Tag Archive for: leadership advice

Why Creating Inclusion at Senior Levels Requires Formal Sponsorship

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formal sponsorshipInformal sponsorship and mentorship can proliferate inequitable power dynamics in organizations. Organic sponsorship is a big part of how leadership proactively recasts the pipeline in the majority image. Meanwhile, the status quo power dynamic inhibits individuals who are in the minority among leadership from lifting others up behind them.

(This contribution from Pulsely dives into how informal sponsorship works to reinforce the glass ceiling).

Here’s one core way in which your organization is perpetuating inequitable power dynamics at senior levels: informal sponsorship and mentorship.

When you connect the dots of power, organic sponsorship is a big part of how leadership proactively, repetitively, and, by default, recasts the pipeline in the majority image. Meanwhile, the status quo power dynamic inhibits individuals who are in the minority among leadership from lifting others up behind them.

We offer a six point case for why leadership inclusion requires formal sponsorship programs that are deliberately disruptive in creating more equitable opportunities.

Mentorship and Sponsorship – What It Really Means

When it comes to career advancement, mentorship is both necessary and not enough. The common distinction is: a mentor talks with you, a sponsor talks about you.

A mentorship is 1-1. Mentors help you within your journey. They help you to navigate the intersection of your goals and career choices, identify and amplify strengths, and develop in core areas. Mentorship often acts as a trustworthy mirror for personal growth.

A sponsorship is more than 1-1. A sponsor relationship is 1-1+ an audience of power. Sponsors put skin and reputation in the game by leveraging their social capital (influence) in rooms you’ve yet to enter, and advocate for opportunities and advancement for you among their peers. The protégé also has the motivation of stepping up to the challenge because the sponsor’s reputation is on the line, too. Sponsorship often acts as a spotlight that shines on you to lift you up to the next level of career advancement.

As written by Rosalind Chow in Harvard Business Review, “Sponsorship can be understood as a form of intermediated impression management, where sponsors act as brand managers and publicists for their protégés. This work involves the management of others’ views on the sponsored employee. Thus, the relationship at the heart of sponsorship is not between protégés and sponsors, as is often thought, but between sponsors and an audience — the people they mean to sway to the side of their protégés.”

Why Informal Mentorship and Sponsorship Are Inequitable

“Regardless of education, motivation, and personal and professional success factors, being sponsored by a white man remains the primary accelerant to the career mobility of Black women.” (Stephanie Bradley Smith in HBR)

As this quote underlines, and Catalyst iterates in Sponsoring Women to Success, “Sponsorship is focused on advancement and predicated on power.”

The dynamic of organic sponsorship is ultimately majority promoting majority, with the same repeated outcome at leadership, save minor and temporary shifts. Even the common phrase of “winning sponsorship” has a blinding and dubious premise.

While data from different surveys inevitably differs on absolutes (for example, the % of people who report they have a sponsor is highly contextual to the criteria), what remains steady across studies is a debilitating power gap between individuals of the majority and non-majority when it comes to both sponsorship and who they are sponsored by.

Here’s what reproduces the current senior management and leadership profile:

1. Mentorship and especially executive sponsorship have a catalytic impact on career advancement for both protégés and sponsors.

  • Male managers with sponsorship are 23% more likely (female managers with sponsorship are 19% more likely) to progress to the next rung of the career ladder than peers who do not have sponsors.
  • Managers and executives who sponsor high-achieving junior talent are 53% more likely to advance to the next leadership level relative to peers who don’t sponsor.

2. Access to mentorship and executive sponsorship is highly variable depending on who you are, regardless of performance = inequitable.

3. Mentorship and sponsorship are especially necessary to advance women and people of color.

  • Black managers are 65% more likely to progress to the next rung in the ladder if they have a sponsor.
  • Mentorship programs increase representation of Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American women, and Hispanic and Asian-American men, by 9% to 24%.
  • Having mentors and sponsors who advocated for them is the single attribute shared by people of color who have progressed furthest in the leadership ranks.
  • Executive sponsorship has been proven to be the most effective organizational intervention to advance Black talent.
  • Latina women with sponsorship earn 6.1% more than peers who lack sponsors and black women earn 5.1% more.

4. But people tend to mentor and sponsor those just like them – and this means the majority (with the power) mostly sponsors the majority.

