How Sponsorship Is Built: Why You Earn a Sponsor
Why sponsorship is earned through performance, loyalty and reciprocity, and never requested.
By Shirisha Nagendran · Executive Coach
A sponsor is the person who advocates for you, using their own credibility, in the rooms where decisions that influence your career are made and where you are not present to influence them. Having one is the single biggest non-performance factor in whether capable people advance.
So the obvious question that follows is a practical one. How do you get a sponsor?
The answer is counter-intuitive and surprising. You do not ask for a sponsor. You earn one.
Sponsorship is a reputational investment that a senior person chooses to make in you, and they make it for several reasons that you set in motion long before the relationship pays anything back. These could be performance, loyalty, potential, or a pattern of reciprocity.
This guide is about how sponsorship is built and how to be in a position to earn one.
You do not ask to be sponsored
The instinct, once you understand how much sponsorship matters, is to go and ask someone senior to be your sponsor. It rarely works, and Rosalind Chow explains why.
Chow is a social psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, where she studies power, status, and social hierarchy, directs executive education programmes that advance the careers of Black and Latino professionals, and advises companies on how they run sponsorship. She has spent decades on the question of how people use their social connections to raise other people, which makes her worth listening to on the mechanics of it. Her central distinction is the one this whole series of guides rests on.
A mentor works on you. A sponsor works on the audience around you.
Chow's account of why the direct request fails is straightforward. A direct request puts the other person on the spot. It asks them to stake their credibility on you before they have the basis to do so, and it frames the relationship as something you need from them rather than something mutual.
This is the icky factor many of us ‘feel’ when it comes to networking. This kind of relationship is transactional, and does not offer much to the person who stakes their reputation for you.
The move that works is a lot less scary than a direct request. Ask a senior person for their view on a real decision you are weighing. That gives them a window into your thinking and your judgment, costs them little, and lets them form their own view of whether backing you would be a good investment. The relationship is built one interaction at a time, over a long period.
Sponsorship, if it comes, comes because they decided to offer it, and not because you requested it. This is the role of a sponsor, of someone who backs you repeatedly in several forums and you get marked as their protege.
The role of a sponsor is a long-term investment, and it may or may not materialise even after repeated investments in the relationship. When someone takes you on as their protege, they become your sponsor, and that is completely up to them. So asking someone to become your sponsor prematurely puts them in a precarious position where they would find it hard to refuse, so they may take you on, and do nothing about advancing your career.
But there is a specific version of a request of sponsorship that does work and that you can ask of someone. A single concrete act is something you can request. Asking a senior person to endorse you for a particular role, or to make a specific introduction is a request they can weigh on its merits and say yes or no to without committing to anything beyond it.
Ask for acts of sponsorship. Leave the prospect of becoming someone’s protege for the long term. It may develop over time when you make that investment in the relationship.
What a sponsor does
It helps to be precise about the behaviours or actions that a sponsor takes for their protege, because they are what you are trying to make possible for yourself.
Rosalind Chow names four.
A sponsor amplifies, promoting your work in places you are not present.
A sponsor boosts, recommending you formally and staking part of their own standing on your success.
A sponsor connects, linking themselves to you and you to others.
And a sponsor defends, challenging an inaccurate account of you before it gets fixed as the truth in perception or documentation.
Each of these spends some of the sponsor's credibility on your behalf, which is the thing to keep in mind, because it explains everything about how sponsorship is earned.
Sponsorship is a reputational bet
When a sponsor advocates for you, they tie their name to yours. If you succeed, their judgment looks good. If you fail, it is their judgment and reputation that is questioned, and not only your performance. A mentor carries no such risk, since no one holds a mentor responsible for a mentee's outcomes. A sponsor does for their protege.
This is why sponsors are selective, why they back people whose work they know first hand, and why the whole task of earning sponsorship reduces to one thing. You lower the risk the sponsor is carrying, and you raise the return. Everything described below is a way of doing that.
First, you deliver, and then some
The foundation to ask to be someone’s protege is performance, and there is no route around it. Sylvia Ann Hewlett is an economist who founded the Center for Talent Innovation in New York and has run the largest body of research there is on sponsorship, surveying tens of thousands of professionals on what separates the people who get backed from the people who do not. Her finding is that protégés earn sponsorship first through consistent, superior results, the kind that hold up under pressure and difficult circumstances.
Performance is necessary. It is also not sufficient, because strong performers are common at all levels, especially senior levels and sponsorship is scarce.
