The Difference Between Mentorship and Sponsorship

Q&A with Rosalind Chow, Carnegie Mellon Professor of Organizational Behavior, and author of The Doors You Can Open

Rosalind Chow is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Her academic focus is on how we participate in social systems, emphasizing the importance of rethinking how we engage with those systems and use our social connections to elevate others.

She is the author of the new book, The Doors You Can Open: A New Way to Network, Build Trust, and Use Your Influence to Create a More Inclusive Workplace that came out April 8th.

As she writes in the introduction, “an entire book could be written about the factors that hold people back, about why doors so often do not open .... This is not that book. This book is about the people who notice that someone is outside and mobilize other people to open the door.”

I’m so excited to share our conversation about why sponsorship is overlooked in the conversation, taking a backseat to or getting conflated with mentorship, and why we ought to shine a spotlight on sponsorship.

Understanding the distinction between mentorship and sponsorship

Annie: Before we get to talking about the importance and consequences of distinguishing between sponsorship and mentorship, can you explain what those terms mean?

Rosalind Chow: The big thing that I argue about is that mentorship is dyadic phenomenon. Sponsorship is more of a phenomenon where the sponsor is not trying to change anything about the protege. They're essentially managing other people's impression of the protege. It's almost entirely impression management, but on the behalf of somebody else.

Mentorship has often been described as this phenomenon where a more senior person takes a more junior person under their wing and cultivates them into someone who advances more quickly in the organization than maybe they would have otherwise if they didn't have that support. Both sponsorship and mentorship are both things that this more senior person could be giving the more junior person, which is partly why I think it's always been bundled together. They're both forms of support you can give.

The reason differentiating the two is critical is because there is a difference in who or what is being asked to change.

Mentorship is really asking the mentees to change. It's like, I'm going to give you feedback on X, Y, and Z. You need to work on these skills, or get this additional education, or you need this extra certification. Or, you have this difficult problem, and I’m going to help you by explaining what I would do in that situation. This is all stuff that you're telling the mentee that the mentee is then meant to enact on their own.

I try to be very clear about my language. Proteges are who sponsors work with. Mentees are who mentors work with. When you have a protege, you're like, I already think that protege is great. I don't need them to be any different than who they are. What I need to change is the social environment around my protégé, so that people are aware of who they are and what they're capable of. That's how they're going to advance.

As a sponsor, I'm not trying to change the protege. I am trying to change the relationships that other people have with my protege. When you talk about networking and making connections, I see that as sponsorship because what you're essentially doing is you're trying to create relationships that didn't exist previously. Anytime you do something that changes other people's relationships with each other, that's sponsorship.

The outsized focus on mentorship

Annie: Do you feel like, in today's world, particularly with the confusion between mentorship and sponsorship, that there isn't enough emphasis on sponsorship? One of the common questions that I get from young people is, how do I get a mentor? (But that's what they always want to know. I've never had anybody ask me, how do I find a sponsor?

Rosalind Chow: Yes, I think that people have focused on mentorship a lot. I think mentorship is really important because, especially for people who are just coming into the workforce, they're junior. They don't know what they don't know. They're half baked. They need someone to help them become fully baked. That's where mentors come in.

I think the reason why people focus so much on mentorship is because it's an easier ask than sponsorship, because it doesn't risk that social capital in the same way that sponsorship does. If I spend a long time mentoring someone and they go off and they end up totally crashing and burning, unless I've made a huge deal about how that person is my mentee, no one's going to come back and be like, you really failed them as a mentor. That's highly unlikely to happen.

The cost to having a bad mentee is that you gave up a lot of your time and maybe you're sad about it, but your reputation for the most part stays intact. For sponsorship, it's not like that, especially if you do put a lot of effort behind it. You’ve gone out, said all those nice things, and told me about how this person's amazing. If I check them out and I do not see it – or worse, if I take your recommendation and they let me down – it's not just that I have a negative impression of the protege now. I'm also wondering, what's going on with your judgment?

There is this this riskiness to sponsorship that I don't think is as evident with mentorship. That's a big reason I think there are so many people who focus a lot on mentorship.

Kim Ng’s story: The importance of a (non-mentor) sponsor

Rosalind Chow: Now, the other reason they get confused all the time is because mentors often are the ones who sponsor. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Annie: I know you illustrate that with a notable example in the book’s introduction. Given the overlap between mentorship and sponsorship, along with the confusion, could you share that story?

Rosalind Chow: That's why I opened the book with the example of Kim Ng, because no one on earth would argue that Kim Ng needed more mentorship.

Annie: I know who she is, but can you just set the stage for that, because I don't think everybody knows about the baseball connection and Derek Jeter.

