Author Talks: The ‘right kind’ of sponsorship could advance your career

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Alexandra Mondalek chats with Rosalind Chow, associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University, about The Doors You Can Open: A New Way to Network, Build Trust, and Use Your Influence to Create a More Inclusive Workplace (PublicAffairs/Hachette Book Group Spring 2025). Chow reveals the flaws inherent in the traditional approach to mentorship and sponsorship. She argues that more tactical, authentic methods are needed to help protégés achieve their career goals. She outlines a practical approach for creating a successful, mutually beneficial mentorship and sponsorship program. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.

Why did you write this book?

This book is a labor of love that came out of my having done a fair amount of executive education program directing, teaching, and thinking about sponsorship in a new way. Having lots of participants come to me and say, “I love this way of thinking about how we use our social connections. Where can I go to read more about this approach?” and me not having a resource to give them, I thought, “Well, if it doesn’t exist, then I might as well be the one to do it.”

Tell me about the title of the book.

The title of the book was very important to me. The Doors You Can Open is an ambiguous title. Who are you opening the door for?

You could be opening it for yourself, but it’s a call to open it for other people. The door opener doesn’t matter. The title reflects the idea I wanted to enforce, which is that anyone can be a sponsor. We can all support each other. We all have a role to play. So, I really love the book title for that reason.

No one wants to say it, but sponsorship can be risky. How did you consider framing that concept?

I describe sponsorship, and then I explain what the potential risks and benefits are. Ultimately, it’s up to everybody to decide their comfort with the risks versus the benefits. In fact, it’s almost, in a way, definitional to sponsorship. That risk is inherently part of sponsoring other people.

There are certain forms of sponsorship we can engage in that are less risky than others. But at least one of the big distinctions that I want to make between mentorship and sponsorship is that mentorship is inherently less risky.

And that’s partially why, generally, we see less sponsorship compared to mentorship because sponsorship is harder. It is riskier. Knowing that it has risks also helps us understand, “Well, why are some people willing to do it?”

Who are they willing to do it for? Who are they not willing to do it for? I don’t know of any version of this where I couldn’t have talked about the risks of sponsorship.

As you climb, you start getting a reputation for being someone who develops talent. The hope is, obviously, that your leaders are the ones who pull others up with them. That’s what sponsors do.

How would you define sponsorship?

Mentorship involves someone talking to you; sponsorship involves someone talking about you. The other way I like to put it is, think about who is being asked to change. In a mentorship relationship, mentors are asking mentees to change. Someone gives you feedback. They tell you, “Well, this is how I would approach the situation.” All of this is information given to you with the intent of changing how you behave or think about a situation.

With sponsorship, the protégé, or the person who’s being helped, is not being asked to change at all. It’s about how other people think or behave toward the protégé. I see mentorship as fundamentally what we would call a “dyadic relationship,” where there are only two people involved. Sponsorship involves more than two. There must be a third for sponsorship to exist. A sponsor is asking someone else to think or see their protégé differently.

What are some common misconceptions about sponsorship that you have encountered?

There are two major misconceptions. The first misconception is that only people with power can sponsor. The second one is that sponsorship must involve taking bold actions. There are smaller versions of sponsorship and larger, more visible versions of sponsorship.

Power is related in the sense that powerful sponsors are the ones who can take big, bold, visible sponsorship actions. The prototypical sponsor that you sometimes hear about is someone who is pounding the table for you. You’re in a performance review meeting, and maybe there’s a disagreement about someone’s performance. There’s someone in the room who feels very passionately about their protégé and is pounding the table, saying, “You all are wrong. You need to give this person a chance,” or, “This is the promotion they deserve.”

Understand that when people are doing that, they’re making their sponsorship very obvious and visible for others to see. They are very explicitly saying, “I want you to do this for my protégé,” or, “I want you to think a particular way about my protégé.”

