When it comes to career advancement, many look to mentoring as a solution to getting ahead and helping others. But Rosalind Chow, associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University and author of new book The Doors You Can Open, argues we are overlooking and underusing one of the most powerful networking tools: sponsorship. In an interview, Chow shared what to know about sponsorship and strategies for success. The following Q&A has been lightly edited and trimmed for clarity.

I feel like there’s some misunderstanding that sponsorship and mentorship are the same thing. How do they differ?

The way that people usually think about it is mentors talk to you, sponsors talk about you.

The way that I like to think about it is that mentors try to change their mentee. When we have a mentor, they give us feedback, they coach us, they give us advice on how we should navigate certain situations, but that’s really about managing what we do as the mentee. Sponsors, on the other hand, are not interested in changing anything about their protégés. They think their protégés are great, and what they want to change is actually how other people see the protégé.

Then when we start thinking about the benefits, the beneficiaries of mentorship are really just the mentee and the mentor: The mentors usually get a lot of personal satisfaction from helping develop typically a more junior person, and mentees benefit because they get somebody else’s wisdom, guidance and encouragement. So it’s really about their own subjective well-being in terms of how they experience work. The benefits to sponsorship are different because there’s more people involved… If mentorship is kind of this more insular kind of relationship, sponsorship is actually more expansive. And so, there are more winners.

I do want to be clear that it also has potentially more losers. If a mentorship relationship goes bad, it is just bad for the two of those people. But also, it’s probably worse for the mentee than it is for the mentor. When things go bad with sponsorship, it’s pretty bad for everyone. If a protégé doesn’t live up to expectations, then not only are they not seen very positively, the sponsor also gets dinged. And then the person that was being sponsored to, that’s a lost opportunity that they could have spent using that time working with someone else or giving that opportunity to somebody else.

You mentioned that there’s also a misconception that sponsorship is something that’s reserved only for high power individuals.

We often hear about sponsors who are powerful because they tend to be in positions where they can influence the people who are making really consequential decisions. But the way sponsorship works is that it’s fundamentally trust-based. And so, if I don’t have a lot of power, but there are people who trust me, they’re going to listen to me. In that sense, anyone can be a sponsor. So as an example, you’re a junior analyst and your senior supervisor comes to you and says, “I’m thinking about adding this person to my team or our team. I know that you’ve worked with them before in the past, what do you think?”  This is a higher-power person who is giving a lower-power person the opportunity to share their information about this other person that they’re not very familiar with.

And that puts who we would normally consider to be a protégé into the sponsor position, where they have a choice. They can either elevate this other person or not. That’s what I mean when I say sponsorship doesn’t depend on power. It really depends on trust.

My general take is if what you want is for people to sponsor you, you’re better off sponsoring other people first. And maybe you start small, you just sponsor your peers by saying really nice things about them, because eventually that’s going to come back to them, they’re going to realize you’re saying nice things about them and they’re going to want to say nice things about you. That’s a total win-win situation.

But also, if you start sponsoring other junior employees, that looks good for you with more senior people. And so, if they ever are looking for someone to add to their team, you become a trusted source. That’s just a way for you to build a closer relationship with more powerful people as well.

It’s earned, more than something that you seek out.

Yeah, exactly. When it comes down to it, who do we want to build relationships with? We want to build relationships with people who are nice, right? Assuming that you are all competent, what’s really going to set you apart is being known as someone who’s a team player, who’s really paying attention to other people, who appreciates other people.

You can actually really build a reputation for yourself by being a really positive presence who builds up other people. I think as you go up in the ranks too, that becomes seen as more and more of a leadership trait that people look for. You can establish that very early on.

Do women face particular challenges when it comes to networking and advocating for their own career advancement?

Oh yeah, for sure. Which is why it’s helpful, if you want to be super strategic about it, to have a sponsorship circle, where there’s this shared understanding that you’re very open with each other about what your accomplishments are so that when opportunities present themselves, other women in the group can essentially sponsor you to make sure that everybody knows about all your great news, but it doesn’t come from you. So you don’t get that like self-promotional hit that a lot of women tend to get when they self-promote.

Do you have advice for women either aspiring to leadership or those who are in leadership wanting to lift up other women that are maybe lower in the ranks than them?

Ultimately it comes down to networking, but in the same way that I was just suggesting that instead of self-promoting, having other people do it for you, having a system in place where other people agree to sponsor you, I would suggest that for networking as well.

I don’t know about you, but I hate networking events. I’m really not a fan. And there’s this temptation to go and just find someone you know and huddle with them, because otherwise it feels super awkward. I want to honor that desire to be with someone you feel safe with, but to also get you the outcome of meeting new people. What you want to do is bring somebody to the networking events whose network is really different from yours. That way you have a wing person who introduces you to people they know. You have a sponsor in the room who’s making these introductions for you. You also are introducing them to people in your network who they might not know, right? You take all the awkwardness out of the equation for everybody by engaging in sponsorship. And it makes you look good too.

This isn’t purely for women, but I could see how women might face this issue, which is how much do you really want to share of yourself in your relationships?

One of the best ways [to build professional relationships], especially if you’re feeling a little uncertain about yourself, if you don’t want to share information about yourself, get the other person to share information about themselves. Then ask really good questions. I mean, it sounds so intuitive, right? But I feel like enough of us don’t do it. All of that is perennial advice for a good reason.

Be transparent about your aspirations. It’s kind of like fundraising, where you build a relationship, but then at some point you have to make the ask. And people are like, “How do I make the ask?” I would suggest people focus less on a specific outcome. Instead of, “My dream is to be in the C-Suite when I’m 45 years old,” it’s more helpful to people to understand your motivations for why you want to be in that position than the fact that you want to be in that position itself.

If you say, “By the time I’m 45, I want to be working in a position where I have a critical leadership role in an organization working on products that have a positive impact on social welfare, because it really matters to me that I’m working on something that makes a difference,” that actually helps other people to imagine a wider variety of avenues that they can sponsor you. If you want people to help you, not necessarily telling them where you want to go but telling them why you want to get to where you want to go essentially gives them the latitude to brainstorm their own ways that they can help get you there. And because they’re part of that brainstorming process, they’re more likely to actually offer to do those things for you.