Quick tips
- Say the name in the room. Advice is not sponsoring.
- Commend one specific thing in front of their boss.
- Make the introduction you could have kept to yourself.
A message arrived on a Tuesday from somebody he barely remembered, thanking him warmly and at length for twenty minutes of advice he had given eight years earlier. He read it twice and still could not place the conversation. He remembered that year perfectly well. He did not remember the twenty minutes at all.
What he worked out later that week was the more interesting part. The job he had been giving that advice from existed because somebody said his name in a room in 2011, in a meeting he was not invited to. Nobody ever told him. He had spent the years since being a perfectly decent mentor to a handful of people, and had never once done for anybody the thing that had been done for him.
That thing has a name. It is sponsoring, and it is not advice.
What is the difference between a mentor and a sponsor?
A mentor talks to you and a sponsor talks about you. A mentor gives you advice in a room you are both sitting in, and a sponsor says your name in a room you are not in, to people who can hand you something.
Most people were never taught that these are two separate acts, so they do the first one, feel generous, and stop. Herminia Ibarra, Nancy Carter and Christine Silva reported in Harvard Business Review that the people receiving the most mentoring were not the people receiving the most promotions. Advice was plentiful and advocacy was scarce. What moved careers was somebody senior spending their own credibility on a specific name, and Harvard Business Review was still reporting the same gap nine years later.
KEEP CALM's founder, Kaʻohele Carlos, describes the practice in his own words:
Another secret to my success is giving back. Doing volunteer work. Always looking for opportunities to coach, train, advise, lift up, commend, champion those in my sphere. The positive energy and support I get back in return is 10 fold.
That is his account of his own twenty years rather than a rule about yours, and the useful part is the order. He did it while he was still climbing, not once he had arrived.
The cost: one sentence, and a little of your own credibility riding on somebody else. The script: "If you are looking for someone for that, put Rosa on the list. She ran the migration last quarter and nothing broke." The frequency: once a month, in a room where a decision is being made.
Who should I be sponsoring, and how do I pick?
Pick the person whose work you can describe in one concrete sentence, and who is not obviously already being carried. Specificity is the whole qualification, because a name you cannot back with a fact is a name you will not say when the room gets serious.
Three filters. You have seen the work yourself rather than heard about it, so you are lending your own judgment. They are one step behind you rather than five, because the rooms you sit in are next to their next move and not their eventual one. And they did not ask, which rules in the quietly excellent people who are bad at asking.
You do not need a title for any of this. A teammate who says "Rosa ran that migration" in a planning meeting spends the same currency a director spends, and it is not authority. It is being specific in public and turning out to be right.
What do I say when I commend somebody in public?
Name the one specific thing they did, in front of the people whose opinion of them matters. Vague praise evaporates, and a precise sentence said in front of their manager is a career event that costs you about eleven seconds.
Adam Grant and Francesca Gino, publishing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that expressions of gratitude made people markedly more willing to help again, and that the mechanism was feeling socially valued rather than feeling obliged. Being told you are worth something is what does the work. That is why "great job" fails and "the way she rewrote the second section is the reason the client signed" lands. Only one of those can be repeated by somebody else later.
The cost: eleven seconds, and a little of the attention you were spending on yourself. The script: "Before we move on, I want to name what Daniel did here, because it is the reason this shipped." The frequency: weekly, in a meeting you are already sitting in.
Which introduction should I make this week?
The one you have been sitting on because it felt like spending a favor. Ask each side privately first, then send three sentences saying why each person is worth the other's time, and get out of the thread.
Introductions feel expensive because you are lending your judgment to two people at once, which is why they are worth so much to whoever receives one. Asking first is what turns a risky favor into a cheap one. The introduction you could have kept to yourself is usually the most valuable thing you can hand somebody in a week, and it is the one most people never quite get around to.
The cost: five minutes and a little of your standing with both. The script: "You two should know each other. Priya, Marcus built the thing you described on Thursday. Marcus, Priya is the person I mentioned." The frequency: one a month is plenty.
How do I teach what I know without losing my edge?
Teach it anyway. You do not have an edge that survives being written down, and teaching is the fastest way to find out which parts of your craft you own.
Researchers reporting in Memory and Cognition found that people who studied a passage expecting to teach it recalled more of it, and organized it better, than people expecting a test. Preparing to explain something changes how you hold it. The parts you cannot say out loud in plain language are the parts you were faking, and one attentive student finds them faster than a year of solo practice will. That is the compounding version: the hour you spend on somebody junior is not taken off your own work, it is a second pass through your own craft with a witness in the room.
The cost: two hours of preparation, most of which improves your own work. The script: "I am going to walk three people through how I do this on Thursday. Want in?" The frequency: quarterly is enough to keep you honest.
Should I give money or the skill I am paid for?
Give the skill. An hour of the thing you are expert at is worth a day of general help to a small organization, and it is available to you years before the money is.
This is the version of giving nobody has to wait for. A designer who spends one Saturday on a food bank's signage has moved something a check that size could not touch. Money is easier and money matters, and there is nothing wrong with setting a percentage. But the skill is the part only you have, and giving it away is how you find out how good you actually are at it, in a room where nobody is grading you.
The cost: one afternoon a quarter, plus the discomfort of working outside your room. The script: "I do this for a living. Do you want two hours of it?" The frequency: quarterly.
The one nobody ever finds out about
Six behaviors, and the last one is the one that stays with you. Champion somebody who did not ask, who will never learn that you did it, and who cannot pay you back. The name you put forward when they are not in the building. The reference they never hear about. The objection you quietly answer in a corridor before it reaches them.
It is worth doing on the plainest grounds: it works, and the practice makes you the kind of person other people put forward. It is also the only one of the six with no feedback attached, so the only reason to do it is that you decided to be somebody who does.
A year of this is fifty two names, and most people keep no record of any of it. Keep one. A page with a date, a name and which of the six you did is the only evidence you will ever have that you run this at all, and it takes eight seconds a week.
None of this asks you to want less or to work less. It is the opposite. You are going to spend the next ten years pushing hard at something, and the people still standing at the end of it are almost never the ones who guarded everything they had. They are the ones whose names get said in rooms they are not in, because they spent a decade saying other people's.
Sources
- Harvard Business Review, Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women
- Harvard Business Review, A Lack of Sponsorship Is Keeping Women from Advancing into Leadership
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, A little thanks goes a long way: Explaining why gratitude expressions motivate prosocial behavior
- Memory and Cognition, Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages