Vaishali Kasture: A Masterclass on Sponsorship
It has been long believed that what women need to advance in their careers is mentors. But, on ground, is mentorship really leading women into top ranks and C-suites? Is it leading to promotions, especially when compared to their male counterparts? Not quite, research suggests. While women are receiving valuable career guidance from their mentors, it’s clear that they need a different dynamic to targetedly progress their careers. They need sponsorship – a relationship that is fundamentally different from mentorship and goes measurably beyond.
Vaishali Kasture, co-founder of SonderConnect, a non-profit empowering female entrepreneurs globally, often meets high-potential women who have 4-5 mentors at any given point but who neither know who a sponsor is nor are actively looking for one. In 25 years of her corporate experience Kasture has not only held several leadership positions with organisations such as Citibank, Infosys, Goldman Sachs and Deloitte, she has also sponsored men and women to achieve focused goals and higher positions. Here, she shares with us the critical basics of sponsorship.
Mentor and Sponsor
A sponsor advocates while a mentor advices. A sponsor has an un-shattering faith in your ability to deliver and fights fiercely to get you the next big assignment or promotion. A mentor will counsel you, help you build your network and support you through day-to-day challenges but a sponsor will endorse you, recommend you and lobby for you. To put it simply, mentors matter but they are not your ticket to the top.
A mentor may be anyone senior from the organisation or industry who has enough experience to guide and support you, but a sponsor is usually a senior executive within the organisation who has a crucial seat at the table during decision-making – especially related to promotions – and can tilt the tide in your favour with his/her power and influence. In return, a sponsor expects nothing short of stellar performance and committed loyalty.
Scan your Ecosystem
A sponsor may or may not be your role model, or even your mentor. A sponsor-protégé relationship is somewhat transactional – where you benefit because someone is willing to put their weight behind you and, in return, for putting their brand and credibility on the line, they categorically expect loyalty, integrity and performance par excellence.
Scan your organisation for senior management who have significant power and influence. Then identify what you’re doing – projects or in your day-to-day role – that will benefit the sponsor’s career and add to the credibility of his/her ecosystem.
Get Smart About, and Comfortable With, Self Advocacy
Most women believe that the only key to success is working hard and clocking in long hours; any other way of advancing feels inauthentic and uncomfortable. So they rarely negotiate for themselves in the workplace. Kasture provides a fitting analogy here – a worker bee will put her head down, work exceptionally hard and hope that one day she will get recognised whereas a queen bee will network, negotiate, look around the table, figure out what’s happening in the organisation and place herself in a meaningful manner in the right context.
Consciously Build your Relationship with your Sponsor
> Your work begins much before the point where you can ask a sponsor for his/her sponsorship. After you’ve identified the sponsor, you need to do a lot of legwork (and make sure they can see it!) to demonstrate why you are worthy of their sponsorship. There is no dearth of protégés so you need to prove, over time, that you are capable of delivering results, worthy of their trust and credible enough for their sponsorship.
> Have an honest and transparent discussion with the sponsor about what you do, your unique strengths, why you look up to them and how you fit into their world – so the sponsor believes that he/she can benefit from this relationship as well.
> Once you’ve earned the sponsorship, make sure that you get enough face time with your sponsor. Keep him/her updated with your progress and with what’s not going well. It is your job now to ensure that they are not blindsided by anything going on in your role, function, branch, country – whatever is your extent of coverage. It’s your job to protect the sponsor.
> In the unlikely event of a rejection for sponsorship, there should be no bad blood. Graciously accept that perhaps the timing is not right and move on to the next sponsor.
The Impact of Sponsorship
> Sponsorship significantly advances the protégé’s career in a meaningful manner. A sponsor will surgically analyse the protégé’s performance and tell them straight what they are good at, where they made a mistake and what they need to do better. Knowing that somebody has got their back encourages the protégé to take risks, boldly.
> Sponsorship helps an organisation retain its top talent, especially women, who often have a head’s down approach to work – they work hard, get the job done and then wait for their careers to advance when a senior notices them and their outstanding performance. Sponsorship is a way to identify the high-performers and match them with sponsors who will put their weight behind them for a couple of years. Kasture shares that across the Fortune 500 companies, there are 30% women in top leadership but less than 5% in the C-suite. Sponsorship is an incredibly effective tool to fix that – to fast-track the careers of women.
About the Expert
Vaishali Kasture is the co-founder of the non-profit, SonderConnect, that is dedicated to discovering, empowering and promoting female founders globally. A professional in the banking and financial services, Kasture has spent her illustrious 25 years in the corporate world holding, and raising the bar for, several leadership positions. She is a champion for women with a keen interest in supporting and mentoring them. Besides work, Kasture finds joy and purpose in running and has completed multiple marathons including the Comrades Marathon, the world’s largest and oldest ultramarathon.
