Tips To Get You Promoted This Year: The Role Of Mentors, Coaches And Sponsors In Career Acceleration
Many of us are under the mistaken belief that if we just work hard we will magically ascend the corporate ladder, and when that promotion doesn’t come we buckle down and work harder and harder. Eventually weeks, months and years go by and the opportunities for promotion continue to evade us and despair just sets in. The problem isn’t that we don’t have hard work ethic, or that we don’t deliver results, or even that we don’t have the depth of expertise required. The problem is that the right people don’t know about our amazing contributions and the value that we bring so we are consistently overlooked. Hard work doesn’t speak for itself, if no one is listening. We need visibility! We haven’t put ourselves out there so that the right people can play a powerful role in our career advancement. The truth is, we can’t really work our way to the top, but we need to network our way to the top. In this article, we will review 3 types of people who can and ought to play an instrumental role in our career advancement: sponsors, mentors and coaches. Watch the above video as well that explains why women over rely on performance to get ahead, why it is not enough and what to do instead. Watch to the end to hear about the proprietary The DIVA Method ™ for a tactical 4 step strategy to advance in your career.
Sponsors
When we talk about using our network to accelerate our career, there is a lot of focus and emphasis on getting mentors. In the business world it seems as if every leadership expert talks about the role of mentors, and we will talk about their role in this blog since they do play an important role in accelerating our careers. Most experts however, seem to overlook an even more powerful relationship that if leveraged appropriately can literally skyrocket our careers over night, and this is the power of sponsors. In her book, Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit And Success, Sylvia Ann Hewlet says that a sponsor is more powerful than a mentor because they are more vested in the outcome of your advancement. I think they are more invested because they have become a co-brand with the person they sponsor. This means that the person who they are sponsoring has become associated with the sponsor and if you look good they look good and vice versa. No one wants to jump on a sinking ship but someone viewed as a rising star will have multiple people who will want to associate their names with them.
Sponsors have the power, network and influence to use their social capital to get you promoted, get you the plum assignment or even to protect you as you come up the learning curve. If a leader doesn’t have influence, they won’t necessarily be able to sponsor because you need someone to open doors for you that you don’t have access to. Sponsorship is about access and as an ambitious driven professional, access is everything you need to ascend in your career. In reviewing the concept of access, it is important to highlight another point made by Sylvia that multicultural professionals (and I would include women here as well) are more likely to be satisfied with their rate of career advancement when they have a sponsor. If you don’t have a sponsor, you are missing a key resource in your toolkit for career success, it is as simple as that.
Coaches
Coaches are another resource in the career acceleration toolkit and while the concept of coaching is becoming increasingly talked about, most people are still confused on what coaches are and what they can do for one’s career.
Coaches in the field of sports are very well known to help a very good player become great. They will help them refine their technique so that they can crush it in their field. Executive career coaches can help in the same way. A good coach won’t necessarily have expertise in your field but what they will do is hold your goals and agenda as their number one priority and will use the coaching conversation to help you identify and navigate the obstacles that come in the way of your advancement. Many of these obstacles are internal. It could include helping you overcome perfectionism, negative inner chatter or other self-limiting actions and mindset that will sabotage or slow down your career advancement. They will help you identify your blindspots and the patterns that you uniquely engage in to unconsciously block your progress. I have coached many of my clients to learn how to manage difficult relationships, improve their time management, set boundaries, organize themselves or even use their network more effectively. The topics that one can be coached on is as endless as the various obstacles that come in the way of our attaining our goals. Coaches will work with you to co-create the technique that works best for the uniquely talented person that you are. If you find the right coach that can both challenge you and hold a safe space for your growth, this resource can accelerate your career in unbelievable ways.
Mentors
Finally we will look at mentors. Mentors unlike coaches will have expertise in the area that you want to become more competent in. This area could be professional, including financial or business acumen or it could be personal such as work life balance with children or time management skills. Mentors can accelerate your learning curve by sharing tips and best practices so you skip the process of making common mistakes that can slow down your career advancement.
Part of being organizationally savvy so that we can master company politics and get the promotion, increase or job that we deserve is to bust through myths such as just working hard will get us advancement and learn the actual strategies that will give us the results that we seek. So what’s one action that you will take this week to network your way to the top? My advice is to find or hire that executive coach, or work on your visibility so that you can get the sponsors or mentors you need to advance in your career. Let’s get this done!
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