What distinguishes a person worth backing is that they bring something the sponsor values and may not have. Hewlett calls this your currency. It might be a skill the sponsor's team lacks, a network they cannot reach, fluency in a market or a function they are weaker in, or a perspective their group does not have. Whatever it is, it adds to the sponsor's own standing even as it sets you apart. The question worth asking yourself is: What do I bring that is useful to the people whose advocacy I would value?
Having their back, the loyalty and reciprocity that earns sponsorship
This is the part most people miss, and it is the part that makes the difference. Sponsorship is a two-way street. Hewlett's research puts the proportions starkly, that the protégé does the larger share of the work in the relationship, and not the sponsor. You do not get carried up on someone's coattails for nothing. You earn the investment by investing first, and visibly.
What that investment looks like is concrete, and it is worth naming it explicitly.
You earn trust by doing something that demonstrates it, before any of it is reciprocated. Loyalty, in Hewlett's findings, sits second only to performance in what secures a sponsor. The order matters. You commit to a senior person's success and interests first, and the advocacy, if it comes from them, follows. You do not wait to be backed and then become loyal. You show where your loyalties lie, and then see whether the backing comes. Whether it does is never guaranteed. Doing nothing and expecting people to stand up for you guarantees that they will not.
Having someone's back is a specific way of demonstrating trust. When you receive information that matters to a person whose orbit you want to be in, something they would need to know and might not yet, you bring it to them. You become a reliable source of the intelligence they need, eyes and ears they can trust. You do real favours, the kind that cost you something and help them. You show open appreciation for what they do. You stand up for them when they are not in the room, and you advocate for them in the same way you hope someone will one day advocate for you. This is reciprocity in the full sense, a long-range exchange in which value moves in both directions over time.
And some of it has to be visible. In my experience this is the part people most underestimate. When you align yourself with someone, you have to be seen to do it. Quietly being in someone's corner is worth far less than being known to be in it, because the value you bring to a sponsor includes the public fact of your loyalty, which reflects on them. There are moments when you have to throw your hat in publicly, to be visibly watching someone's back, to let it be known whose work and whose judgment you stand behind. This is how alliances become visible to the people around them, and it is part of what makes you worth backing in return.
A caution holds this together. Do not do any of this as flattery. Do not do it to join a faction. Loyalty earned through real contribution and shared interest is a different thing from currying favour, and senior people who are worth having as sponsors can tell the difference quickly. The loyalty that earns sponsorship is grounded in something true, that you respect the person, that your interests align, that you have had their back when it cost you something.
Hewlett's own framing is that sponsorship rests on a quid pro quo and is, at heart, transactional, and that provided you are giving as good as you are getting, there is nothing about that to be uncomfortable with. The discomfort comes when the giving is hollow, when you are performing loyalty you do not hold in order to extract something. The integrity comes when the exchange is real on both sides, when what you give has cost you something and what you receive has been earned rather than engineered.
There are times when you have to invest a great deal of extra work for a person to become a sponsor. You could build the slides for them. You could do the work that they do not have the bandwidth for. You could run initiatives on their behalf with them as the sponsor. There are many things you can do, and the test is the one above, that you are giving something real and may have this reciprocated.
Showing, and not only telling
A sponsor can advocate for you in two ways, and you have more influence over one of them than the other. The two ways are telling and showing.
Take their word for you
Telling is direct advocacy. The recommendation, the word in the review, the case made on your behalf when you are not in the room, all of this is telling. The sponsor is asking the audience to take their word for you.
Reach their own conclusion
Showing is different. Showing is creating the situation in which the people whose assessment matters see you do the thing themselves, and reach their own conclusion. The sponsor puts you in the room instead of describing you to the room. Showing tends to have more impact, because people believe what they see more than what they are told.
The implication for you is to make showing possible. Hone your skills of facilitating discussions, having difficult conversations, standing up to challenging stakeholders, presenting your work confidently. Put your work where the people whose assessment matters can encounter it directly, which means presenting your own analysis to the steering group instead of having your boss carry the slides, taking the difficult question in the review yourself, and being in the room when the thing you built is discussed. When a senior person offers to represent your work for you, the useful counter-offer is to come along and speak to it. Being strong in presentation, communication and negotiation skills are vital, if the sponsor has to be comfortable putting you in front of a group where their reputation matters. A sponsor who can show you, rather than only vouch for you, is a sponsor whose advocacy carries further, and you are the one who creates the occasions for it.
