Stop Waiting to Be Sponsored. Build Your Own Table.
The sponsorship gap is real — here's how to work around a system that wasn't built for you.
Let me tell you the difference between mentorship and sponsorship, because confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes women in revenue make. Mentorship tells you what to do. Sponsorship gets you in the room where the decision is made. A mentor gives you advice, perspective, encouragement, and feedback. That's valuable. But a mentor cannot always promote you. A sponsor talking about you in a closed-door meeting can.
Research is unambiguous on this: women are over-mentored and under-sponsored. We have no shortage of people willing to give us career advice. We have a significant shortage of people with organizational power who are actively putting their credibility behind our advancement.
That gap is not accidental. It is the natural outcome of a sponsorship system built on affinity, and affinity, at the top of most organizations, is still largely homogeneous.
You've been told to find a sponsor. What you actually need is to understand how power moves — and how to make it move for you.
Why the Traditional Sponsorship Advice Fails Women
The standard advice — "build relationships with senior leaders, be visible, do great work" — assumes you have access to the informal networks where sponsorship is built. Golf games. Dinner invitations. Hallway conversations after the meeting ends. Many women are simply not in those spaces, not because they lack initiative, but because they were never designed for them.
Waiting for someone to discover your brilliance and decide to champion you is a passive strategy in an active game. It's time to play differently.
How to Build Strategic Sponsorship
Identify power, not just seniority: Your sponsor needs to be someone who is in the room when your name should come up, and who has the standing to put it there. Title alone doesn't equal influence.
Make it a two-way value exchange: Sponsorship is a relationship, not a favor. Think about what you bring to the relationship. Unique market insight? Relationships with key clients? Capacity to execute on a high-visibility initiative? Make the value exchange explicit.
Create visible proximity: Volunteer for projects that give you direct exposure to senior decision-makers. Ask to present your team's work in leadership reviews. Get yourself in physical or virtual rooms where impressions are formed.
Build your own board of directors: One sponsor isn't enough. Build a small, intentional network of advocates across functions and levels. Diversity of influence matters more than concentration at the very top.
Your network is either accelerating your career or limiting it. There is no neutral ground.
And If You're Already in the Room?
If you've reached a level of leadership where you're in the closed-door conversations where advancement decisions are made — this section is for you.
You have access that other women behind you don't have yet. And you have a choice about what to do with it.
Say her name. When the conversation turns to who should lead the new initiative, who should be in the rotation for that Director or VP role, who has been showing up as a strategic thinker — say the name of the woman who deserves to be in that conversation. Use your credibility to extend access to women who are doing the work and not getting the visibility.
This is not charity. This is how the pipeline actually changes. Not from a corporate DEI initiative. From the women who already have access deciding to use it differently.
Build your table. Invite people to it. And pull the next woman up before you walk out the door.
-Elisa