People tend not to like being told what to do. You do need a fair amount of power to get away with that. If you’re someone with less power and you’re pounding the table, people are going to see that as extremely inappropriate. I would not recommend that. Again, sponsors need to have power. People who have power are probably going to have more opportunities to sponsor. And they probably will be able to sponsor in many more ways than a person who doesn’t have power.

But when we’re talking about who’s the most effective at sponsorship, it actually doesn’t have to be the person who has the most power. It’s the person who has the most status. It’s the person whom other people trust. Actually, if you separate out between power and status, people don’t necessarily trust people in power.

They trust people who are high in status. The average person usually sees power and status as the same thing. As academics, we separate the two. Power means control over resources. Our bosses have power over us, because they control our ability to receive promotions or raises and selection for projects that we want to be a part of. That’s separable from status, which is the respect and admiration that other people have for us.

You can think of bosses who are both high in power and in status. These are the bosses for whom everyone wants to work. People who work for these managers or leaders love working for them so much that they would probably give up opportunities to work with others as a result.

These people have high power and high status. There are also bosses who have a lot of power, but nobody likes them. Those people have high power but low status. Who’s the sponsor who will be able to propel their protégé forward? It will be the sponsor who has status, not just the sponsor who has power.

Why is the traditional networking process inherently flawed?

The book is about sponsorship, obviously. But it’s also my diatribe against networking as we normally think about it, try to do it, or talk about it. The way we have been socialized to think about networking these days is typically to focus on power.

In Harvard Business Review articles on how to assess or optimize your network, there’s usually an assessment [that asks questions] such as: “Who in your network has what kind of resources?” “Does your network lack some sort of resource that you need?”

We approach networking thinking primarily about power. Again, power is control over resources. Who has power? We are looking for people with power. Power tends to be associated with certain social characteristics that may or may not actually be good indicators of whether someone has that resource or not. I argue that focusing on who has power is not the correct way to network.

When we focus on who has power, we tend to overlook the people who don’t appear to have power but actually might have access to many resources we could benefit from. Instead of approaching networking as, “Whose problem can I solve?,” consider that this is not a problem that I need to solve.

Rather, I know that there are people with problems, and I know that there are people who have certain skills and abilities that could be solutions to other people’s problems. My job is to find those problems and match them with the right people who could solve those problems.

With this approach, networking does not turn into this marketing game where you have to upsell yourself in a way that feels inauthentic for many people. It turns more into a quiet treasure hunting game, at least from my perspective, where you’re trying hard to get good, high-quality information from other people. That information is not about what they can do, but what their challenges are, what they’re looking for, and also what they enjoy doing so that you can make these matches.

Can you explain the connection between power and bias?

People who are in positions of power because they have control over resources—this effectively buffers them from other people being able to threaten them. When you have all the things that other people want, people are going to be very hesitant to act against you in ways that are going to hurt you.

That allows you to focus purely on getting what you want. Research has found that when you’re put in a mindset of power or in a position of power, it makes you objectify other people. It makes you use cognitive heuristics.

One cognitive heuristic is stereotyping. You see this relationship between being high in power [and stereotyping others]—for some people, not all. Generally, when you have power, you’re more likely to stereotype other people.

What does it mean to have multiplex ties? What is its role in networking?

When you don’t contact your network, it’s not just bad for you. It’s also bad for them. There’s utility in knowing that you have value for someone else, because many of us associate asking for help with a form of vulnerability.

Multiplexity refers to the number of relational layers that we have in a given relationship. How many different types of topics or dimensions are there to our relationship? We all have people at work whom we’re perfectly friendly with, but we only ever talk to them about work-related things. It doesn’t mean we don’t trust them. If anything, you might very well trust them to get stuff done at work.

Yet for whatever reason, you don’t talk about anything other than work with them. Then you also have people with whom you may speak only about personal things—for example, your pets or your kids.

But you never really share anything about your work. And then your career is another layer that people talk about that is not related to getting the day-to-day things done. It covers the long-term career aspirations.

That layer refers to the mentors who get to see that side of us. But we might not go to our mentors and say, “Hey, I need to get task A done, and I’ve never done it before. Could you please show me?” The idea of multiplexity is that for every layer that our relationships involve, the quantity of information increases.

