Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:03:47: Difference between a sponsor and a mentor
00:07:00: To get a sponsor
00:09:42: Your invisible value
00:11:40: Invisible, distinct and unique
00:13:05: Mentors, then into sponsors
00:14:06: The second conversation is quite different
00:15:16: You've got to give before you get
00:16:49: Attitude
00:19:19: Mentees are taught are taught to be pretty passive
00:20:38: Place to start
00:22:43: Protégé pitfalls
00:26:05: Future of sponsorship
00:27:28: Sylvia's career advice
00:28:14: Final comments.

Helen Tupper: Hi, everybody, it's Helen from the Squiggly Careers podcast.  If it's your first time listening, welcome.  This is a weekly podcast.  Normally you hear from me and Sarah and we talk about the ups and downs and the ins and outs of Squiggly Careers, but today I'm actually not joined by Sarah, I'm going to be joined by somebody called Sylvia Ann Hewlett who you may or may not be aware of.  I'll tell you a bit more about Sylvia in a second and we are going to talk about the topic of sponsorship, and this is part of our Ask the Expert series where we find people to talk to who know a lot about a very specific topic that we think can help you right now in your Squiggly Career.

So, let me tell you a little bit more about Sylvia and her work.  Sylvia's an economist, she's an author and she's an expert in talent development.  She's got a PhD in economics, she's the author of ten articles on Harvard Business Review and also the author of ten books, including two of my favourites which are relevant to today's topic; that is: the first one, Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor; and also, The Sponsor Effect.

I first saw Sylvia speak when I was at BP, so this is about ten years ago, and her work has stuck with me since then.  I think sponsorships are a really important part of how people can succeed in Squiggly Careers, and she is such a great expert on this topic.  I don't see that much written; there aren't that many books on sponsorship and Sylvia has written quite a few, and if you actually would like to hear from somebody else on this topic, I really like Carla Harris's TED talk.  I'll link to that so that you've got it as well in the show notes if you want to dive a bit deeper into the topic.

In the conversation Sylvia and I have, we discuss the difference between sponsorship and mentorship and actually why they're not mutually exclusive, so you can have a sponsor and a mentor and they do something slightly different for you in your career.  We talk about why sponsorship is a two-way street, so how you as the person being sponsored can benefit, but also the benefit that the sponsor gets as well.

One the other things that we talk about is how in the current context many of us are still working remotely for some if not all of our time, but how actually that's not a disadvantage to getting sponsored, how it can actually increase our opportunities for access to people.  It's a conversation that is full of practical examples and lots of breadth as well, like Sylvia talks through lots of different people that she has worked with and how they have used sponsorship to benefit them in their career and I just feel like it just makes it more realistic and less theoretical, so I hope you find that too.

One of the things that I love that she talks about is the importance of surfacing your invisible assets, so there are lots of strengths that people might see but there are also lots of invisible assets that you can use to benefit your sponsors and build some of those relationships as well.

The key insights from the conversation will be captured in our Squiggly Careers Podsheet and you can get that from amazingif.com; just go to listen and you'll be able to download that from the episode.  I would love to know your thoughts as well on this conversation, the insights that you've gleaned, the actions you're going to take away.  You can get in touch with us either on Instagram, so just message there, we're just @amazingif or you can email us if you'd rather than do that, we're Helen&Sarah@squigglycareers.com.  I'll be back at the end to say goodbye.

Hi Sylvia and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Well, it's great to be with you today.

Helen Tupper: So, we are talking today about the topic of sponsorship and it's something that we talk about on our programmes, and I often see people who are curious but don't know much about it.  Often, I get curiosity and a bit of confusion with mentorship, so I wonder if we start right there, we try and clean up some of the confusion.  What is the difference between a sponsor and a mentor?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Very simply, mentorship is a gift; a somewhat more experienced person who was a friendly, supportive interest in your progression, gives you some advice.  Maybe you take some notes, maybe you arrange for coffee in three months, but it's about your development and its advice is at the edges.

Sponsorship on the other hand is an investment.  It's a senior person who sits in a seat where they can open doors for you, and essentially you impress the heck out of them because you do have to give before you get and then they open the doors; so, it's about an exchange of value, if you like.

