Over-Mentored and Under-Sponsored at Work
Why mentoring is not enough for your career advancement.
By Shirisha Nagendran · Executive Coach
Most senior women have mentors. Fewer have sponsors. The two are not the same thing, and treating them as the same is one of the more costly mistakes in career navigation.
It is costly because it means investing in the relationship category that already tends to be overdeveloped while neglecting the one that produces the most concrete career outcomes.
This guide sets out the distinction, why it matters now, and how to build sponsorship relationships without it seeming transactional or naïve.
The Distinction
Rosalind Chow, an organisational behaviour researcher at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, draws the most useful distinction available.
Acts on you
A mentor shares their experience, offers guidance, and helps you develop your thinking about your career and your leadership. The relationship runs between two people, in conversation. Its output is your development. The things you understand better, the capabilities you build, the clarity you reach about your direction. Mentors are valuable. The relationship is worth having.
Acts on how others see you
A sponsor does something different. A sponsor advocates for you in rooms you are not in. They put their credibility behind your advancement. They say your name when a decision is being made about a role, a project, a promotion, or a visibility opportunity. They use their social capital, the trust and relationships and influence they have built, on your behalf.
The difference is directionality. Mentorship happens in the relationship. Sponsorship happens in the organisation, in the conversations that shape outcomes, in the moments where your name is either in the room or it is not.
Both relationships involve advocacy for you. Mentorship advocates within the conversation. Sponsorship advocates outside it.
Why This Matters Now
For most of the history of formal diversity programmes, the focus has been on mentoring. Organisations created mentoring programmes, matched senior people with junior women, tracked the number of mentoring relationships, and measured participation as a proxy for investment in female advancement.
The data has not supported this as sufficient. Herminia Ibarra, with Nancy Carter and Christine Silva, studied a Catalyst sample of more than four thousand high potentials and tracked who was promoted two years on. For men, having had a mentor predicted promotion. For women, having a mentor showed no relationship to promotion at all. The mentoring investment was real. The outcome did not follow.
Ibarra, Carter and Silva gave the pattern a name that has held up for over fifteen years.
The advice, the guidance, the development conversation are available. Less available is the person who goes to bat, uses their capital, and makes the specific case for your specific advancement in the specific conversation where it matters. Only sponsorship carries advocacy for advancement.
Two developments have sharpened the picture. In the United States, many organisations have cut or dismantled their formal diversity programmes since early 2025. What survived was often redirected towards mentorship and networking, which is the relationship category Ibarra's data shows does least to advance women. The formal structure has drifted towards the relationship that develops a woman rather than the one that advances her.
This shift has not stayed within the United States. It reaches India directly, because many Indian centres are Global Capability Centres, the captive offshore operations that American companies run as their own. When a headquarters in the United States steps back from formal advancement structures, the change travels down into the centres it owns.
In many higher power-distance markets, including much of India, advancement has long run through informal advocacy more than through any formal programme. The contraction now visible in the United States makes plain a pattern that is already held in many of the rooms you work in.
This is the political literacy dimension of networks and career architecture. As the formal scaffolding thins, or where it was never load-bearing to begin with, advancement depends on whose name is in the room and on who has a sponsor making the case. Sponsorship becomes the primary mechanism.
What Sponsorship Actually Looks Like
Sponsorship is easy to describe in the abstract and harder to recognise in practice. Four moments make it concrete.
In a succession planning conversation, a sponsor says, 'We should be considering her for the regional director role. She ran the Q3 restructure and it delivered what we needed. I think she is ready.'
In a client pitch selection, a sponsor says, 'Put her on this one. She needs the exposure, and she is the right person for it.'
In a senior appointment process, a sponsor makes a call, 'I hear you are looking for a new head of strategy. I know who you should talk to.'
In a post-mortem of a project that went badly, a sponsor says, 'The conditions that created that outcome were not about her leadership. I do not want this to land on her record in a way that is not accurate.'
In each case, the sponsor is using their credibility, the trust that others have in their judgment, to shape how you are perceived in a conversation you are not part of. The value of that depends on how much their credibility is worth in that specific context.
Chow names four things a sponsor does, and the four moments above are instances of them.