Rosalind Chow: Kim Ng was the first female general manager in Major League Baseball, actually in all four major professional sports associations. She was the general manager for the Miami Marlins. When she was announced as the new general manager, all of a sudden people were like, oh, wait, this woman has been in MLB for 30 years? She is overly qualified for this position. She probably should have been a general manager somewhere like 10 years earlier. What on earth took so long? You could spin it as it's like, oh, all the teams are biased, which is probably true. But all the teams that interviewed her, which were quite a few, clearly saw her as being a viable candidate. They just couldn't get over how risky it would be to be the first team to go with a female GM.

It wasn't until she had this powerful sponsor in Derek Jeter, who was at that time a co-owner and CEO of the Miami Marlins. He basically was like, oh, we need a GM. I know exactly who we need. We need to hire Kim. He called her up and she was the only person they interviewed. But it was because he was willing to say, “Look, I believe in her.”

Annie: This is where I think about sponsorship is so incredibly important because one of the things that I think about my own work is the interaction between status-quo bias and omission-commission bias. There's a distinction between the two. Loss aversion is a bias where we tend to index more on the potential losses than we do on the gains, but it isn't symmetrically applied. Rather, when we are picking something that's status quo, we're pretty tolerant of the losses that accrue from that. But when we're veering from the status quo, we're very intolerant of the potential losses that accrue from that. When I'm listening to this story about Kim Ng, I hear omission/commission bias in what you're saying. She was probably better than a lot of the candidates out there, but she was so out of the box that they were like, this is too risky. It wasn’t risky in the sense that they're more likely to have a bad outcome if they hire her. It's risky in the sense of if they have a bad outcome, people are going to be more likely to blame the decision-making, as opposed to making a status-quo choice by going with one of the many 50-year-old white guys.

That's where it feels like sponsorship can come in real handy for a couple reasons. One is that it increases the chances that people are going to go with a more out-of-the-box choice. But the other thing is it is a de-risking strategy if we're worried about having a bad outcome. You could say, well, it was Derek Jeter's idea, in the sense that there's social proof to it. Now, all of a sudden, you weren't quite as exposed on the downside as you otherwise would have been because of the social proof associated with it.

Rosalind Chow: The way I talk about it is that really powerful sponsors are essentially lending the weight of their social capital to their proteges. They are claiming an association with the protege. It's like co-signing a loan. If you want to think about it that way, it is de-risking in the sense that you essentially have a guarantee from somebody who you are pretty certain has the resources to buffer in case of default.

Ways sponsors use their social capital

Annie: You describe sponsors as opening doors for their proteges. Depending on the sponsor’s influence and how they choose to apply it, I know that can mean a lot of different things. You can open doors a little or a lot.

Rosalind Chow: There’s another example from the book that might be helpful here. I talk about this crotchety but very accomplished medical researcher. He has tons of grant funding. He's always being asked to speak at places, but he’s crotchety, and he doesn't want to go speak. He would send his protege. Now, there's a difference between him saying, “Thank you for your invitation, I can't make it, but here's this other person you should consider, my protege.” That's one version.

But what he did was say, “I can't make it, but here's the person you should ask instead. He’s CC'd on this email and keep me in the loop as you decide how you're going to make this happen.” To me, he blocked off all the exits in terms of how much behavioral freedom the other party has to decide how they want to respond to the situation. Basically, if you decide not to invite the protégé to speak, they’ll know it and I’ll know it, and you don't want to piss me off because I’ve got status. This all goes to questions about, as a sponsor, how much power you have and how the way you wield can impact things. I don't want to call it bullying behavior, but definitely some of these constraints that you put on other people impact the amount that you can do that. But that would be another instance where there was a softer way of doing it, and he just went super hard at it.

Sponsorship’s compounding effect versus mentorship’s linear effect

Annie: As I listen to you, the thing that comes to my mind is this idea that the benefits of sponsorship compound. It feels like mentorship is more of a linear progression, and then sponsorship is more like a geometric progression. Do I have this right, and can you speak to this subject?

Rosalind Chow: Yes, and I agree with you. The way I think about the compounding effect is that there are more people impacted positively through sponsorship than through mentorship. When you're a mentor and you have a mentee who does really well, you get personal satisfaction. Maybe you even get a reputation boost, and your mentee does great. But with sponsorship, because it inherently involves more people, if it goes well, additional people benefit. The audience benefits from being connected with the protégé. The protégé benefits. And then the sponsor benefits because they start gaining a reputation for being able to spot talent, for being able to identify opportunities that makes sense to others, and also the collective benefits. This goes back to what I was talking about earlier, about networking as a way to benefit the collective. I agree with you. I think the benefits to sponsorship are actually steeper than the benefits to mentorship. But then again, so are the costs.

