sponsor – The Early Career Voice

Remember my disappointing story from Part I of this post? Well, I have an uplifting story from the same meeting. A different colleague from a different training program came to the conference with a different group of mentors. Every time I bumped into her at the meeting, she was being introduced to leaders in her field at a variety of institutions by her mentors/sponsors. She left that meeting with many more contacts, opportunities, and potential future bosses than she had going in. Now, she had not asked for her sponsors to recommend her to these people, nor had she even asked these mentors to be her “sponsors.” She was a hard-worker who always delivered consistently on her projects, and those that mentored her felt proud to be recommending her to their colleagues, because they knew that she would be reliable and reflect positively on them.

Similarly, I’ve been very lucky to have been surrounded by mentors who were often very natural sponsors. As I’ve grown in my career, they’ve stayed in touch and have been eager to recommend me for committees or projects that I would not have otherwise had the opportunity to become involved in. But in thinking about many of my friends and colleagues who are not lucky enough to have these people in their lives, I wanted to put together a list of things that may improve one’s chances of getting sponsored:

EARN IT – Unlike mentors, who may be assigned to you or whom you can choose based on mutual interests and/or a similar research, sponsors are not assigned, and you cannot simply ask someone to be your sponsor – if you have a good mentor, and you show them loyalty and build your trust/credibility with them, they will likely want to be your sponsor.
DEPENDABILITY PAYS OFF – When you make yourself visible within your own organization by becoming involved in projects or workgroups and by reliably getting things done on time, people will start to notice and will want you to expand your involvement. This will naturally expand the pool of leaders that you can work with and impress.
DIVERSIFY – While you don’t want to spread yourself too thin, it’s important not to put all your eggs in one basket. If you spend all your energies impressing a single mentor or leader in your institution, and they are a terrible sponsor, or they leave, or something else happens, then you’re unlikely to have them as a sponsor despite all your efforts. Have at least a couple mentors that you work well with and work hard to build trust with them.
BE THE ONE THAT YOU WANT – Behave like the protégé that you will someday be proud to sponsor – chances are, someone will notice and will be proud to sponsor you
DO YOUR HOMEWORK – If you want to learn more, there’s tons of books and articles out there on this topic. Take the time to read up. This article from the Harvard Business Review by Sylvia Ann Hewlett is one example.

David K. Werho, MD is an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of California San Diego and a Pediatric Cardiac Intensivist at Rady Children’s Hospital – San Diego. His research focuses on pediatric cardiac ICU outcomes as well as interventions and curriculum development in medical education. He tweets @DWerho and contributes to the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Society Newsletter as editor and contributor.

I recently witnessed something profoundly disappointing. A close friend and former colleague who was finishing training at an excellent institution attended a large national meeting, accompanied by no less than 3 personal mentors, with the eager hopes of being connected with potential future employers. As with most graduating trainees, he was expecting his mentors to help offer meaningful networking opportunities to get his “foot in the door” for some of the very few academic positions available in his chosen subspecialty. I watched him struggle for several days before going home with no new contacts, no new prospects, and no job interviews. His mentors, despite helping him excel in research and helping him develop a work-product to present at a huge meeting, ultimately failed him at the meeting in question. In that moment, I realized that not all mentors are good sponsors.

Sponsorship is very different from mentorship, though sometimes a great mentor will naturally be an excellent sponsor as well. Sponsorship has been more recognized in the business world over the last decade after a study published in the Harvard Business Review, “The Sponsor Effect” highlighted the role that sponsorship has in advancing careers. Specifically, they showed that more than 2/3 of participants who had a sponsor reported satisfaction in their career advancement, while greater than 2/3 of participants who did not have a sponsor resisted advocating for a raise for themselves. The study also showed that sponsors can confer a 22-30% statistical career benefit. However, sponsorship is only recently becoming more and more recognized as a key factor in advancing careers in academic medicine as well.

What is a sponsor? I think the following graphic from Stanford University does the best job of explaining the difference between a mentor and a sponsor.

I think the bottom line is that sponsors are personally and professionally tied to the success of their protégé’s and make it a point to ensure that their protégé’s are connected to the people that will help them achieve their career goals and advance to bigger and better things. Yes, traditionally, in the business world, this would be primarily within their own organization. However, in the world of academic medicine, where so much of our career trajectories and growth opportunities (and promotions) are dependent on how we’re seen by people outside of our current institution, either at other programs, or within national societies/committees, I think a major part of sponsorship in academic medicine is active networking.

As I reflect on my own mentoring relationships, I see in hindsight the difference between my mentors and my sponsors. While much of my personal and professional development is attributable to the advice and guidance of my mentors, I can now see that most of my current career, administrative, research, and educational opportunities have been directly because of my sponsors (even though I didn’t know it at the time). I was extremely lucky to have these individuals take a vested interest in my personal success, without me ever asking. But for those of us who are not lucky enough to have sponsors fortuitously arrive in our lives, there are a few ways to increase the chance of getting a good sponsor… Stay tuned for Part II.