Career Advancement Through Mentorship
By: Susan M. Barber
Tags: Sponsorship, Workplace, Mentorship, Workplace Culture, Leadership

Choosing to be involved in mentorship or sponsorship is an excellent way to advance your career and move up in an organization more quickly. Here three ways to go about doing this.

Take advantage of what your manager has to offer. For those who are working for a strong leader who develops their people, you will learn a lot and gain opportunities based on that relationship with them. They will support your growth and advocate for opportunities to get you exposure. Great leaders know that their role is to create more great leaders. However, if you are working for someone who isn’t as strong, you still have options available to you. Identify a mentoring program that you can be a part of either in your company or these may also be offered in affinity or employee resource groups. More formalized programs can bring a lot of rewards to a company and the mentors/mentees. Today over 71% of Fortune 500 companies are offering mentoring programs to employees. It is viewed as a way to increase employee engagement, retention, provide leadership opportunities, and help those who participate to increase salary and get promoted. The structure of being in a program like this is a great foundation, but the success of mentoring depends on the level of responsibility both the mentor and mentee come with to make it work. Find a leadership sponsor. Although the sponsorship relationship is not created through a formalized program, it is based on conversations. Find a person who can open doors for you and connect you to the people who can get you visible opportunities to stand out. Choose someone that you trust and can ask for help. Their support of you in the organization will boost your credibility and potential to others.

How to Find a Mentor or Sponsor

In general, you will only have one sponsor, but you don’t need to make a choice to have just one mentor. Some people have multiple mentors over their career based on what they want to learn. Both mentors and sponsors have valuable roles to play for you and it is up to you to take advantage of the opportunities that they can provide to you.

I want to share a secret with you about the best way to find mentors and sponsors. The secret is that if you have potential and you are gaining visibility, they will come and find you. That doesn’t mean that you can’t approach them on your own, but when you start to gain recognition for what you can do, they will approach you. Be open to these opportunities and decide what will be the best choices to help you reach your career goals.

Things to Consider When Selecting a Mentor

Do you have a mentor in mind for yourself? Would you describe them as someone who is similar to you and your style? It is common to look for people who are further ahead in their career with a strong personal brand, but in many ways, they are just like us.

Choosing a mentor who was exactly like me is what happened in my career. I didn’t think about it that way at the time. I just saw this female leader as someone who was smart and well-connected. She had reached the ranks of senior leadership, so I assumed she must be able to share insights and advice with me. That was all true and she did help me a lot.

However, when I shared my mentoring experience with another female VP a few years later, her view on mentors was very different. She told me that she looks for mentors who are the opposite of her style and gender. Her intention was to challenge herself with different perspectives so that she could grow and develop faster. That conversation stuck with me and gave me different things to consider when I chose my next mentor.

Every person has to choose what is right for them and the good thing is you don’t have to select just one mentor. The simple questions to ask yourself when selecting a mentor are: “What do I want to learn from them and how can they support me in the best way?”

Establishing a Powerful Mentor Relationship

I remember the initial stress I felt when I had been assigned a VP business mentor. It was a benefit of being in a leadership program which seemed really great until I had to think about what to say to her. Up until that time, I had only met with mentors who were in IT, so we had a common language and understanding about what our roles were.

There were three reasons this mentor meeting brought me a bit of stress.

I was going to need to have an agenda of topics to send to her in advance. I needed to come up with some good questions to ask her that were thoughtful and would help me the most.

The second reason was that she was a VP. I felt the added pressure of representing my leadership program and IT in the best way. I could also see her as a potential sponsor for me and she would need to see me as someone that she might consider sponsoring.

Lastly, I wondered if we would have a good connection and be able to have conversations that would help me. This mentoring partnership was intended to last for a year and if we didn’t connect that could be a difficult experience.

Here are some things that I did to prepare that you could use before you meet with a new mentor or sponsor.

I asked others who knew her what she was like, how she had been as a mentor or sponsor for them, and what they did to prepare for meetings with her. I just wanted a sense of what she was like since we had not met before.

I also prepared a list of topics and questions that we could talk about. We ended up having a great connection and she was very helpful for me. I was happy that I had prepared so we did have good conversations and I knew what to expect.

I found this article by Jo Miller that I thought could be helpful to you. It contains 40 great questions to ask a mentor. You could also share with anyone you may be mentoring to help them prepare for a meeting with you.

Susan M Barber, President of Susan M Barber Coaching & Consulting, LLC, works with individuals, teams, and organizations to build skills that leaders need to attain breakthrough results. Her passion for coaching and leadership development is driven by seeing the transformation of leaders as they reach far beyond their own ideas of success. She continues to drive custom programs for groups that want to make changes in their careers to become more powerful leaders.