide who is deserving and undeserving?
We know from research that people from marginalized groups are less likely to be seen as deserving, and therefore are less likely to receive sponsorship. When we aren’t intentional about sponsorship, we risk exacerbating social inequality. But the same way that sponsorship can make inequalities worse, it can also make inequalities better because we can use it to elevate people who would otherwise be missed.
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