Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor: The New Way to Fast-Track Your Career by Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Author:Sylvia Ann Hewlett
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781422187166
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2013-08-19T14:00:00+00:00

Loyalty

Storey also proved her loyalty by:

Demonstrating trustworthiness and discretion and having her sponsor’s back

Burnishing her sponsor’s brand across the organization

Growing her sponsor’s legacy

Storey’s first sponsor put her in charge of the printing firm’s sales organization. “Here I was, a young woman, leading a group of men who’d been selling space in telephone directories for decades,” she said. Yet the move made sense, she realized, given her a track record of improving processes and strengthening customer relationships.

“My sponsor genuinely saw my potential,” she reflects, “but I think he also saw me carrying on his legacy. I was someone who recognized the value of relationships. I’d sought him out from the beginning as someone I could learn from: he could get almost anything done by the way he managed the relationships he’d developed both inside and outside the firm. He believed there was nothing more important than delivering an exceptional customer experience, and I shared that belief.”

Top achievers like Storey have repeatedly won sponsorship because they’ve come through on not just the performance front but also the loyalty front, irrespective of their affinity (or lack of it) with the leader. What makes sponsorship appear to be a dirty game is the fact that among those who’ve practiced it for decades—those in the old boys’ network—affinity has been the basis for that trust and loyalty. Powerful men advanced the careers of younger men who looked like them and acted and spoke as they did. What makes sponsorship a mutually beneficial alliance in today’s workplace is just the opposite: trust is now earned, cultivated, and deepened in a number of ways that utterly trounce the salience of tribal similarities, making sponsorship a potent and enduring career lever for everybody, regardless of race, gender, background, or sexual orientation.

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