Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor

By Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Why You Should Read This  This provides the proof of and roadmap for building the community that will enable you to thrive and will ultimately create the self-awareness to pay your gratitude forward. Here is the link to the Audible version of the book.
As the VP of Leader Development who supports the Mentoring Committee, it may seem provocative and bordering on blasphemy to suggest a book with this title for our review.  But for those of us who read the Joint IAWA-Oliver Wyman Lift Off To Leadership Study that highlighted why women are leaving the aviation industry, we know that finding people to speak about us when we are not in the room is critical to our advancement. 

In “Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor, The New Way to Fast Track Your Career” Sylvia Ann Hewlett clearly details what sponsorship is and how it works.  Her introspective and practical seven steps that lay the road map for protégés is practical and tactical.  It further reflects that if you want a sponsor, you need to be willing to do the work to cultivate one who will make an investment in you.  She artfully describes three issues that can often derail us in our search for a sponsor if we turn a blind eye to the obvious.
While mentorship is about development, sponsorship is about investment.  This fantastic book was brought to my attention by Barbara Adachi, who spoke on a panel that I moderated for IAWA’s 2019 Business Aviation Forum, titled “Gravitas.”  In this book, Ms. Adachi spoke about how she ensured that men within her organization developed the habit of sponsoring women within it.  It is true, we must develop the habit of creating spaces for others to succeed and celebrate it when we make an investment in someone else achieving success.

How You Can Apply This  This book reframed how I attracted a sponsor to support my achievements of a personal and professional goals.  Conversely, it also ignited my desire to not only speak about someone when they were not in the room but to also make an investment in a woman that enabled her to achieve her goals.
We must be intentional, gracious, and shamelessly vocal in our support of other women throughout our careers.  We are so much stronger when we build each other up.  When one woman succeeds, we ALL succeed.

Additional Materials For Reinforcing What You Learned  For those of you who want to reinforce what you gained from this book by listening to this podcast: Next Big Idea Club with Shellye Archambeau.  https://link.chtbl.com/SarahLevyPDF . She describes how she planned her career and how others sponsored her to move forward and achieve her unapologetically ambitious goal of serving as a CEO.  FYI:  Her cousin, Lisa Archambeau, serves in a management capacity within Business Aviation.
You may also want to conduct a deeper dive by reading the Harvard Business Review article on Promotions Aren’t Just About Your Relationships.

This book review was written by Shelley A. Svoren, VP – Leader Development for IAWA and who is the CEO + Founder of Infinite Branches.  You can DM her on LinkedIn.