Step Up to Sponsorship

15 january 2013

“Women are poised to shape not only their own destiny but the destiny of this century,” President Barak Obama proclaimed in his commencement address at Barnard College yesterday. One way we can turn these words into reality is through mentoring and sponsoring talented women – not just in your own company but in the larger community of ambitious and promising women around the world.

That’s why I’d like to spotlight Cherie Blair’s Mentoring Women in Business program.

Cherie Blair has turned her energies post-Downing Street into creating a non-profit foundation that matches women entrepreneurs in developing and emerging economies in Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Middle East with experienced businesspeople – both  women and men –  who are eager to share their know-how and advice with someone whose background is very different from their own. Using online tools, mentors and mentees work together to create and fine-tune business plans, source funding and develop a marketing strategy that helps these budding businesses thrive and expand.

We know quite a lot about mentorship at the Center for Talent Innovation, where we have been intensively researching mentoring and its more powerful, more evolved relative, sponsorship, for the past two years.

There’s a crucial distinction between mentoring and sponsoring, and it’s more than a question of semantics.  Our research shows that while mentors offer useful advice and a sympathetic sounding board, sponsors provide the critical heavy lifting that propels careers upward: They open doors, make connections to key stakeholders and advocate for your promotion. Mentors, we’ve found, give support; sponsors get you your next job.

Both mentors and sponsors are essential for women to succeed – certainly in a large corporation and especially in an entrepreneurial organization. Cherie Blair’s program is especially interesting because it bridges the gap between the mentorship and sponsorship.

For example, mentee Linda Wijesinghe wanted to develop a micro-credit bank to help support Sri Lankan fishermen and farmers, whose livelihoods were dealt a double blow by the 2004 tsunami and the global financial crisis. However, the challenges of building such an institution, given the occupational hazards that made her customers such high credit risks, were prohibitive. Her mentor, Anna Jakimova, a director at a UK-based institutional investment firm, suggested switching the idea from a bank to a charity offering micro-loans based on contributions from the fishermen and farmers. With Anna’s help, Linda is working to get additional funding from the World Bank and the Sri Lankan government. Anna has also been instrumental in reaching out to other mentors through the platform’s forums, sharing information and expertise in order to further support Linda’s plans.

I’ll be diving more deeply into sponsorship in future blogs – how it works, how to create and nurture a network of sponsors, what you owe your sponsor, and why this relationship is absolutely crucial for women to get ahead.

Meanwhile, consider whether you can do a little destiny-shaping yourself.

The present pool of mentors/sponsors in the MWIB program includes a UK director of manufacturing, an account manager at a financial information company, an Italian executive coach specializing in improving team communications, a Czech logistics expert, and a Swiss finance advisor who jumpstarts funds for small organizations.