  • 61% of people indicate their mentorship developed naturally.
  • As much as 91% of white managers have no Black, Asian, or Latinx people in their immediate social network.
  • 71% of sponsors report their protégé is the same race or gender as their own.
  • 58% of women and 54% of men who sponsor choose a protégé because they “make me feel comfortable.”
  • A study of 72 protégés found that 100% of sponsors of white male protégés were men and the majority (73.5%) were white. Among Black female protégés, most sponsors were Black (57%) and 27% were women.
  • Payscale found 77.1 percent of male protégés said they had a male sponsor while women were about half as likely to have a male sponsor.
  • Payscale found 90% of white men and women protégés reported they had a white sponsor, while Blacks and Hispanics were 35% less likely to.

5. Not only are there far fewer female and minority senior leaders, but increased personal career risk can hinder their sponsoring.

  • Women hold only 1/4 of executive roles in the 1000 largest companies and BIPOCs make up only 17% of the C-suite.
  • Despite a desire and even a higher sense of obligation to lift others of similar sex/gender up (26% for Black leaders vs. 20% for Hispanic and Asian and 7% for Caucasian), Black senior leaders face higher scrutiny and are 26% less likely to commit to being a sponsor than white executives.
  • More than one third of black leaders report they never sponsor a junior talent who looks like them – despite often wanting to, at tension with personal career risk.

6. To further the gap, white and male sponsors hold more influence on outcomes of their protégé’s employment than those from the non-majority groups.

  • In U.S. law firms and among lawyers who had sponsorship, white men were half as likely (30%) as women of color (62%) to feel that the lack of an influential mentor was a barrier to their advancement.
  • Payscale found: black women with black sponsors are paid 11.3% less than black women with white sponsors; Hispanic women with Hispanic sponsors make 15.5% less than those with white sponsors; women with women sponsors make 14.6% less than those with male sponsors, and even men with female sponsors make 8.7% less than those with male sponsors. Payscale notes the gaps shrink after compensable factors are weighed in, but the gap remains.

If you want to introduce more equity into talent development, you cannot look away from the affinity bias-based pattern of those with high social capital using that power and influence to promote those who look like them into power, too, while also further advancing their own status. Nor can you look away from how the non-majority individuals who break through to leadership are inhibited from doing the same.

Formal mentorship and sponsorship programs are about deliberately disrupting the cycle of inequitable talent development that has strongly influenced your management and leadership to date. In the next article, we explore how in more detail.

‍Guest contribution: Originally published on the Pulsely blog, written by Aimee Hansen. Pulsely delivers diversity and inclusion diagnostics and actionable DEI insights to drive inclusion, equity, and performance. Pulsely’s scientific framework combines the power of understanding four key drivers of inclusion: diversity data, workplace inclusion, inclusion competencies, and performance indicators. To learn more, visit Pulsely, read an interview with Co-Founder Betsy Bagley, or check out the Pulsely blog to find more content like this. 

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Avoid These Four Leadership Failures To Retain Employees Through The Great Resignation

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Great ResignationFor more than a year, the employment world has experienced significant upheaval as millions of workers make a mass exodus from the traditional workplace: a phenomenon now commonly called ‘the Great Resignation’. Women leaders who recognize and avoid four common leadership failures in the workplace will be better placed to retain their best employees through these turbulent times.

World-wide, leaders are grappling to understand what is fueling ‘the Great Resignation’. Also known as ‘the Big Quit’ and ‘the Great Reshuffle’, this is an ongoing economic trend in which employees have voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse since early 2021, primarily in the US.

Research into this phenomenon that is wreaking havoc in the employment world suggests that many people are rethinking their careers, seeking a better work-life balance, facing up to long-endured job dissatisfaction, and preferring the flexibility of remote work.

As ‘the Great Resignation’ unfolds, there has never been a more important time for business leaders to think smart to ensure their work environment appeals to the post-Covid generation of workers.

Here are the four fundamental leadership failures that drive good employees away. Recognizing and rectifying these leadership failures will provide women leaders with an edge to help them retain good employees amid a mass exodus.

Rectifying leadership failure 1: Treating employees as the primary customers

The first crucial leadership failure is not recognizing that the employee is actually the primary customer.

Employees are initially drawn to work for a company because of various reasons, such as the company’s reputation. Ultimately, however, good employees stick around because of how well a company looks after them.

 Employees should therefore be treated as the primary customer. This means that each employee should be treated, cared for, managed, and responded to in a way that is consistent with how the company wants its customers to be treated.

Not only does it set a good example to manage employees this way, but it also increases one of the most important assets of any company: credibility, and the trust it brings. Employees want to work with and for a company that they can trust.

