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Mentoring may be a buzzword in the business world, but it’s not always done effectively. Too often, mentorship turns into glorified networking or infrequent meetings for a quick coffee. Recently, the idea of sponsorship—intentionally supporting your mentees—has been added to the conversation to help companies focus on employee development and promotion to develop strong, diverse teams.
Sponsorship and mentorship are different from each other, but they should not be conducted in isolation. Within a company, the only truly effective way to implement these processes is to see them as two parts of a cycle that should continuously repeat. For this to happen, those in leadership roles must take a deliberate approach that seeks continuous development.
Related: How mentorship programs can uplift underrepresented employees in the workplace
Mentorship aiming for sponsorship
To effectively mentor their employees, mentors must develop specific goals for their employees’ professional growth. To achieve these goals, they must be looking for two key areas of development: strengths and gaps.
- Identify strengths: Identifying your students’ strengths means working closely with them to discover their experience, skills and passions. These strengths are not limited to knowledge in your field but might include personality traits such as leadership skills, ability to learn quickly, or interest in a particular role or area.
- Identify gaps: To make mentoring an ongoing and effective process, consider what your mentees still need to learn to move forward. They may have knowledge gaps that require further training, or perhaps they have the knowledge for new roles but lack the skills to lead a team or communicate effectively with customers. Consider how to assign extended projects that provide them with an environment to ask questions, discover new skills, and feel supported in a new context.
- What it is not: Mentoring isn’t simply about networking or turning an employee into an assistant. Effective mentorship looks forward to sponsorship, allowing employees to grow within your company.
Related: How mentorship programs can create a culture of continuous learning in the workplace
Strategic sponsorship
Sponsoring employees internally means deliberately drawing on the knowledge gained through the mentoring process to introduce employees to new roles and responsibilities. This requires flexibility and a willingness to repeat the cycle continuously.
- Flexibility: As a student’s knowledge and skills grow, their role and recognition should also grow. Being willing to change or develop someone’s role within the company allows you to place employees in roles where they will most effectively contribute to your business and get the most satisfaction.
- Continuous tutoring: Employees should never be promoted and then left to fend for themselves. Once a mentee has been sponsored into a new role, she will have new strengths and gaps that require development and training. This could also mean equipping them with tools so they can be mentors themselves.
- What it is not: Sponsorship does not mean adding more responsibilities to the employee without adequate promotion or redefinition of his role. To create a healthy team atmosphere, employees who have grown enough to take on new roles need to feel that their growth is formally recognized and celebrated.
Repeating the cycle
While mentorship and sponsorship may seem like individual experiences, when combined, these processes can foster the growth of an entire team at once. We have seen this growth regularly at Outpace. We hired a new SEO specialist a while ago; let’s call him John. I soon identified two of John’s key strengths: his ability to learn extremely quickly and his previous experience. I started mentoring him and training him on our internal processes, how we run our SEO meetings, and more. I brought his potential to the attention of our executives and within six months we promoted him to head of the SEO team. I continue to guide him as a leader in his new position.
Our process doesn’t stop here. John quickly realized that Jane, a member of his SEO team, was contributing far beyond his current role. She now leads her in managing SEO quality assurance in a role that recognizes the full potential of her contributions to Outpace. These are just two examples of how mentorship and sponsorship can have a trickle-down effect and allow team leaders to become mentors and sponsors themselves.
Related: How expert mentorship fuels startup success
Individual relationships: benefits for the team
Clearly, mentorship and sponsorship affects the entire workplace, not just individual employees. When employees see the potential for their professional development in their current company, their job satisfaction increases. Instead of making employees feel overworked, this cycle provides them with opportunities and recognition. This helps increase employee retention since employees don’t have to look elsewhere to feel like they’re making progress. One of the main benefits of mentoring and sponsoring employees is that they also become strong leaders and mentors. This allows the process to repeat with new employees. Over time, mentorship and sponsorship build strong companies where interconnected teams continually grow and support their colleagues.