Let me give you an example: Tiger, what a name for a CEO, Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO of Genpact, a big business services drum.  He, three years ago, decided to sponsor someone called Katie Stein.  Why did he want to invest in this person, right?  Well, he was looking for two things.  He said, "Look, I want a different muscle, a different voice at our leadership table.  I'm looking for a chief strategy officer, can look at the long run, can drive consensual conversations, can bring in knowledge from the outside".  He said, "The problem with us leaders right now, we're all kind of alpha men, we're mostly engineers.  We're great, but we've got to mix it up". 

So, he was looking for this different muscle and he said, "I also need a woman, because we're expanding in Romania, they are all kinds of female technologists in Eastern Europe, we want to become a magnet for them.  You can't be what you can see so unless we have some women at the top who are fantastic, we won't be able to tap into this new talent."  So, Katie was up for both those things, she thought it was fantastic, that she was truly valued and what did she get out of it?  Well, she had a great career at BCG, she was a very valued piece of that company, but she wanted to be in a real corporation, not just advising, but actually running the show.  Becoming part of the C-suite in a big company was a dream of hers, but she also went out of her way to say to Tiger, "You've got to have my back.  I want you to set me up for success".

What he then did for her, he gave her the prime spot at the big retreat that winter to present to the investors and he took her out to meet the key stakeholders of the firm.  So, they were delivering for each other like crazy; it's transactional.  I always say that sponsorship is this two-way street.  Now, you can have a mentor as well because they can be fantastic when you're struggling.  As a safety valve, you can complain to a mentor or have them sort out some fork in the road that you're dealing with, but the sponsorship relationship is about driving value together, it's about delivering value to each other; it's an investment.

Helen Tupper: I've been familiar with your work since 2013, and yet I see a lot of people still struggling to get a sponsor and I wonder how much a lack of confidence or an inability to ask for the help is maybe stopping people getting the sponsorship they would benefit from?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: You know, Helen, this is why I've become very tactical.  I've actually got a playbook, how the heck you bring this off.  I'll give you an example: I created a video recently around a young Asian woman, 23 years old, her name is Jing Huang, working at PIMCO on the West Coast.  So, what she did, which was a fantastic tactic to deepen what was still a mentoring relationship, but she wanted a deepen it into true sponsorship. 

So, she drifted by her mentor's office one day and she said, "Look, I've got some assets that you perhaps you don't know about, and I can see a way in which it could work for the team, and for the company".  He didn't have much time and he said, "Well, why don't you just think this through, make a list and then let's do a 15-minute zoom.  On Friday, I've got some time at 6.00 you present it to me.  I mean I don't have time to do massive amounts of research in terms of your background".

So, what did Jing do?  She made a little list of six things, three things he probably knew about from her performance reviews and from her resume and the fact that she had been salesperson of the year, for instance, you know a big feather in her cap; but there were three invisible assets that were on this list.  First up she spoke Russian and she felt that that was an asset these days because the first was expanding in Russia and he had no idea. 

The other thing she said on this list, and she presented it to him via zoom is, "Look, I'm the Chairperson of the Alumni Association of the most prestigious business school in Beijing.  I've just been giving some virtual conferences, moderating sessions, organising the whole thing.  I have an amazing network of up-and-coming Chinese executives who are a natural market for some of our products. Let's work together and try and create a new venture".

He was awoken to the power of difference, right.  Her ethnicity and the specifics of her background were hidden, somewhat invisible to the firm, but she saw ways to translate this into stuff that could be valuable, and it took a 15-minute zoom call.

Helen Tupper: Would you suggest, because I love the idea of making it tactical for people, even though it's a strategic thing to do for your career, you can kind of start tactical, almost to write down your visible strengths because you've got to believe in those and be confident in them; but then also think about some of your invisible value as well?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Yes, because another example I use in this playbook is a young gay guy.  So, he was toiling away at Merrill Lynch, you know, in the lower ranks of the wealth management division and he realised that he had these amazing networks of gay professionals that he had shared all round him, he was very active in the gay community.  He said, "Look, gay individuals have very different financial needs.  Only 14% of us will ever have children, right.  Our needs at aged 60 or 70 are quite different"; so, he again went to a senior woman who was an Indian woman, who understood difference in some ways, but she had no idea of this community. 

