Mentoring versus Sponsorship? – Why both matter for Diversity and Inclusion

Does mentoring help organisations achieve their diversity and inclusion objectives? There’s a large body of academic and industry opinion that says it does. Mentoring is acknowledged as one way of addressing imbalance within an organisation by furthering the development and career progression of identity groups. Many organisations employ mentoring programmes, amongst other interventions, to promote company-wide inclusion and increase diversity at more senior levels. There is evidence that helping mentees acquire skills and knowledge and introducing them to internal and external networks can break down barriers for both the protégé and the mentor and that targeted mentoring can reduce bias and discrimination in organisations.

Is developmental mentoring on its own enough? Do D&I programmes require, as a number of experts and commentators argue, more active senior-level sponsorship of the protégé than would be found in a typical mentoring relationship? There is a suggestion that D&I success, especially at a senior level, is based on sponsorship and not mentoring.

One HR professional who I spoke to recently lamented that her organisation’s opt-in mentoring programme had failed to increase diversity at a senior level. The scheme was well-subscribed and popular but it had become apparent that skills and knowledge transfer alone weren’t going to deliver the diversity outcomes that the organisation was looking for. This realisation caused my associate to question the value of the whole mentoring programme.

Sponsorship tends to be informal, random and therefore probably not evenly distributed across the organisation. Sponsors put themselves “out there”, taking some reputational (and maybe even career) risk by championing their protégés. There is an emotional and selective context to this kind of advocacy. It would be hard to imagine someone being an enthusiastic sponsor if they were assigned the role.

Sponsorship puts extra impetus behind individuals and can clearly accelerate D&I and should be used where appropriate and practical. Its absence should not detract from the value of mentoring on its own and it would a pity for non-sponsored protégés to view mentoring as a lower value option. Mentoring is frequently the first stage in a process that can lead into sponsorship by the mentor. Not every mentor is in a position to act as sponsor and in many instances there may not be enough sponsors to support all protégés. Moreover, mentoring and sponsorship accomplish different things. The transfer of skills and knowledge and the psycho-social benefits that come from mentoring may well be absent in even the closest sponsoring relationship.

There is a key role for both in D&I initiatives but, for organisations where sponsorship is actively encouraged in addition to mentoring, there needs to be clear communication about the value of mentoring on its own, the different objectives for mentoring and sponsorship, and transparency about how sponsorship occurs.

Sources

Abbott, I., 2018. Innovative Mentoring Increases Diversity and Inclusion. PD QuarterlyFebruary, pp. 44-50

Dobbin, F. & Kalev, A., 2016 Why Diversity Programs Fail; Harvard Business Review, July-Aug pp.52-60 https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail

Klasen, N.& Clutterbuck, D., 2002. Implementing Mentoring Schemes. London, Routledge.

Kossek, E. & Zonia, S., 1993. Assessing diversity climate: A field study of reactions to employer efforts to promote diversity; Journal of Organisational Behaviour, Vol 14 pp. 61-81.