Next Generation Planner: June 2022
Danielle Andrus is editor of the Journal of Financial Planning. She can be reached HERE.
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Most new planners trying to build their expertise in financial planning have probably considered working with a mentor at some point. Some planners may have even served as a mentor to someone who looked up to them at some point in their lives. Mentoring is a valuable tool to socialize newcomers to the norms of a profession and help them develop their skills.
Sponsorship is the other side of the mentoring coin. Instead of working with an individual, a sponsor talks to other people and spends some of their own social capital to invest in the individual. If you’ve ever recommended a CPA or estate planner to someone, that’s sponsorship.
“There’s this confusion even within the academic literature about where sponsorship lives in relation to mentorship. The traditional view is that sponsorship is this very small subcategory of mentorship. One of the things that I’ve been working to do is to try and really bring out sponsorship as its own separate thing,” noted Rosalind Chow, Ph.D., associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.
Without this distinction between sponsorship and mentorship, Chow said, “people think that they’re acting as sponsors when they’re actually acting as mentors, and it doesn’t get you the same outcomes.”
There are a few critical differences between sponsorship and mentorship, she explained. One of the most fundamental is that mentorship is a dyadic relationship, compared to the triadic nature of sponsorship.
Mentorship is a relationship between two people. “Your mentor is giving you guidance, is giving you advice, cheerleads you,” she said. Mentors help their mentees develop the skills they need to be successful or navigate thorny situations, but ultimately, they’re trying to help the mentee change in some way.
“Sponsorship is what I call a triadic relationship where you have a protégé, you have a sponsor, and then you have this external audience that the sponsor is trying to act on. Whereas in mentorship, it’s really between the mentor and the mentee, in sponsorship, it’s not actually that much about the protégé and the sponsor. It’s more about the relationship that sponsors have with other people who are outside of this first-order relationship with the protégé.”
Instead of helping the mentee change themselves to be more successful, sponsors recognize where protégés already have valuable skills or attributes and are helping change the environment they are working in, Chow said. They recommend their protégé for projects or jobs where they would be a good fit, they invite them to more exclusive events or make introductions to more influential people than the protégé can access on their own, and they speak up for them.
“It’s not that the sponsor is trying to get the protégé to be someone who they’re not,” Chow said. “It’s that the sponsor is trying to get other people to see the protégé in the same way that the sponsor does, as this really great person that they should be giving opportunities to.”
Sponsor, Mentor, or Both?
Sponsorship and mentorship are two approaches to a similar objective—helping another planner be successful—and individuals can engage in both kinds of behaviors.
“When I coach someone, I’m giving them mentorship, and when I am singing their praises, I’m their sponsor. I can be both and people do need both; it’s just that for many of us, it’s a lot easier to be a mentor.”
That’s because another big difference between sponsorship and mentorship is that there is some inherent risk in being someone’s sponsor, she said.
“When I’m telling a mentee how they ought to change, that’s me spending time with them, guiding them. . . . But with sponsorship, you’re not spending time with the protégé; you’re spending time and your social capital on influencing other people.”
A recommendation that doesn’t work out can reflect poorly on the sponsor if others begin to doubt their judgement or credibility.
Sponsoring a More Inclusive Industry
Sponsorship is a tool that can help the industry address implicit biases that cause qualified candidates to be overlooked.
“There are certain biases that make it so that these individuals need champions in meetings that majority group members are less likely to need,” Chow said. She noted that sponsorship can have an extra layer of risk for planners from groups that are underrepresented in financial planning.
For example, with fewer than 5 percent of CFP® professionals who are Black, Hispanic, or biracial, there’s a big opportunity for sponsors to recommend younger planners from these demographics for positions where they can thrive. However, if the only sponsors who step up are from those groups themselves, it can impact their influence.
“That’s a lot of pressure on that one leader, and that’s just a lot riskier for them,” Chow explained. “You see scenarios where, in some cases, the sponsors who are from these underrepresented groups try to be super inclusive in their sponsorship, and that can be problematic because it, in a way, dilutes the power of their word.”
Some would-be sponsors react by—subconsciously or not—creating stricter standards for people within their own demographic. Chow described the “queen bee” phenomenon where women who have achieved senior roles are less likely to advocate for women coming up behind them. A superficial explanation is that those women are threatened by their juniors’ success, but Chow believes they’re preemptively rejecting the notion that they’re only helping them because they’re women.
“These senior women don’t want to get a reputation for only caring about other women, so they actually end up having higher standards for sponsoring junior women than, say, junior men,” she said.
Chow noted that objective performance metrics have found little difference by gender. “Where you do see the bias is in the qualitative, open-ended commentaries that managers can provide. That’s when you see superlatives being more often used to describe men than women. They talk about men as having lots of potential, as being exceptional . . . and you just don’t see women being talked about in that same way.”
Initiating Sponsor-Protégé Relationships
Many firms and organizations have formal mentorship programs that connect more experienced planners with people who are new to the industry, but planners who want to find a sponsor should recognize the risk that person is taking by speaking on their behalf, Chow said.
“Your job as a protégé is about reducing as much uncertainty for the sponsor as you can . . . so being clear with your sponsor about what your ultimate career aspirations are, and then building a close enough relationship where they like you enough to want to spend their social capital on you,” she said.
To get to a sponsor-protégé role, new planners need to work on building relationships with people in their networks where “you feel safe telling them what it is that you want and where you want to go, and where they’re going to be interested in finding out all the great things that you are working on.”
Those relationships take time to develop as planners uncover shared interests, values, and objectives, and requires some balance between personal and professional interactions. Chow sees this happen in two extremes, with some young people choosing to focus only on professional matters and others sharing far too much.
“I think you can deal with both of those extremes by becoming a listener. So instead of talking about yourself, ask the sponsor what they’re working on. What are their aspirations? What are some of the challenges that they’re facing? Because as a protégé, you want to put yourself in a position where you can generate value for them as a sponsor. If you can do that, they get a sense of how competent you are because you’ve been able to do something for them. And again, because you’ve done something for them that helps them personally, they’re going to like you a lot for that. That is just going to make it so much more likely that they will have you in mind when opportunities come up or if your name comes up in the conversation.”
Chow noted that a sponsor-protégé relationship doesn’t only have to flow from the more powerful person in an organization to someone with less power.
“Sponsorship is anything that you do that impacts how people trust each other,” she said. “When you say that your manager is an amazing person to work with, you are sponsoring your manager because now maybe some of your colleagues or your peers are going to be more interested in looking out for opportunities where they get to work with your manager. I like to say that it’s an equal opportunity support behavior that everyone can do.”