A sponsor amplifies, by promoting your work in places you are not.
A sponsor boosts, by recommending you formally and staking a portion of their own standing on your success.
A sponsor connects, by linking themselves to you and you to others.
A sponsor defends, by challenging an inaccurate account of you before it sets.
Amplifying matters most where self-promotion carries a penalty. For many women it does, so the safe channel for your accomplishments is another person's voice.
Who Can Be a Sponsor
Sponsorship is not limited to the most senior person in your organisation. A sponsor is anyone whose advocacy would improve the probability of a specific outcome.
The power of a sponsor is a function of their influence in the specific context where you need advocacy. A peer who is trusted by a key hiring manager has more sponsorship value for that opportunity than a senior person who has no relationship with anyone involved in the decision.
The sponsor who matters most is the one who is in the room where the decision you care about is being made, and whose judgment is trusted by the people in that room.
This means sponsorship needs are specific. They attach to the decisions you want to influence. A sponsor who is invaluable for one opportunity may have no value for another. Building a network of sponsors across different areas of influence is more useful than depth in a single relationship.
What You Are Asking a Sponsor to Carry
When a sponsor advocates for you, they pledge their own reputation. They are telling the people who trust them that you are worth backing, and in doing so they attach their judgment to your name.
From that point their standing and yours are linked. If you deliver, their judgment is confirmed and their standing grows. If you falter, or if others question your record, it is their judgment that is questioned alongside you. This is what a sponsor takes on every time they act on your behalf.
A sponsor amplifies, boosts, connects, and defends. The first three build your standing in the organisation. The fourth protects it, and of the four it is the one that costs the sponsor most.
Defending spends the sponsor's standing. Each time a sponsor corrects an inaccurate account of you, they draw down the credibility that made their advocacy worth anything in the first place.
Chow's research finds that women are criticised more often than men, so a woman's sponsors have to defend her more often. A woman seeking sponsorship is therefore asking, without intending to, for a costlier form of support than a man asking for the same thing. That is not a reason to ask for less. It is a reason to understand the account you are drawing on, and to keep a sponsor from spending faster than your record replenishes.
Work made visible on your own terms lowers the protection you ask of the people advocating for you, and keeps their advocacy at full strength.
The GCC and India Dimension
For leaders in GCC or India-based roles within multinational organisations, the sponsorship question has an additional layer of complexity worth naming.
The decisions that shape your career, the role you are considered for, the visibility you are given, the narrative that travels upward, are often made by people who are geographically, culturally, and organisationally distant from your day-to-day work.
Your direct manager may be an advocate. The conversations that matter may be happening at a headquarters you have limited access to, in a culture where relationship and access work differently, among people who have limited direct visibility of what you do.
The problem at headquarters is specific. Without a sponsor at or near the decision-making centre, you depend on your manager's advocacy and on the secondhand impressions that travel upward through whatever filter that relationship represents. If that filter is accurate and generous, your work is represented well. If it is not, you have no independent channel through which your work can reach the people deciding.
Building sponsorship across geographies is the structural response to the structural problem.
It means investing in relationships with senior people at headquarters or in other markets, making your work visible to them over time, and creating the conditions for them to know your capability first hand. It is harder than building sponsorship locally. It asks for more intentional investment. And it is worth more for the decisions that matter most.
Building sponsorship elsewhere is the route you have to take if you find that your manager does not act as your sponsor, or is sabotaging you or has no influence in the promotion process or within the room where decisions are taken.
Building Sponsorship With Intention
The transactional discomfort that many women feel about sponsorship building is worth addressing. The discomfort usually runs, 'I should advance on the merit of my work, and not because I cultivated a relationship with a powerful person. Using relationships to get ahead seems calculated and inauthentic.'
This discomfort deserves attention, and part of it is accurate. Women who build strategic relationships are read differently from men who do the same. The same connection that reads as sensible for a man can read as calculating for a woman, and women who network actively can be marked down for it. The discomfort is partly a correct reading of how your relationship-building will be received.
The distinction worth holding is between cultivating a relationship for leverage, which is what draws the penalty, and making real work known to people who can speak to it, which holds up. The second is the slower business of letting your work be seen by people whose word carries weight.
