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The Doors You Can Open: Unlocking Opportunity Through Sponsorship at Work w/ Rosalind Chow

• Francesca Ranieri

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Ever felt like your hard work wasn’t enough?


That’s because the biggest career breaks don’t always come from effort alone—they come from the people who open doors for you.

In this episode of Your Work Friends, we sit down with, Carnegie Mellon Professor,  organizational psychologist and author Rosalind Chow to unpack the power of sponsorship. Not mentorship (that’s important too), but sponsorship—the behind-the-scenes advocacy that shapes reputations, gets your name in the room, and changes who gets ahead.

We talk about:

  • The simple one-liner that explains mentorship vs. sponsorship
  • Why Rosalyn calls sharing someone else’s win good gossip
  • The four ways sponsorship actually works—create, confirm, prevent, and protect
  • How women and people of color are often “sponsored differently”
  • Practical moves anyone can make this week to sponsor someone else

If you want to understand how influence really works at work—and how to use it to build fairer, smarter teams—this conversation is a must-listen.


Connect with Rosalind: 

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.

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Speaker 1:

My general prescription is just if you know someone's good news, you should just share it.

Speaker 2:

Hey friends, welcome back to your work, friends, where we break down the now and next of work so you stay ahead. Today we sat down with organizational psychologist Rosalyn Chow to talk about something that we know quietly makes or breaks your career. Rosalyn is a professor of organizational behavioral theory at the Tepper School of Business and she's also affiliated with the Social and Decision Sciences Group at Detroit College. She is a faculty director of CLIMB, offered through the Tepper School of Business, which is in partnership with Deloitte, and she is the founding faculty director for the Executive Leadership Academy. So she knows a thing or two about this topic. Francesca, what do you think?

Speaker 3:

To me, rosalyn is like one of the experts, if not the expert, on sponsorship. As Rosalyn puts it, mentors talk to you, but sponsors talk about you and they really shape the room when you're not in it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, what I really loved about this conversation is the simple, tactical, practical things that people can do right away. She helped us map what sponsorship can be. You're also going to hear about how this actually helps teams and what she calls collective intelligence. Teams are literally getting smarter when we make each other's strengths visible amongst each other.

Speaker 3:

In today's episode, you're going to walk away with three key things One, two moves you can do this week to share a colleague's good news and invite someone under the radar into the room where it happens. Two, how to ask for sponsorship without the cringe, the ick we all might feel. And three, why leaders should reward the people who spot talent and open doors, not just the high performers.

Speaker 2:

It's really thoughtful. Rosalyn is awesome. All right, let's open some doors.

Speaker 3:

Here's our conversation with Rosalyn Chow.

Speaker 2:

All right, I'd love to get into the book. It's so good. What inspired you to write the Doors you Can Open? Was there a catalyst that you were like I have to get this out now to write the Doors you Can Open? Was there a?

Speaker 1:

catalyst that you were like I have to get this out now. I wouldn't say that there is a catalyst. If anything, I think I was pretty resistant to the idea of writing a book. I started teaching in this executive education program. I talk about this a little bit in the book and one of the things that was really gratifying about making that change is that people would come up to me after I would do programming and they would want to know if there were other resources that I could point them to. And the reality was that I didn't think that anybody had said what I was thinking in the way that I wanted it to come out. So then I figured I should go ahead and provide this resource that I wish I could give to people. So that was really the impetus.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's incredibly important and, by the way, I was at a networking event last night full of women talking about credibility and they all had that same challenge. Does anyone care about what I need to say? Yes, you have very valuable things to add to the world. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

I got over it enough to actually produce the book.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm glad you did. It's so good. And this is not a networking book. You and I talked about that when we initially met. Instead of networking, what do you want people to expect instead when they pick up your book?

Speaker 1:

I don't know that I would say it's not a networking book. I think it's more like an anti-networking book, in the sense that it is about networking, but it is about trying to change how we network. So it's not about networking better. The book is about sponsorship, how we elevate other people, and through elevating other people we actually end up elevating ourselves, and what that suggests is a reorientation toward networking to be different than, I think, the way most of us have been taught to think about it, which is that we network because there are things that we need from other people, and so we go out to find people who have these resources and then we try to convince them that we should have a relationship with them so that they will give us what we need. That's a very cynical, strategic way of thinking about networking. I think people often are like it should be win-win right, where it's not that you're just taking from them, you're giving them something too. But that's still very transactional, and the implicit assumption is that you have to have something of value to give, which, as a woman, as a woman of color, I'm not an obvious choice as someone you would want to network with, just on the face of it, and so I think I was channeling a lot of my anger around either being underestimated or erroneously estimated as a non-valuable network contact. Network contact and really encouraging people to think less about like networking is about what I can get from other people, or even what I can give, necessarily, but more thinking about networking in this larger context of how information flows within groups and what type of information within groups and what type of information actually makes groups better. One of the things that collectively intelligent groups need are for people in the group to be aware and appreciate each other's strengths, and the issue is that how do you get that information out there, that exchange, who are really capable of getting people to share information with them that they can then share with others? But that's actually not just good for the person who's being bragged about, so they get a big benefit because they don't have to self-promote themselves. Somebody else is saying nice things about them, so they don't get that penalty that's often associated with self-promotion.