Rectifying leadership failure 2 – Recognizing leadership is not management

Another crucial leadership failure is not recognizing the difference between leadership and management.

Most companies have a management culture, which is not the same as proper leadership. Management is important and is a part of leadership responsibility. Managers have to make people follow, but leaders make people want to follow. Managers bring about compliance, but what leaders are able to create is buy-in, and this increases the likelihood of employees bringing their best self to work.

Recognizing the difference between management and leadership not only increases the likelihood of recruiting and retaining good employees, it also increases the chances of having a team that gives their best effort and go beyond the regular call of duty.

Rectifying leadership failure 3 – Realizing valued compensation is not just financial

The failure to recognize that finances are not the only form of valued compensation is a third common leadership failure today.

This is a recent development and is clear when considering the work patterns of the Millennium generation. This is the first generation in some time that does not out earn the previous generation. And it’s not because this generation is not capable or competent, but rather because they value some things more than money, such as flexibility, being part of something bigger or being valued as individuals.

Whereas paying employees so well that they tolerate toxicity in their working environment – often called ‘golden handcuffs’ – may have worked in the past, but will not work in the future.

Rectifying leadership failure 4 – Recognizing that EQ is the IQ multiplier

Last, but certainly not least, is the leadership failure of not recognizing that EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is the IQ (Intelligence Quotient) multiplier, especially now during ‘the Great Resignation’. 

It’s not that employees are avoiding work, or that they prefer to stay at home, but rather that many have had a glimpse of what it’s like to work in peace and don’t want to return to a toxic work culture.

For this reason, building Emotional Intelligence is a core leadership competency. Fortunately, building EQ is possible, and requires attention to each of the four qualities of EQ, briefly described below.


The four qualities of EQ
  1. Self-awareness, referring to how well you are aware of yourself as a leader.
  2. Self-management, which is the ability to manage yourself based on what you know about yourself.
  3. Social awareness, or the ability to discern the difference in others’ relationship management approaches.
  4. Relationship management, which is determining how different people communicate, comprehend and are motivated, and the ability to lead and respond accordingly.

In a post-COVID work world, dominated by ‘the Big Resignation”, being an emotionally intelligent leader – able to manage yourself and others – is key and critical to recruiting and keeping good employees.

By: Dr. Dharius Daniels is an emotional intelligence expert, author of Relational Intelligence: The People Skills You Need For The Life Of Purpose You Want, and former professor at Princeton University.

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15 Tips For Elevating Your Leadership Mindset

We’ve rounded up some of the most acute advice on elevating yourself to a leadership mindset, from the women leaders we’ve interviewed in our Voices of Experience leadership series this year.

1. Don’t Shy Away From Hard Truths

“To be a good leader, you need to be able to cheer your team on with all the good stuff. But to make changes and keep progressing, you also need to be willing to address the challenges and difficult matters,” notes Marcia Diaz of PGIM Real Estate. “I think people appreciate direct and honest feedback and ‘knowing where they stand.’”

2. Let Go of Certainty

“Women have a tendency to be very certainty driven, and they end up not taking as many risks and opportunities. It’s like that quote ‘doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will’,” says Monica Marquez of Beyond Barriers. “Women need to be much more open to taking the opportunity and embracing just-in-time learning, so they don’t rob themselves before they try.”

3. Keep Personal Fulfillment As a Priority

“Someone once told me that when your career takes off, something else is going to suffer. For a long time, I was convinced that you have to work very hard while other things would have to take a backseat,” says Anna de Jong of PGIM Fixed Income. “You are actually more successful when you understand what is really important to you and cultivate personal satisfaction, as well.”

4. Set Your Vision Ahead

“The more senior you get, the more you are responsible for steering and being able to see around the corner and anticipating the different challenges that you’ll face along the way,” says Katherine Stoller of Shearman & Sterling. “You get more experienced at identifying the problems you may be seeing tomorrow.”

5. Broaden Your Circle of Concern

“When I was subsequently promoted…I remember asking myself: am I willing to fight for my team, even to the extent that I may compromise my job? Am I willing to fight for my team for what is right?” say Geklang Lee of PGIM Real Estate, Asia-Pacific. “Only when I was prepared to do that, did I accept the role.”

6. Lead With the Space For Growth

“When you are hands on, you do things a certain way and tend to believe others should do it the same way. But people have different approaches, and it takes time to admit to yourself those approaches are fine, and so are the consequences,” says Silke Soennecken of Commerzbank New York. “You are supporting the growth of people by allowing them to also make mistakes. You’re going to support and guide them, but there’s purpose in delegating and giving others the opportunity to grow and shine in their own way.”