The relationship between a sponsor and a sponsored person works best when it is grounded in first-hand knowledge, mutual respect, and real benefit to both. A sponsor takes a reputational risk when they advocate for someone. They take that risk for someone they believe in, whose work they know at first hand, and whose success reflects well on their own judgment.
Building that relationship means giving the sponsor real evidence to stand behind. That evidence is your work, your judgment, and your record of what you can do.
The work of sponsorship building is therefore less about cultivating relationships in a calculated sense and more about making your work known to people whose advocacy would matter.
That happens when you do excellent work that creates its own reasons for senior exposure. It happens when you are visible in the settings where sponsors are present. It happens when you bring real engagement to the conversations you are in, when you follow through, when you go deeper, and when you hold an opinion worth hearing.
Making your work known in these ways is sustained, honest investment in professional relationships, the kind that builds trust over time.
Trust is the foundation sponsorship rests on.
It is a different thing from networking in the performance sense.
The Reciprocity Principle
Research on networks and sponsorship keeps returning to reciprocity.
The relationships that are most durable and most productive are the ones where value flows in both directions.
A sponsor who advocates for you is investing their credibility. That investment lasts when they see a return on it. Your success reflects well on their judgment. Your work produces outcomes that serve them and their priorities. The relationship is one they find stimulating or valuable in its own right.
Thinking about what you bring to the sponsor relationship, and not only what you can draw from it, is the basis of the relationships that last longest and work best.
This guide has drawn the distinction and shown what sponsorship is. The next guide in this series, How Sponsorship Is Built, is about the harder part, how you build that advocacy for yourself, without it seeming calculated, and when the people deciding your career sit at a distance from your daily work.
If you want to map your own professional network, identify your advancers, and close the gap between your effort and your advancement, we can work together: https://shirishanagendran.com/work-with-me/
This guide is part of the Networks, Alliances, and Sponsorship cluster within the Political Literacy hub at shirishanagendran.com. Related guides cover strategic networks, making your work visible, and the advocacy audit.
Frequently asked questions
The questions most people bring after reading this guide.
What is the difference between a mentor and a sponsor?
A mentor shares experience and guidance and helps you develop your thinking; the relationship runs between two people and its output is your development. A sponsor advocates for you in rooms you are not in, putting their credibility behind your advancement and using their social capital on your behalf. Mentors act on you; sponsors act on how others see you.
Why are women over-mentored and under-sponsored?
Formal diversity programmes have focused on mentoring and measured it as a proxy for investment in women. But a Catalyst study of more than four thousand high potentials found that for women, having a mentor showed no relationship to promotion, while for men it predicted promotion. The advice is available; the person who uses their capital to make the case for a woman's specific advancement is less so.
Who can be a sponsor?
Anyone whose advocacy would improve the probability of a specific outcome, not only the most senior person. A sponsor's power is a function of their influence in the specific context where you need advocacy. A peer trusted by a key hiring manager can have more sponsorship value than a senior person with no relationship to the decision.
Isn't building sponsorship just calculated networking?
The distinction is between cultivating a relationship for leverage, which draws a penalty, and making real work known to people who can speak to it, which holds up. Sponsorship building is less about cultivating relationships in a calculated sense and more about letting your work be seen by people whose advocacy would matter, grounded in first-hand knowledge and trust.
How does sponsorship work in GCCs or India-based roles?
The decisions that shape your career are often made by people geographically, culturally and organisationally distant from your work. Without a sponsor near the decision-making centre, you depend on your manager's advocacy and the secondhand impressions that travel upward. Building sponsorship across geographies is the structural response: investing in relationships with senior people at headquarters and making your work visible to them over time.
Explore the Series
The Networks, Alliances & Sponsorship series, in order. New guides publish weekly from 19 July 2026.
Want to know when the next guide publishes?
This series publishes weekly, one guide every Sunday from 19 July 2026. Leave your email and I will let you know as each one goes live.
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.
Chow, R. M. (2021). Don't just mentor women and people of color. Sponsor them. Harvard Business Review, June 2021.
Hewlett, S. A. (2013). Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor: The New Way to Fast-Track Your Career. 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.
Ibarra, H. (2015). Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader. Harvard Business Review Press.