Mentors give advice from a distance, coaches provide real-time feedback in your current role, and sponsors actively advocate for you. Women often get plenty of mentoring but lack sponsors who will stick their neck out to open doors.
Chapters
Okay, so there's, so there's some of your coachees who are going to want to create their own career paths and be themselves, and there's some who are going to want to be in the traditional organization. And you drew a distinction between coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring, which apparently helps you make your way up that career path. Could you say more about that?
Sure. So a quick word on coaching versus a mentor. Many organizations, we use it interchangeably. Often even I sort of have this, I will say mentor when I mean a coach, but there is a significant difference between the two. The mentor traditionally dispenses advice, is older, influential, has been there, done it, and is watching the action from the balcony or the gallery. Now, this could be an ex-client, even a family friend, or an ex-boss. These are people who genuinely care for you, and they're there to support you, but their role is dispensing advice. So they're telling you. The coach is there where all the action is taking place, on the dance floor, as we say, or the football field, not watching it from the balcony, giving you real-time advice, nudging you, nagging you, giving you feedback, and they're typically in your current ecosystem, your current domain, your industry, most likely your boss or somebody who's connected to you in your current place of work. Because a coach guides your current practice, a mentor guides your life journey or a career journey. So those are the two sort of distinctions. Also, telling versus asking. Sponsor is a term that I guess it's sort of, there's a lot of talk about it lately. In fact, a very interesting HBR article says women are over-mentored but under-sponsored, meaning a lot of people are telling us what to do and how to do it, but nobody's sticking their neck out for us. So sponsor is that third category who's actually going all out to stick their neck out for you, to advocate for you, to open doors for you. I think the nicest definition was A sponsor is somebody who is standing up for you when you're not in the room. These people are super influential, they can clearly open doors, they have clout, they have influence, but they also have the desire to see you succeed. And I encourage all the young women that I know to consciously convert these mentors into sponsors if you can. It's good, it's great when somebody is giving you advice, But can some of these mentors also do more for you than just tell you what to do?
So a mentor will tell me what to do or teach me what to do. A coach will help me ask the right questions and grow. And a sponsor will give me a leg up.
Yeah, a sponsor would invest.
Sounds like one of the key things I can do as a coachee, and especially as a woman, is to say, yo, can you help me, give me a leg up? I need to get on the damn horse.
