How To Guide Your Protégé To Success: 3 Strategies For Sponsors

In this day and age, it’s hard to believe women are still struggling to advance in their careers. It’s not for lack of experience or credentials. What’s missing are sponsorships for women.

In McKinsey’s Women In The Workplace 2021 report, it states that for every 100 men who are promoted to manager only 86 women are promoted. That means fewer women will be promoted to higher levels.

It’s evident women need more sponsors at higher levels who will open doors for them and advocate for their advancement. But as more companies do away with sponsorship programs, you have to create the opportunity for the next woman who is struggling to advance to the role she is qualified for and deserves because of her hard work and dedication.

3 Ways To Groom Your Protégé For Success

When you become a sponsor, you’re not only providing career feedback and giving advice. You are also boosting a protégé’s chances of making a list of candidates for higher-level positions. That’s why being a sponsor is a role that should be taken seriously.

I have had a number of protégés over the years and if I distill the key most impactful strategies, I would list the following:

Be A Good Role Model To Your Protégé

Whether you realize it or not, every employee is watching their manager and leaders. They are internalizing those behaviors and copying them. As a manager, you don’t have to do anything to make this happen. It happens.

So the most important thing you can do to groom a protégé is model the types of behaviors and habits that will help them grow.

For example, being well-prepared for a leadership meeting, providing clarity to the team on roles and responsibilities, being transparent and communicative, reaching out and just asking how they are doing, “How’s the workload?”

Nonreactivity

I find more junior leaders tend to be reactive and a little fearful. If the trial doesn’t go right, they quickly jump to workaround solutions versus going back to first principles. Understanding the core deliverable and starting from there to develop options.

This is a practice of “go slow to go fast”. Though even senior leaders can get into reactive tunnel vision, a protégé will stand out if she practices.

Visible Stretch Projects

From a most practical standpoint, your protégé needs visibility with other leaders to gain first-hand knowledge of their capabilities. I have found that a very effective way to do this is through a stretch project.

I define a stretch project as one that necessitates cross-functional collaboration, solves a challenging and visible problem in the business, and requires a cadence of leadership updates and inputs. For example, a sales professional who leads a pricing project or a communications leader who develops a social impact partnership.

Wrapping Up

When you make an effort to guide your protégé, it can fast-track her career up the organization chart. I hope the suggestions I shared in this post will be helpful in your role as a sponsor.

If you have anything to add to this list, please leave it in the comments below. And be sure to share this on social media!