From mentoring to sponsorship: designing a program for women moving into leadership

Many organizations run mentoring programs for women employees. But mentoring alone may not lead to promotion. The next step in a career is often decided not by advice, but by someone who speaks up for you at the decision table. This guide explains how to turn your mentoring program into a sponsorship program for women moving into leadership and other underrepresented talent.

The difference between a mentor and a sponsor

Herminia Ibarra sums up the difference in one sentence: a sponsor is “someone who has power and will use it for you.”

	Mentor	Sponsor
Core role	Advice, feedback, a thinking partner	Advocacy, visibility, opportunity
Where they work	One-on-one with the mentee	In decision meetings, when the mentee isn’t in the room
What they put on the line	Their time	Their reputation and political capital
Who can do it	An experienced, suitable person at any level	A senior leader with influence over appointment decisions
Measure of success	The mentee’s development	The mentee moving into a new role

In a 2019 article, Ibarra treats sponsorship not as a single role but as a spectrum. At one end stands the classic mentor who gives private advice. In the steps between are leaders who build a career strategy, introduce the mentee to influential people and open up visible work in their own area. At the other end is the full sponsor, who advocates openly and puts their reputation on the line.

Why it matters

In their 2010 Harvard Business Review article, Ibarra, Nancy Carter and Christine Silva examined data that Catalyst collected from more than 4,000 high-potential MBA graduates:

• A higher share of women than men said they had a mentor.
• But women’s mentors were less senior and had less influence in the organization.
• Mentoring predicted promotion for men, but not for women.
• In the follow-up survey, men had received 15% more promotions.

The authors’ conclusion was short: high-potential women are overmentored and undersponsored.

Research with about 12,000 white-collar employees by the Center for Talent Innovation, founded by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, paints a similar picture. According to the findings reported in TIME, women are 46% more likely than men to lack a senior sponsor. And women with a sponsor are 22% more likely to ask for stretch assignments and 27% more likely to ask for a raise than women without one.

McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s Women in the Workplace 2024 report shows that the problem starts at the first rung. In the US, for every 100 men promoted to manager, 81 women are promoted. According to the same report, the share of companies with a formal sponsorship program specifically for women fell from 31% in 2017 to 16% in 2024.

The picture in Türkiye

According to TÜİK’s (Turkish Statistical Institute) Household Labor Force Survey data, the share of women in senior and middle management positions in Türkiye was 21.5% in 2024. In 2012, it was 14.4%.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s classic study describes what happens when a minority makes up less than about 15% of a group. In such groups, people in the minority become highly visible, and their behavior is attributed to their whole group. So calculate the ratio unit by unit, not as a company average. The average may look reasonable while women leaders in some units are on their own.

Program design for women moving into leadership

1. Separate the purpose. Ibarra and colleagues recommend making the program’s purpose clear. If the goal is promotion, sponsors should be chosen from people with influence over appointment decisions; personal chemistry comes second.
2. Select the cohort using talent data. Start with women identified in talent reviews as having potential or being ready within one to two years. A cohort of 8–15 people is a manageable start.
3. Choose the sponsor from outside the line. The sponsor should be outside the mentee’s reporting line but have a voice in appointment decisions.
4. Involve the direct manager. The same article recommends running central programs together with line managers.
5. Plan for 12–18 months. Sponsorship requires trust, and trust takes time. Ibarra and colleagues also recommend that support continue through the first 100 days after a promotion.
6. Build it alongside mentoring. The mentee can focus on their development with a mentor and on opportunities with a sponsor.

