Mentorship vs. sponsorship

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I was scrolling Instagram last week and came across a post from Rich Lessons with Sevetri and Sheena,  wherein the hosts and guest were talking about the difference between mentorship and sponsorship. I hadn’t heard this distinction before, have you?

For those who don’t know, I found a paper that outlines the differences. Mentorship is helping to provide a set of skills via feedback for career advancement. Mentors are selected for a specific set of content expertise and often, according to the paper, work behind the scenes with the mentee.

Sponsorship is the provision of influential and promotional support to help secure career advancements. Sponsors are ideally highly placed within an organization and influence decisions regarding appointments, promotions, and awards. A sponsor puts your name forward when you aren’t in the room.

So, with that distinction in mind, where would you want to engage one versus the other?

Where can a mentor help?

1. Getting clear on what you need/want

a. In the academy in general, and in our mid-career time specifically, figuring out our next steps becomes oddly urgent. As I have sat with this feeling for the last few years, it has occurred to me that part of the reason for it is that high-achieving people have a hard time knowing when to turn it off. We’ve been striving for success through graduate school, landing our first tenure-track job, and getting tenured and promoted; it seems natural to want to continue that trajectory up through full professor, chair, assistant/associate dean, dean, and then onto senior university leadership.

If this is what you want, there is nothing wrong with it. But I certainly needed to pause a couple of years ago and ask myself if I wanted this or if I was pursuing this because it was the “next step”.

There is nothing wrong or deficient with being a faculty member who seeks excellence in their teaching, research, and service.

In these moments of disquiet and uncertainty, a mentor can be useful in helping you to sort through your plans.

Where can a sponsor help?

1. Taking the next step

a. Once you have gotten clear on your interests (ex. moving into a leadership position or becoming an excellent faculty member or whatever else you can think of), the next step is finding those sponsors. So where do you start looking?

In my own case, this involved putting myself forward for a series of high-profile faculty leadership positions, including chair of the faculty senate, co-lead of an institutional research initiative that spanned every academic unit in the university, and co-founding a research center housed within the office of research.

I needed no special skills or training for these roles, just a willingness to do the work that was needed (and trust me it was a lot of work). What these positions afforded was access to leadership at the highest levels of the institution. I was in meetings where important decisions were made; I got to see how those decisions were made and learned how to use my voice in those meetings to represent the people for whom I was responsible.

This proximity to senior leaders and the opportunity to demonstrate my skills, knowledge, and abilities in these spaces most certainly played a role in my being asked to lead an effort to stand up another high-profile research institute on campus. That’s what sponsorship can do for you.

Of course, this is just one way of finding a sponsor, but it is important to note that you will need one regardless of your trajectory (and the same can be said for a mentor). While we may like to think that merit alone will be enough for people to recognize our contributions, the reality is that it isn’t. Human beings, as social creatures, rely on relationships and loose ties to make decisions about each other. As I said before, we all need someone to speak our names when we aren’t in the room.

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