Again, he gave her a set of ideas and then she put him to work, she said, "You've got to prove to me that this is a viable concept, I'll give you just a tiny budget, see if you can make stuff happen".  I mean sponsors don't easily lend their credibility, but she honestly had not thought that through, and in that particular case, they grew a whole business for Merrill Lynch because they designed products, financial products, that suited the lifetime needs of a gay couple or a gay individual etc.

So, utilising the power of your special assets, and it could be for instance an amazing knowledge of the New Jersey marketplace, or in my case having grown up in Wales, which is a very specific context in which one needs to have some cultural fluency to position a message or indeed a product.

Helen Tupper: So, it's not just about what strengths are visible and what value might be invisible, it's also what makes you distinctive and unique and it's in that you can almost make your pitch to your sponsor for support?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Yes, and of course in a weird way, the remote working that we're all involved in right now make it almost easier because Jing's story happened at the beginning of the pandemic and people were going into lockdown, and it was actually a whole lot easier for her mentor, that she wanted to move to being a sponsor of hers, to free up 15 minutes on Friday than to arrange some elaborate breakfast or something, right.  So, in strange ways this can work.

Helen Tupper: I think that's really good to hear because a lot of people that I talk to as well have almost said, "Oh well networking and personal development has got harder over the last 12 months because I'm not seeing people informally quite as much", but actually your access in that example, the availability and access increases.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Right, and you know I think an enormously good tactic is to look around your world and see if there's a key person who can open a door you need to be opened; and if you're a beginning entrepreneur you need that funding, right, if you're climbing a ladder in government or in the private sector, there's always someone up there who you know if you can again impress the heck out of them and they end up understanding your value, can do powerful things for you.

Identify people who sit in those positions.  Ask them for a little mentoring; that is acceptable because everyone knows it's pretty light touch, and then turn them into sponsors.  That is the most in your own power pathway to sponsorship.

Helen Tupper: So, if I was to take that example with you, for example, I'm not putting you on the spot I'm just trying to work this through Sylvia.  Let's say I said, "Sylvia is a woman who can open a door that would be valuable to my career".  I'm going to start with mentoring so the first question that I might ask you would be around, "Could you share some of your advice and experience with me?  You've done some of the things that I would love to do", so it's more of a mentoring ask.  Then I would then turn that into, after having that meeting and hopefully had a sense of connection with you, the next question that I would ask would be more of a, "Sylvia, there's an opportunity that I'm interested in, could you please help me?"

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: No.

Helen Tupper: Okay.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: The second conversation is quite different.

Helen Tupper: Okay.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: The first one is absolutely that you are seeking guidance and how much you would value it, because you identify in some way with the amazing things this person has done, and it reflects your own ambitions in life.  The second conversation is what can I do for you, which is why it is different, and I'll give you an example from a few years back. 

I realised you always want new sponsors because you're unless you're 85 and totally checked out, you always need people to open doors, right?  This is a lifelong set of muscles that you're building.  So, I realised that what I would love to do would be to have a little more influence in Washington in policy, because I'd done a lot of work with private sector and I thought, "Well, I could contribute", but then I didn't know anyone in Washington who was powerful.  So I got out my rolodex, I mean literally dusted it off, and I found someone, someone called Alan Krueger who I had taught with at Princeton, many years ago, who was now the Head of Council of economic advisers.

Then I thought to myself, "You've got to give before you get", so I figured out what I could do for him that would help him and then I called him.  He took my call, he remembered me, which was fantastic right.  I said, "How great to be connected again.  I realise that you've just had a whole lot of additional projects dumped on your shoulders", because Obama had asked him to do a whole deep dive into black women and poverty.  I said, "You know I've done work on that; I can pull some data together and I'll come down and give a presentation because it might help get this thing going". 

He almost fell off this chair, because if an old friend calls you and you're in a position of power you groan and think, "Well, they're going to ask for something", but I didn't.  So, I did a whole of free work for him, I went down, and he had very little headcount to put on this, so it was enormously helpful to him.  Then six months later he made the phone call to the White House to get me on the committee that I wanted to be on.