7. Don’t Just Manage, Inspire

“I would rather be a leader than manager. To be a good leader, you really do have to have a vision, a mission. I want people to feel inspired to get on board with what we’re doing and feel purpose and connection,” says Erika Karp of Pathstone. “Management is structural and systems and measures and accountability are critical. But I don’t love management as much as I love leadership.”

8. Model A Leadership that Gives Power Away

“One thing I learned through my community organizing training with Midwest Academy is this idea of leadership: that giving power away is how you grow a powerful movement,” says Caroline Samponaro of Lyft. “I focus on imparting that message to those I manage: how are we giving away power to build a strength of team and community that can be that much more successful?”

9. Know Your Network of Influence

“People often want to go directly to the key decision maker and say ‘get to know me’, but if you get to know the influencers of the key decision makers, you become an influencer in the organization as well,” says Natalie Tucker of Radioligand Therapy. “When joining an organization, this is a good first step for those who are more introverted and looking to quickly create positive impact on the business because you’re able to have honest dialogues on key matters. It’s about reading the organization, and learning about its people – not their title, but who they are, and their communication networks. Once you understand the communication network of an organization, you can navigate it well.”

10. Invite Being Challenged

“I’m completely open to, and actually encourage, my team telling me when I’m wrong. I invite them to convince me that I’m wrong. I love that!” says Grace Lee of S&P Global. “I want us to have the best ideas, and that’s only possible when we are all contributing, debating and challenging each other.”

11. Stay Grounded In Yourself

“Some people would say you shouldn’t necessarily point out or emphasize the difference,” reflects Nneka Orji of Morrinson Wealth Management UK,“but I think it was so helpful in terms of me knowing who I was and who I am, and being true to myself. Of course I wasn’t always as confident in this respect and I’ve grown a lot since, but being comfortable in your own skin, in terms of your own history and culture, is critical. As long as you know who you are, you know your motivations, your boundaries and you make decisions in line with these.”

12. Diversify Your Personal Board of Directors

“I realized the people I go to often are very similar to me, so when I go to them for advice, they’re probably going to give me what I want to hear,” says Leah Meehan of State Street. “So I have one person on my board who has been a friend for a long time, and he tells me ‘how it is’. He does not hold anything back, to the point it sometimes upsets me, but he’s helping me to move ahead; I need more of those people, to diversify my board.”

13. Stand Tall in Your Value

“The biggest thing I think I took away from mentors and coaches over the years was to learn to give a value to myself,” says Beverly Jo Slaughter of Wells Fargo Advisers. “External recognition is a wonderful thing, but we all have to learn to give recognition to ourselves, to recognize when we have done well, to celebrate our value and feel confident that we bring it to the table.”

14. Come From an Intrapreneurial Mindset

“So as I think of being an ‘intrapreneurial executive,’ I bring that same sense of acting like an owner to the organization I work for. I’m going to be constantly thinking about ways of improving the business,” says Linda Descano of Red Havas. “I act like I own it, as if it’s my investment. It’s working with that same sense of responsibility and drive to make it grow.”

15. Foster a Longterm Perspective

“It’s a long career and so easy to get wrapped up in the here and the now, especially when you start out,” says Emily Leitch of Shearman & Sterling. “But you really have to remember — when you feel overwhelmed, when you’re in a transaction and it’s all-consuming — you have to be able to ride those waves and think from a long-term perspective.”

By Aimee Hansen

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How to Make Your Team the Best It Can Be

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woman chairing a boardroom meetingImagine a world where your boss genuinely cares about you, where he or she nurtures you, recognizes and rewards you fairly, always taking time to acknowledge your hard work and dedication. Not only that, but they respect you and support your professional growth.

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To Allow Women to be Leaders, We Need to Change the Culture

Speaker-hands-upIt would be hard to argue that there has ever been a better time to be a professional woman, but despite making up close to 50% of America’s workforce, women are still very under-represented in executive roles (just 5.2% of Forbes 500 CEOs are women). Smart companies that understand the value of diversity and well-read hiring managers know that female-led companies are often more productive and financially stable. Yet women continue to be a scarcity in boardrooms and corner offices around the country. Visionaries like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and scholars like Harvard’s Dr. Hermina Ibarra posit that the lack of female leadership has less to do with the paths available to the modern woman, and results more from the context in which these women are expected to learn to lead.

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