Who can sponsor, and why you need more than one
A sponsor does not have to be the most senior person available. Chow draws a useful line between power, which is access to resources and formal authority, and status, which is the respect and trust others hold for someone. A person with high status and modest power can still shift a specific decision, because their word is believed in the room that matters. The sponsor who counts is the one who is present where your decision is made and trusted by the people deciding.
This is why sponsorship needs are specific, and not generic, and why you build a portfolio of sponsors instead of betting on one relationship. A sponsor who is invaluable for one opportunity may have no influence on another. A spread of sponsors across the different areas of influence that matter to your goals is more useful than depth in a single tie. For anyone running a serious remit from a location away from the headquarters (most GCC roles), that portfolio has to include at least one relationship at or near the centre where decisions are made.
GCC stands for Global Capability Centre, the captive offshore operation a multinational runs as its own arm in India, serving a headquarters located in another country.
The discomfort, taken seriously
Much of this can be uncomfortable. Part of the discomfort is an accurate reading of a real asymmetry between genders. The research is clear that women who build strategic relationships are judged more harshly for it than men who do the same, their networking is interpreted as manipulative where a man's reads as strategic. So the unease is not just a personal discomfort, but it also arises from the system.
The conclusion that follows such systemic inequity is to decide to stay out of it, but staying out of it leaves you dependent on a meritocracy that the evidence says does not, on its own, deliver. The conclusion is to do the work with integrity. The line worth holding is between cultivating a relationship for leverage, which is the thing that draws the penalty and the distaste, and making your real work known to people who can speak to it while having their back.
That line is also the line between the political operator and the politically literate person. The operator does these things as a transaction. The relationship is a means, the loyalty is a performance, and the moment the other person stops being useful the attention moves elsewhere. Transaction dressed as a relationship is what people are seeing through when they see through someone, and it is what gives the whole territory its bad name. The politically literate person does the same visible things from integrity and reciprocity. The work is real, the loyalty is held, the exchange runs in both directions, and the relationship survives the other person ceasing to be useful. From the outside the two can look similar for a while. Over time they do not, because a transaction cannot be sustained once the returns stop, and a relationship can.
Sponsorship built on real contribution, real loyalty, and real mutual benefit is not a corruption of merit. It is how good work finds its way into the rooms where it is judged.
Investing this time and energy into your own performance, relationships can be time-consuming. Much of this can seem impossible when you are already stretched at work. But remember that how you carry yourself, the watercooler conversations you have with people, the presentations you make all of that is something you do not pay much attention to on a daily basis. None of this work is about doing something ‘extra’ but it is about capitalising on the opportunities and proactively cultivating relationships and investing in them long before you have the need for it.
What sponsorship is not
Sponsorship is not flattery, and it is not a performance of loyalty detached from any real basis. It is not a substitute for the work, since advocacy grounded in nothing is exposed the moment anyone engages with you and your work directly. And it is not a single relationship to be secured once and relied on forever. It is a small set of real relationships, earned through performance and loyalty and reciprocity, invested in before they pay, and tended over time.
Where this goes next
Knowing how sponsorship is built tells you what you are aiming at. It does not tell you what to do on Monday morning, particularly if you have joined somewhere new, or if you have never had a sponsor and have no idea where to begin. The companion guide, Where to Start When You Have No Sponsor, sets out the low-stakes moves that put you in front of the people who might one day back you, and closes with the move that turns the whole question around.
This guide is part of the Networks, Alliances, and Sponsorship cluster within the Political Literacy hub at shirishanagendran.com. The companion guides on the advocacy audit, strategic networks, and making your work visible develop the specific practices this guide draws on.
Frequently asked questions
The questions most people bring after reading this guide.
I am very junior. How do I find a sponsor?
Being junior works in your favour, because you have a long runway to build a portfolio of sponsors. Start with your work, and make yourself technically and functionally strong. Find mentors who can teach you and whose judgement you trust. Invest in your soft skills, because these start to matter once your technical and functional competence is established. Most people at your level give them little attention, so strengthening yours will work to your advantage. Do favours for your mentors and for the people senior to you, and while you are junior, give at least a fifth of your time to this. Make your work visible to the senior people whose reach extends across the department, not only to the team around you. This is where you build the relationship. You become someone reliable and dependable, with results that perform under pressure, and the backing tends to come from the people who have been watching you. The sponsor you are looking for is often already in the room, forming a view. When the relationship is there and you have a particular need, ask for a specific act of sponsorship, an endorsement for a role or an introduction.
