Leadership

When I say “sponsorship support,” what comes to mind? Do you think of an athlete wearing branded gear? A big-name beverage company behind the Superbowl half-time show? While these are types of sponsorship, they are not what I’m referring to. In corporate workplace settings, sponsorship support refers to someone in a senior position advocating for you and your career advancement, usually as an outgrowth of a solid mentoring relationship.

When I was in my 20s and working at Apple, I had my own experience with sponsorship support and that’s where I learned the importance of it. I’ll share more about my story later in this post but first, let’s look at the similarities and differences between mentorship and sponsorship.

“Why don’t you try finding a coach?” my friend suggested to me as I recounted my woes of trying to move to a new city and find a new job at the same time. I’d been at it for three months and was not seeing results. I felt completely stuck. Even worse, old voices from the past had started taunting me in my head, telling me I wasn’t good enough and feeding into my doubts. I had heard about coaching and thought why not give it a try. Turns out I got a lot more than I expected.

Coaching and consulting are typically seen as two different services that don’t work together. You either get a coach, or you get a consultant. A quick Internet search of the term “coaching and consulting” results in 7 of the top 8 articles pitting the two sets of skills against each other, with only one article blending the two concepts and offering the new term “coachsulting.” In my experience as both a coach and a consultant, I have seen the benefits of offering both and being able to switch hats while working with clients.

Leadership teams of major organizations haven’t historically been diverse, but there is a way to make things better. Diversity in senior leadership teams takes intention, work, and planning. In my previous articles, we examined how retaining underrepresented talent as well as identifying where minority staff aren’t given promotions in your organization are keys to fostering a diverse workplace. However, if you really want the diversity within your organization to flourish, you need to create and implement a clear succession planning strategy so that underrepresented individuals have opportunities to advance all the way through, from entry-level to VP and even extending to C-Suite positions.

As greater numbers of organizations seek to include more ethnically and culturally diverse people in their workforces, it becomes increasingly important to address differences in representation among the various levels of staff and leadership. In my previous article, I shared about the importance of retaining staff from underrepresented communities and looking for “leaks” in the company. Today, we will examine the problem of “clogs” in the leadership pipeline that prevents some employees from moving up in an organization.

Recent studies are proving what many have suspected for years: More diverse workforces outperform less diverse ones. McKinsey’s Diversity wins: How inclusion matters report, published in May 2020, states that companies in the top quartile of ethnic and cultural diversity were 36% more likely to outperform companies in the bottom quartile[1]. So, if your corporation is not ethnically and culturally diverse, then you do not currently have the best talent available.