Annie: I want to put it in a slightly different frame and discuss another way sponsorship spreads benefits. If I'm thinking about the ways that I could help another person, just trying to maximize for them, by mentoring them, I'm giving them a benefit that they're going to accrue over time. If I'm a good mentor, it's going to make them better. But if I sponsor them and it's a successful sponsorship, the people that I've now introduced them to could also sponsor them. It feels like as far as benefit, there's a compounding effect for the person that you're sponsoring, the protégé.

Rosalind Chow: Absolutely.

Annie: And the protégé becomes part of this network who can use their place in the network to sponsor others, and so on and so forth.

Rosalind Chow: Yeah, absolutely.

Sponsorship’s role in perpetuating inequity – and its potential for reducing it

Annie: This now brings me to this question. When we're thinking about accruing wealth measured by dollars, if you have wealth, you have that to invest, and then you make more money because of that compounding effect. But we know that some people come into the world with more money, and some people come into the world with less money, and there's a penalty to that. As we think about a society, let's imagine that we believe in meritocracy, and we think that the best person should win the job. Isn't there this exact same problem with sponsorship? That no matter how good you are, if you are disadvantaged, your potential sponsors don't have the same type of connections, so it's harder for you. Aren’t you starting far behind on that exponential growth?

Rosalind Chow: Correct. That is definitely a point I try to raise. Sponsorship is not an unmitigated good. It depends on how we choose to use it. The issue right now is that a lot of us already do it, but we're not being very thoughtful about who we do it for, and we're not being very thoughtful about who's in our networks. This definitely goes back to, who do you know? What are the resources in the social circles that you run in, and what sorts of opportunities can they give you access to? You're right. If people who are in social circles that are rich in social capital, rich in lots of opportunities that could generate more wealth down the line, if they are constantly just sponsoring each other, that is how we get these incredibly unequal systems that we currently have.

Part of the book is my attempt to make it so that more of the people who are coming to talk to you will ask you about finding a sponsor. They will now know that this thing called “sponsors” exist. They'll realize that, oh, I don't just need mentorship. I also need sponsorship. How do I get people to talk about me in the rooms where it matters? And also, how am I going to find people who are not in my standard social circle so that I do get access to these opportunities that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise?

I do have that line in the book because I feel very strongly that it shouldn’t be entirely up to the proteges to be doing the work in this way. It's the people who know the decision makers or who are the decision makers who should be looking more expansively and finding more different people to sponsor. Going back to the book, you'll see I go through this whole network assessment exercise where I'm hoping that readers will be able to see for themselves, oh, I might be a little bit more limited in the types of people I can sponsor, and what does that mean about me and what can I do to fix that?

But you're absolutely right. It is true that sponsorship can perpetuate inequities, but it can also be part of the solution in the sense that without it, there are lots of people who wouldn't have gotten these opportunities otherwise. Kim Ng would never have gotten this opportunity if Derek Jeter hadn't been willing to think outside of the box a little bit. He's also a special case, because he cares a lot about diversity and inclusion in baseball. He's made it one of his missions to get more women into baseball as well. He had a little bit of an agenda of his own. But this is all to say that people who are in positions of power, if they have that agenda, can open the field to a lot more people. Then, once the field is open, other people are also going to be looking for opportunities to be more diverse and more inclusive. I'm hoping that those are also exponential benefits that you're seeing that accrue to the community overall.

Annie: It sounds like what you’re saying is that both potential sponsors and potential protégés can address inequity by greater knowledge and intentionality. Is that accurate?

Rosalind Chow: Certainly, one hope for the book is that it will give people a framework or a language in what they’re looking for. So, yes. But a thing that I feel strongly about is that the people who are in lower positions of power and status shouldn’t be the ones trying to get the resources that they need. People should be more proactively looking for opportunities to give those resources away. A big emphasis of the book is on being a sponsor.

What I think is frustrating about how some people might think of sponsorship, going back to this networking idea, is that you have to overstate how great you are to get other people to pay attention to you.

When it comes to sponsorship, especially when you're talking about a higher power person sponsoring a lower power person, there's this concern that often comes up of, I don't want to be saved. It's not about someone saving you. It's about someone noticing how awesome you are and making sure that other people are able to see it. Kim Ng didn't need to be saved. She just needed people to see her and to be willing to take a risk. I don't consider that saving, but I do feel like there's this weird power imbalance that often gets wrapped up into sponsorship that sometimes can complicate things.

Summing up

Annie: One of the things I love about the book is that you’re introducing this separate networking concept of sponsorship. No matter who we are, we’re all thinking about mentorship. We understand that, but now you know that this other thing exists, and let’s talk about that. Everybody should buy your book because it will make society better and fairer.

Rosalind Chow: It's certainly the hope. But I think you're absolutely right. The way it happens now is the doors are only opening for some people.

Annie: I think there are a lot of people who don't know the doors exist or could be opened. I'm super excited for your book launch.