Speaker 1:

Also, one of the things that I think many of us don't really enjoy about networking events either, which is I don't know how often you've had this experience you go to an event. People want to know who do you work for? What do you do? And then you have this like very careful, I don't know if you do this. I do this where I'm looking to see, okay, what is their response to me telling them that I'm a professor. On the one hand they can be like, oh, okay, that's cool, you don't think that I have really anything of value. Or they're going to be like I actually don't know anything about professors, tell me more about that, which is also fine.

Speaker 1:

And then you have the people who are like, ooh, what do you teach? But I think we all have that kind of sense we have just given someone else some information about us. How are they evaluating that? And that's how networking feels. It's this constant sense of, okay, they're feeling me out for whether or not I have value for them, if I'm somebody who would be good for them to know or not, and I just I really dislike that.

Speaker 1:

So, going back to sponsorship, you have people in groups who can get that information out of others without giving them the ick. You're not trying to value them, you're just trying to get information because maybe at some point that information is going to be helpful to someone else, and so that removes some of that evaluation part that I really am not a huge fan of in traditional forms of networking. But then they also end up sharing it with other people, so that other people benefit from knowing that these sorts of talents, experiences, desires, aspirations exist, beneficial connections for other people, and it's not because you intentionally are trying to extract anything from anyone, but you are actually doing a service to the group, and so it just that does get rewarded in ways that do end up being good for you but is not like the reason why you do it, and it's an approach to networking that feels more appealing to me, and so I thought it would be great to share it with others.

Speaker 2:

Your approach immediately resonated with me. That's why I reached out to you, because I hate the what do you do conversation is so uncomfortable and Francesca and I talk about that. That's why we do these meet and greets. Who are you as a human first? What are you interesting for you? Tell me about your. What are you passionate about? What energizes you? Those are more interesting things to me. So I really love that concept of how can we get to know people not to think about what we can do for each other, necessarily, but just get to know them. I pride myself on being a connector and I always like, when I'm five months down the road, I hear something and I'm like, oh yeah, I met this person who does that. Let me introduce you to. It feels good to just do that and make those connections and that's feels like a healthier networking approach. I really love that.

Speaker 3:

Would you want to talk more about this concept of sponsorship? Because one of the things I think about is this difference between sponsorship and mentorship, especially when you get into organizations In a corporate environment, in an academic environment. A lot of times we have mentors, or sometimes we have sponsors, and sometimes we have formal programs about it, or sometimes it's someone who just really knows how to work the system. And I'm curious, if we start with sponsorship, what do you think is one of the biggest misconceptions when you talk about sponsorship?

Speaker 1:

I would say the main one is that it is the same as mentorship or it's just mentorship on steroids.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of people who don't understand that there's a difference between the two, and then even among those who do understand there's a difference. I think there's a sentiment that sponsorship is just like really strong mentorship and from my perspective, they are categorically different behaviors because they act on different targets. And the key difference is mentors talk to you, but sponsors talk about you. So mentors are trying to change you, like your mentor is giving you advice for coaching you through a weird situation or giving you their perspective on how they handled a similar situation, and all of this is in the service of either making you a better performer, changing how you behave or how you think, whereas sponsors are not acting on the person they're trying to support. Their target is actually the social environment around their protege. They're trying to get other people to see their proteges differently. One is about giving advice. The other one is really about persuasion and influence and impression management, but for somebody, else, not for yourself.

Speaker 3:

I've seen this so much in my tenure in corporate. You have people that have sponsors. They have people that will vouch for them in calibration sessions. Talk really well about them when there's new projects coming up. Oh yeah, you should talk to Dave. He's great at that. Meanwhile there's 40 other people that have that type of capability and Dave gets it, or Jane gets it or whoever else. It's the person that has the sponsor that has access a lot of times to projects, people, things, experiences, which then can also go into actual currency like promotions and bonuses and that sort of thing too. Yeah, that's right. I'm curious, especially around when we think about underrepresented groups. Underrepresented groups are famously like over-mentored under-sponsored.