It is awkward for me to go and ask people to do things for me. What do I do?
The discomfort is a signal worth reading. It probably stems from not being clear what to ask of people and imagining that the request will be met with a ‘no’. The easiest place to begin is by asking someone for their input on something significant. You can ask a senior person for their view on a real decision you are weighing. You do not have to ask them to be your sponsor or to advance your career. Offering an opinion or advice costs them little, and gives them a window into the problems you are grappling with, the factors you are considering and lets them form an impression, one interaction at a time, on whether they would consider backing you. When you do make a direct request, keep it to a single concrete act, an endorsement for a particular role/project or one specific introduction, something they can weigh and say yes or no to.
My work should speak for itself. Why do I need a sponsor at all?
Strong work is necessary, and it is not sufficient. Sylvia Ann Hewlett's research across tens of thousands of professionals found that results earn you a place in the pool, and sponsorship moves you out of it, because strong performers are common at most levels, especially senior levels, and advocacy is scarce. Your work speaks in the rooms you are in. A sponsor speaks for it in the rooms where decisions are made and you are not present.
My manager should act as my sponsor. Isn't that their job?
A manager and a sponsor are different roles, and one does not guarantee the other. Your manager is responsible for your performance and development. A sponsor chooses to spend their own credibility advocating for you, and no one can be assigned to do that. Some managers become sponsors, and many do not. A sponsor two levels away or in another function can carry more weight in the room that decides your next move than the manager who signs your appraisal.
This feels like playing politics, and I do not want to be that person.
The distaste is worth taking seriously, because it reads something real. The person people see through is the operator, the one for whom the relationship is a means to their own end. The operator’s loyalty is a performance and their attention moves on to someone else the moment you stop being useful. The politically literate person sees people as people, not as resources. They do not let level, seniority, or stakes stop them from cultivating relationships. They invest in relationships, hold loyalty and the relationship survives even when the other person has stopped being ‘useful’. From the outside the political operator and politically literate person can look similar for a while. Over time they do not.
I am a woman and I worry this kind of relationship-building will make me look manipulative.
That worry is accurate about a real asymmetry. Research is clear that women who build strategic relationships are judged more harshly for it than men who do the same, whose identical behaviour reads as strategic. Staying out of it is the costlier choice in the long run and for your career advancement, because it leaves you dependent on a meritocracy that the evidence says does not, on its own, deliver. The distinction worth holding is between cultivating a relationship for leverage, which draws the penalty, and making your real work known to the people who can speak to it while you back them in return.
My leadership sits in another country and I am in a GCC. How do I find a sponsor when the decision-makers are not here?
A spread of sponsors matters more than depth in one relationship, and for anyone running a serious remit at a distance from the headquarters, that spread has to include at least one relationship at or near the centre where decisions are made. Proximity to your daily work and proximity to the decision are two different things. Find where the choices about your remit are made, and build presence there, through the interactions and the visible work that let someone at the centre form a first-hand view of you. Actively cultivate these relationships when you visit the headquarters, and when the leadership team visits here.
I did a lot for someone and they never sponsored me. Was it wasted?
The return on this work is never guaranteed, and that uncertainty is part of the design. You commit to a senior person's success first and see whether the backing follows, because loyalty offered only once you are already backed is not loyalty. What you built still counts. The reputation for reliability, the visible results, and the relationships you formed travel with you to the next person and the next room. Reciprocity that runs one way stops being a relationship, so it is worth asking whether the exchange was ever mutual.
Explore Other Guides
More from the Networks, Alliances & Sponsorship series
How Careers Actually Advance: Sponsorship
How advancement really works: networks, alliances, and sponsorship. A political literacy guide on why performance alone stalls careers and how to build advocacy.
Read the guide →Over-Mentored and Under-Sponsored at Work
Most senior women have mentors, not sponsors. A political literacy guide on the difference and how to build the advocacy that actually advances careers.
Read the guide →
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References
Chow, R. M. (2025). The Doors You Can Open: A New Way to Network, Build Trust, and Use Your Influence to Create a More Inclusive Workplace. PublicAffairs.
Hewlett, S. A. (2013). Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor. Harvard Business Review Press.
Hewlett, S. A. (2019). The Sponsor Effect: How to Be a Better Leader by Investing in Others. Harvard Business Review Press.
Ibarra, H., Carter, N. M. and Silva, C. (2010). Why men still get more promotions than women. Harvard Business Review, September 2010.