As a female employee, it can be difficult to break through the glass ceiling and advance your career. However, leveraging the power of sponsorship can help you reach your goals. You don’t always have to go solo to reach the heights of your career. Sponsorships are relationships between senior executives, mentors, and mentees, where the sponsor provides support, and guidance to the mentee in exchange for the mentee's commitment to their career growth. Through these relationships, female employees can gain access to resources, information, and networks that can help them grow in their careers. In this article, we’ll explore seven ways that female employees can leverage the power of sponsorships to advance their careers. From creating a network of mentors to actively seeking out sponsors, these strategies provide a strong foundation to build a successful career. With the right guidance and dedication, female employees can use sponsorships to their advantage and see measurable results.
What is Sponsorship?
Sponsorship is a relationship between an executive and a sponsor that creates a mutually beneficial exchange of value. It is a mutual agreement where a sponsor agrees to provide a set of benefits to an employee in exchange for their commitment to their growth and career advancement.
Why is Sponsorship Important for Female Employees?
Women are underrepresented in leadership positions across all industries. This dearth of female executives can negatively affect an organization’s ability to succeed. Institutional bias and unconscious stereotypes have been found to hinder women’s advancement in the workplace. Sponsorship provides a great opportunity to learn from and work with sponsors, who are usually experienced and influential and this can help in developing high-level skills that can be applied to advance the Protégé’s careers.
Finding the Right Sponsor
Actively Seek Out Sponsors: It is a good idea to seek out and identify influencers in the organizations where you work or want to work. Connect with these people to see if they may be willing to mentor you. If you don’t have an available connection in your own organization, look for connections in your industry or in related industries.
This means that you will not for a sponsor to seek you out but instead, use the sponsor search as a mechanism to look for sponsors and connect with potential connections.
As you search for sponsors, be selective. While it can be tempting to simply ask your boss for a sponsorship, you should be more selective with your requests. Pick sponsors carefully and don’t simply ask anyone you come across. Choose a sponsor /agree to a sponsorship opportunity, based on your needs and who can meet them. You may choose your sponsors following these three criteria:
Seniority – You can seek out a sponsor according to their level of seniority. This is because the higher their level in the organisation, the more impact they can have on your career.
Skills - Select sponsors based on the skills that you want to develop and the resources that you want to access. For example, if you want to develop management skills, look for sponsors who have high-level management skills that you respect and admire.
Value – Select sponsors based on the value they can provide you. If a sponsor is providing you with a significant benefit that you can identify and measure, then select them.
There are many reasons why sponsorship can help female employees advance their careers. Here are 7 of them:
1. Access to Mentors: Sponsorship can provide access to mentorship. Mentors are people who have the knowledge and experience that can help an employee advance their career. Sponsors can introduce their proteges to top executives, which can open doors to opportunities, advance salaries, and access new resources. Sponsors can also serve as role models for women, demonstrating the importance of being in leadership positions.
2. Opportunity to develop authentic relationships in the workplace: Sponsors don’t have to be someone you simply meet once, take a picture of, and never see again. Rather, sponsors should be people you have genuine relationships with. Throughout the years, sponsors can be your supervisor, senior colleagues, managers, or even your co-workers who are more experienced and influential than you are. The key is to build great relationship that will foster the connection between you and your sponsor. That way, your commitment is enhanced and the likelihood that you achieve your career development goals, will be heightened.
3. Leverage Influence Through Sponsorship: Sponsorship is one way to advance your career as a female employee, but to make the most of your sponsorship, ensure to leverage the influence you can gain from being sponsored by someone who has gait, authority, and personality. Whether your sponsor is within your network, or you are reaching out wide, ensure to choose correctly, so that you can maximise their connections and the resources they can offer. Use these to your advantage, and put yourself out for opportunities that come your way, while also challenging yourself with higher goals.
4. Build your Brand: As you gain sponsorship and mentorship, use the resources, influence and connections available to you to begin to build your personal brand within the workplace. Network and build relationship with other stakeholders as you gain momentum and recognition.
5. Carve your Identity: It is easy to get carried away and lose yourself in the swing of your sponsorship, with a desire to be like and do things like your sponsor. This may be due to your admiration of their prowess or personality, but don’t forget that you can only try to be like someone else, you can never be them. So, while you are making the most of your
sponsorship experience, don’t forget to show up authentically and build credibility for yourself.
6. Build Trust: With the influence and connection you benefit from sponsorship, you can learn to build trust and recognition within the workplace and when this is achieved, it will be long-standing beyond the length of your sponsorship. Trust is one of the most valuable assets you will need throughout your career if you want to lead effectively and make impact. Trust is developed through consistency and reliability, especially when it comes to delivering on promises you made.
7. Pay it forward: The best way you want to begin to utilise the benefits of your sponsorship opportunity is to pay it forward. Look for another potential female employee that you could help propel their career and elevate them. Share of the gift that was put into you, to allow you achieve your career goals and reflect that back on someone else. That way, you will be contributing to the rise of women in leadership positions, which will always be crucial and highly beneficial to organisational development and help us create enriched
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