For example, if I talk to somebody about just task-related subjects, getting work done, but also talk to them about career-related things, obviously, there will be more information exchanged just because there are two types of information being exchanged.

What’s different about multiplexity, though, is that it’s also talking about the quality of information that’s being exchanged in any given layer. Sponsorship comes from multiplex ties. You’re more likely to be sponsored if you have multiplex ties. That’s the relationship between sponsorship and multiplexity. If what we want is to maximize our network for sponsorship, we need to focus on creating more and more multiplex ties by deepening those single-layer ties.

There are different kinds of sponsorship. Which are the most powerful?

This topic is most relevant for your Gen Z audience because a lot of them don’t see themselves as being in positions of power. They’re not in power yet, because they’re more junior. That’s where I would start. There are types of sponsorship behaviors that anyone can do, no matter how much power they have. And that’s what I call “good gossip,” which I’ve defined as anytime you are trying to change how people see each other.

Gossip is a way to change how people see each other. Often we think of gossip as saying not-great things about people—changing how people see those people for the worse. But you can also change it for the better.

I encourage our Gen Z people to start thinking more carefully about who’s good at what in your network. Then sing their praises when an opportunity arises. You could say, “Oh, are you looking for a person who is really good at this? I know somebody.”

Someone may have good news yet feel weird about promoting it. Most of us, myself included, struggle with self-promotion. You can buffer those people from the social penalty of being seen as a bragger by just doing it for them. There’s no cost to you, but this is really important.

As mentioned, sponsorship is riskier, except when you spread good gossip. When you can point to things that have already happened and are objectively verifiable in some way, there is no risk to sharing people’s good news in that way.

It’s only when you start projecting into the future and you’re starting to vouch for something that has yet to happen or is uncertain that sponsorship becomes riskier. If you forecast incorrectly, not only is the person that you sponsored going to not look good, you will also not look good.

What’s a tactical step that organizations could take to improve their sponsorship programs?

I work with companies to design their sponsorship programs. There’s one program I’m particularly proud of. It’s a very large company that takes its sponsorship program really seriously. That perspective is evident from its design. The first five months of the program have nothing to do with anyone sponsoring anyone else. It is all about relationship building and ensuring that the sponsors feel as though they truly know their protégés and vice versa. We are creating a fresh relationship. It’s an “arranged marriage,” but we want both parties to be very happy. We give them guidelines and a lot of space for building that relationship together.

At the end of the program, we ask sponsors to start thinking about how they will sponsor their protégé. We don’t lead with, “We want you to sponsor.” Rather, we start with, “We want you to build a relationship of trust with someone that you wouldn’t otherwise have had an opportunity to know and, potentially, think about in any sort of reasonable way.”

Then we parlay that relationship into the sponsor being willing to open these doors for the protégé in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise. It will be good for you, for them, and for the institution.

This company is really interested in sponsorship because, when it comes to succession planning and related things, it sees it as very much a talent retention and development imperative.

How do sponsorship programs account for remote or hybrid work?

Mentorship and sponsorship programs suffer from asking people to build a relationship but giving them little to go on. Referring again to this program that I adore, it’s effective because it is an extremely high-touch program. I see a lot of organizations get this wrong in that they match a mentor and a mentee and have a launch party.

After that, it’s just up to the mentor and mentee to make it work. In contrast, with the program that I help run, I train all the sponsors on what sponsorship is and on what we’re hoping they’ll get out of the program. We have multiple touchpoints where I meet with both sponsors and sponsees and force them to complete awkward exercises together.

But when they come out of it on the other end, they’re so happy and grateful for having done so. So, if you want these programs to work, you must be willing to put the resources behind them, either by hiring external subject matter experts like me to facilitate these sorts of conversations, or having a designated, in-house person who’s doing this. But I personally haven’t figured out a way to do effective programming at scale that doesn’t have this kind of, like, high-touch, hands-on feature.

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