Helen Tupper: Just in that example, that person in a position of power and whether it's politics or the private sector or whatever level somebody's at, is there more than a position of power that makes somebody a good sponsor?  I'm thinking if someone's listening now, they're like, "Oh wow do I have to ask to help them?"  They're scanning around their organisation they're trying to spot their sponsor, it's someone that can open a door that they're interested in, so they've got access and a position of power; is there anything else that makes that profile?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Well along with delivering something of value, the other thing that is very, very important in terms of reframing sponsorship is attitude.  Again, let me tell the story because stories stick.  Mellody Hobson, who's now a pretty famous black woman in America, she's on the Disney Board, she's president of Ariel Investments, which is a financial services firm that only deals with the black community.

She joined that firm straight out of Princeton, and she joined the firm because she had a passion for helping black families achieve financial security and she became the Chief of Staff to the CEO, John Rogers.  As he said, "Look I expected her to be an amazing performer, I expected her to be on mission and totally committed, but the thing she delivered that made her stand out is that she left her ego at the door".  She was willing to fix a text SNAFU or run off to the Chamber of Commerce at 9.00pm Friday evening to give a speech because he couldn't do it, right?  She understood that she was in the business of making that firm and him successful.

Even if you don't have all kinds of special skills or speak Russian, I think it's that attitude of being enormously proactive and leaving your ego at the door so that people understand your enthusiasm and exhilaration at the opportunity to work with this senior person.

The other value add she eventually brought to the table, because then he was ready to give her all kinds of chances, she designed a whole strategy which was outreach to women, black women because she said, "Look, it's a different marketplace from black men, in terms of what they're doing on this planet".  They were actually earning better than black men, in the States, etc, but it was her attitude.  He used to call, I mean this sounds strange, he used to call her his "grasshopper".  I said to Mellody, "Are you sure I should use that word, it doesn't sound respectful enough?".  She said, "No, use it, that's really what I was".  Now, obviously the grasshopper became the President of the company by the time she was 31, but the attitude bit I think is again so different, that energy.

Mentees are taught are taught to be pretty passive.  They ask for help and they take advice and so you have to change your mindset when you move into the sponsorship frame, and you've got to become indispensable to this person.  Let's assume he's very busy, doesn't have enough bandwidth and you can be transformative.

Helen Tupper: I think maybe that's part of the challenge because that takes an investment, doesn't it?  If you want to go and be a good protégé for a sponsor, then that proactivity, that attitude that being clear about how you can help and making that offer, that takes an effort.  So, it's not easy; it's easier to be a mentee and get a mentor.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Right and you can't fake it, there's an authenticity to your passion.  I mean for instance, Mellody couldn't fake her devotion to this firm.  She really believed that it was making it a huge difference, and you can think about all of the folks in the not-for-profit sector, working at Shelter or the Shine Trust.  You are there because you love the mission of this place, but that shouldn’t disallow you from wanting to be a leader there, the tactics are the same.

Helen Tupper: So, if someone's listening to this now and they've had a bit of aha moment with, "Oh that's the difference and that's what I need to do to get the sponsorship that can help me succeed in my career", what would your advice be for the first thing that they should do, if they're thinking, "Okay, I understand this, it's good for my career this year, I want to get started with sponsorship", what do you think would be the first most meaningful thing that they could do to help themselves?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Well, I think you need to have two things in your back pocket.  One is doing this inventory of your currency in the world, your assets.  It's exciting because you're actually trying to distil the strengths you have and some of them are hidden, which is why this is incredibly good for diverse individuals, or even people like me that come from weird and fashionable pieces of Wales, which had its own burdens, but it's really about lifting up your whole self. 

I don't know whether people have seen the Oprah interview of Megan and Harry, but one thing Megan said was that in one of her meetings early on in her career as a royal, she was told to tone herself down.  They only wanted 50% of her, she was a little much.  Oprah said, "Well, I don't know how that's survivable if you can only be showing 50% of yourself", but that is the experience of I think many women, many diverse individuals in the workplace.

So, the example I gave from the young Chinese woman, Jing, I mean it's a fabulous example.  You know there are ways in which creating an inventory of your assets and figuring out what might be valuable in the career that you're building is an amazing exercise.