Speaker 3:

Yes, and I'm really curious about the long-term impacts of that when you have a group that is under-sponsored for a long time.

Speaker 1:

So, first of all, I sometimes take issue with those findings in the sense that when that research was done they had to get really like academic. If that's not, I would love to. I hear it, but I actually I should have answered.

Speaker 3:

Is that true?

Speaker 1:

Is it true that people are Okay? I should have answered is that true? Is it true that people are had more mentors than men, but yet men were getting promoted at faster rates than were women? Then they were saying well, the reason why men, even though they have fewer mentors, their mentors are actually sponsors, and so men have sponsors and women have mentors. And there's some other stuff that goes into it, where they essentially look at the hierarchical rank of who the mentors are, men tend to have higher ranked mentors.

Speaker 1:

When you look at women, who also have highly ranked mentors, they actually do just as well as men, suggesting that really the issue isn't that women are over-mentored, it's that they're mentors or sponsors, because they actually don't have a way to distinguish between the two. Their sponsor mentors are actually lower in power and so that accounts for a big difference in promotion rates and size of raises and things like that. And this is actually another reason why, in that kind of approach, people put a huge emphasis on the notion that when you're going out looking for sponsors, you need people who are really powerful in the organization to be your sponsor, because organizational rank is actually the thing that matters, and you'll see in my book that I differ in my perspective on that. So this is not to say, obviously, that having powerful sponsors doesn't matter it clearly does. But what I worry about when we start saying so the way we fix this is by giving everyone a powerful sponsor or by getting everyone to look for powerful sponsors is that we're essentially giving a pass to all the people who don't see themselves as having a lot of power, when in reality I think there's a lot normal people, mere human beings, can do for each other when it comes to sponsorship.

Speaker 1:

So the other part of the equation is that people aren't differentiating between different types of sponsorship. And so in my own research, where I actually ask people like what specifically are you doing when you sponsor, it's not that women get less sponsorship, it's they get a different type that, like men, get much more of that kind of behind the scenes, vouching for kind of sponsorship scenes, vouching for kind of sponsorship, whereas women get softer versions, where they do get talked up a little bit, but again, not to the extent that people are counting the table and getting them the opportunities. People say nice things about women, but they don't necessarily try to put women into those highly visible opportunities.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, I appreciate the distinction. What are the types of sponsorship?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I like to differentiate between, basically, do people already know you or not, and are you trying to increase how positively other people are seeing you, or are you trying to decrease how negatively people are seeing you, or are you trying to decrease how negatively people are seeing you? We call it a two by two. You've got these quadrants. So if nobody knows you, it's really easy for sponsors to try and create to essentially create other people's impressions of you. So that's creation.

Speaker 1:

Confirming is another one. Confirming is actually the easiest. Other people already know who you are. They already think you're great. You're just kind of like adding more gravy to the dish. So this really positive impression is maintained or enhanced.

Speaker 1:

The best sponsors actually are people who start super early. It's not that they identify people who are obviously good and just keep on confirming. That's one approach. Really risk-averse sponsors will probably do that. They just look for the sure thing and then they back that horse Right. But if you're a really intentional sponsor, what you should be doing is essentially creating positive atmospherics around someone who other people are not already aware of and then, once you get more data on them, you can keep on confirming and confirming and then that just ends up snowballing into a really positive career trajectory a really positive career trajectory.

Speaker 1:

So starting earlier is something that I think is really important that people miss out on. So there's creating and confirming, and then you have the negative side, which is people don't know who my person is. I'm worried they're going to have a negative impression. So I'm going to essentially try and remove potential issues before they even become a thing. An example of this would be Mel wants to put Francesca on a project that I know is totally dead end. Nobody knows about Francesca yet. She's super junior. She just entered into the organization, so it'd be really easy for me to like just give up Francesca as a sacrificial lamb. It's happened before.

Speaker 3:

We've all been there. We've all been there. I'm like it's just very personal right now.

Speaker 1:

But instead, if you had a sponsor who was really looking out for you, they'd be like no, francesca is not a good fit for that or she doesn't have capacity for that. I have her working on something else, so find somebody else. That's preventing. You're forecasting into the future. This could come back to not look good for your protege, and so you're trying to make sure that something bad doesn't happen.