What a sponsor actually does

Catalyst’s 2011 report on sponsorship describes sponsor behaviors in concrete terms. Turn these into a list of expected behaviors in your program:

• Visibility: Including the mentee in senior leadership presentations, committee meetings and important client meetings.
• Stretch assignments: Opening up challenging but visible work, such as P&L responsibility, a new market or a crisis project. A 2025 study by Gröschl and colleagues also recommends giving women challenging assignments in a more structured way at every career stage.
• Advocacy: Naming the mentee explicitly, with reasons, in talent review and succession meetings.
• Reducing perceived risk: Lowering the perceived risk of appointing a candidate who is slightly short on experience by openly putting their support behind them.
• Preparing for the transition: Providing targeted coaching on strategy and finance when the mentee moves into a new role.

Hold sponsors accountable

Ibarra’s 2019 article carries an important warning. Many companies have stopped their formal sponsorship programs because leaders didn’t want to advocate for someone they didn’t know well or didn’t see as ready. So design accountability in from the start:

• Make a written commitment with each sponsor. For example, at least two visible opportunities within 12 months and open advocacy in one talent meeting.
• Tie sponsorship to talent management processes. Catalyst recommends linking sponsorship to performance reviews, succession planning or senior leaders’ goals.
• In the IBM Europe example reported by Ibarra and colleagues, sponsors were held responsible for participants being promoted within a year. If there was no promotion, it counted as the sponsor’s failure.
• Hold a 30-minute status meeting with sponsors once a quarter: Which opportunity did you open up? In which meeting did you advocate for whom?

Pitfalls

• A symbolic program: If a cohort is formed but no opportunities open up, participants notice quickly and trust is lost.
• The load falling on a few people: Expecting the small number of senior women leaders to serve as sponsors, mentors and panel speakers all at once. Gröschl and colleagues found that women leaders are mostly sponsored by men. Widen the sponsor pool with men in leadership.
• Picking people like yourself: Catalyst recommends talking with leaders about whom they sponsor, and prompting them to ask whether they also support talent unlike themselves.
• The double bind: Ibarra and colleagues recommend training sponsors on gender dynamics. Decisiveness that’s admired in a leader can be judged differently in women.
• Appointing without preparation: When someone is put into a tough role without support and struggles, it wears down both the person and the program.

What to measure

McKinsey’s report notes that few companies track the outcomes of their sponsorship programs for women. Make sure you do:

• Promotion rate: Compare the cohort’s promotion rate with a comparison group at a similar level.
• Expanded roles: In the Deutsche Bank example reported by Catalyst, 45% of the women who took part in the program had moved into new or expanded roles. Track how much of your cohort has taken on new responsibilities.
• Readiness: The number of women marked as ready in succession plans.
• Stretch assignments: The number of visible assignments opened up for each participant.
• Retention: The cohort’s retention rate after 12 and 24 months.
• Sponsor behavior: The rate at which sponsors fulfill their written commitments.

You’ll find the structure of the women in leadership program on the Women in leadership page, and how to set up indicators in the guide to measuring impact.

Sources

• Ibarra, Carter & Silva (2010), Why men still get more promotions than women – Harvard Business Review — Overmentored and undersponsored; the promotion gap and program recommendations.
• Ibarra (2019), A lack of sponsorship is keeping women from advancing into leadership — The sponsorship spectrum and why formal programs were stopped.
• TIME, Forget About Mentors — Women Need Sponsors — Sponsorship findings from the Center for Talent Innovation research.
• Catalyst (2011), Sponsoring Women to Success — Sponsor behaviors, accountability and the Deutsche Bank example.
• McKinsey & LeanIn.Org, Women in the Workplace 2024 — The broken rung in promotion to manager and the decline in sponsorship programs.
• Türkiye’de İstatistiklerle Kadın 2025 / Women in Statistics in Türkiye 2025 (TÜİK and UN Women, in Turkish) — The share of women in senior and middle management in Türkiye.
• The Field Guide, Kanter (1977) – a summary of tokenism — Effects seen when the minority share is below 15%.
• Gröschl et al. (2025), The Emergence and Effects of Sponsors for Women Leaders – Gender, Work and Organization — Who sponsors women leaders, and the recommendation on challenging assignments.