The second one, you've got to dream and figure out what your destination is, because unless you know where you're going, you don't know who you need to open doors.  Then boil it down to a five‑year plan and then a two-year plan.

Helen Tupper: So, if I've done that, I've got my dreams and I know the doors and I've really thought about my strengths, are there any other protégé pitfalls that you see people, once they start embarking on a sponsored journey, are there any things that you have seen where it's gone awry or gone wrong that people could set themselves up for not those pitfalls?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Trust is central.  You need to show and wear on your sleeves that you're totally reliable and trustworthy, because no one in their right mind is going to want to sponsor someone who's bad-mouthing the team on social media, right, or talking to the competition about jumping ship; so that's the biggest mistake you can do is somehow breach the trust, because you are asking this more senior person to take a risk on your behalf.  And it is a risk because they're going to suggest you for some big opportunity or for the next job or for a pay raise.  If you screw up or if you betray the team, it's egg on their face as well as yours. 

So, the trust thing has to be at the core of what you understand to be an imperative, right, of this relationship.  It's pretty easy to figure out why that is a territory that you need to build and not chip away at.

Helen Tupper: The other thing that strikes me in listening to the approach that you need to take to be successful with sponsorship is that it takes time.  I can't just reach out and ask for your help, I have to earn it, I have to earn that trust, I have to offer to help you with my strengths and therefore this is something you have to be quite proactive about recognising in advance what support you're going to need, and then building the relationships before you need it?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Yes, but you know by six months in, there are amazing streams of value going both ways.  That is how long it takes, and it lasts on average for six years.  So, it's an amazingly worthwhile thing.  There are lots of relationships that last a lifetime, they devolve into peer sponsorship at some point, but think of Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Summers.  They still stand up for each other in public and he was transformative for her when she was in her 20s. 

She was his research assistant at Harvard, he took her to the World Bank as his Chief of Staff and then to the Treasury.  He opened some doors for her in Silicon Valley and the rest is history, but she stood up for him when he was the list for heading up the Fed.  She did an op-ed piece about how he was the best economist in America and totally deserved the job.  They still understand the enormous worth of the other person.

Helen Tupper: My last question for you sort of relates to the world of work as it is today, so when I first came across your work in 2013, I think work has only got more complicated, there's more pace, there's more information, there's more change over that kind of eight-year period.  Do you think sponsorship has increased in relevance as a result of that change, or do you think it's as important as has always been?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Sponsorship goes back to the Stone Ages, right, it's not a new thing.  White guys have been tapping on the shoulder other white guys, younger white guys, for centuries.  What is new is trying to get access to everyone else and exposing the workings.  The language of the old boys' club was, "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours".  It's this exchange of value thing, but what I feel about 2021 is that it has never been as important.  Just remember that during the pandemic, a quarter of all professional women had been shoved out of the workforce because of the demands of supervising online schooling and dealing with elder care issues.  I mean that is a fact in both US and the UK.

But, you find that when a woman has a sponsor, she doesn't off-ramp, she just down-ramps a little bit, works one day a week or whatever, because her sponsor is making sure she doesn't get shoved aside and then you pay a much smaller penalty for whatever time off you took.  I mean, I see sponsorship as totally front and centre right now in order to keep women from losing the gains that we have made over the last 30 years.

Helen Tupper: One of the things that we always ask our guests before they go is to share with us a piece of career advice that's either helped you or that you think would help our listeners.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Well, you know, I started my third career at 57 and my fourth career at 72.  I think we don't realise the delights of having impact and influence deep into our later years and I'm in the midst of being on that frontier right now.  I also had a child when I was 51, so late bloomers are doing well in this world and women are very good at all those things.

Helen Tupper: Thank you so much for listening to this conversation on sponsorship.  I hope it was useful, I hope you've taken some different insights away.  I think it's a topic that's often not covered in as much depth and hopefully you've got some of that from this discussion that I've had with Sylvia.  As I mentioned right at the start, we summarise of the key insights and giving you some kind of prompts for reflection in the Squiggly Careers Podsheet, just go to amazingif.com on the listen dropdown and you'll be able to download that and you can use that with yourself, you can use it to help other people as well.

Sarah and I will be back together next week and hopefully you'll be back with us as well.  Bye everyone.