Speaker 1:

So I talk about minority report in the book. It's like pre-cog Okay, we're going to prevent the crime from even occurring. And then we have protection which is the one that I think a lot of people also think of when they think about sponsorship is people are saying negative things about your protege. A negative impression exists, and now you're trying to mitigate that, you're trying to neutralize this negative impression so that it doesn't come to harm your protege. So this is the kind of thing where, like you, have people in the back room who are like I don't agree with how this person is being characterized. That is not my experience from working with them and, like all these projects, the information you're talking about over here is not consistent with the information I have. So let's find a way to reconcile these two perspectives.

Speaker 3:

I feel like I've been in all of those situations and someone's probably done that for me and someone's probably done that for me. These feel like very common things that you can experience as a peer, as a boss, as an employee, on both sides of the coin.

Speaker 1:

That's the other thing that I think is really interesting is that a lot of people are capable of recognizing when they've been sponsored, although sometimes you also have the stories of people who didn't know that they had a sponsor until like way later, after they've become super successful. And then they meet someone and that someone is I've had my eye on you for 15 years now, but I've been talking about you to other people and you're like wait, what? Yeah, that's kind of creepy and also thank you.

Speaker 3:

Yes exactly.

Speaker 1:

So that's the other thing I think is hard about telling people to go and find sponsors, this fixation on really high power sponsors, and then also telling people like you should go out and find a sponsor.

Speaker 1:

I'm never a fan of telling the people who are lower in power that they're responsible for fixing inequalities or inequities or things like that. So I think partially I'm not happy about that kind of conclusion. But the other part of it is, francesca, as you were saying, many of us have probably done these things for other people. We have all sponsored others. We just don't know it as such. We haven't called it that, but we all do it and we all are capable of doing it, and so really the book is my hope of opening people's eyes to the idea that you already do these things. Now that you know about it, can you be more intentional about who you're going to do it for and how you're going to do it? Because if we all become more intentional about that, that's going to be another way for us to start elevating women and people of color and, to your very good point, the information flow gets so much more robust.

Speaker 3:

It's not what we traditionally think of as people who know how to play the game and they're winning. It's no. If we all do this, then all of a sudden there's a really virtuous information exchange. Yeah, yeah, it's a workplace I'd rather be a part of. Yes, yeah, I love it. I'm sure there's people listening that are like I want to be a better sponsor, wherever I'm planted. Now I know that it doesn't need to be that I'm the VP of blah blah blah and that's the only way I can be a sponsor. I can be a sponsor right now with who I am, and I'm sure there's also people that like damn, I wish someone would sponsor me. So I want to take this from both angles of someone who wants to be a sponsor.

Speaker 1:

So my general prescription is just if you know someone's good news, you should just share it. Share it for them, right, because one, the fact that they felt comfortable enough with you to share that good news with you is, like, already meaningful, because many of us are socialized not to share our good news. The person who is out sharing their good news and is like unabashedly doing that they do not need your sponsorship. You're already getting that information out there but it's the person who, offhandedly, is oh, yeah last week I won that award and you're like nobody else knows about this.

Speaker 1:

Like why haven't you told people? So, instead of saying why haven't you told people, because it's obvious why they probably haven't told people, is yours just like okay, how can I drop that little nugget into all the conversations that I'm going to go into? Or if you are leading a meeting opening with I'm not sure everybody knows, but Francesca won this award last week and so let's all celebrate her. Finding ways to drop positive pieces of information about people already goes a huge way toward being a sponsor. So I call this good gossip in the book.

Speaker 1:

A lot of us are socialized to be like oh, gossip bad. And it's because when we think of gossip, we think of the negative side. Like you don'tized to be like, oh, gossip bad. And it's because when we think of gossip, we think of the negative side. Like you don't want to be gossiped about, because usually the people who are gossiped about are the people who have broken some sort of social norm and this is a group's way of socially sanctioning them. But at the same time, I like to think about this as Yelp.

Speaker 1:

Why is Yelp useful? If Yelp were only one and two star reviews. That would tell you where not to go, but it doesn't tell you where to go. You still need those four and five star reviews to help you decide where you want to go, so you need both. You decide where you want to go, so you need both.

Speaker 1:

We should actually be more intentional about the positive stuff that we can say about each other. The second tactic is be mindful of opportunities, where you are the one in control of who gets to go where. So this is who gets invited to the meeting, who gets invited to lunch? It's like anytime you're the decision maker around. Who gets to participate is an opportunity for sponsorship, because one of the ways we can shape how people are seen is by making them known to others, not just in terms of us saying nice things about them, but just giving other people the opportunity to see this person, and probably they're great and will be impressive on their own, but they've just never had a chance to be seen by other people. Those are the two low-h hanging fruit that I really want people to focus on.

Speaker 3:

And so powerful, even if people just made one move in both of those directions this week. You think about the compounding effect of that is huge. My own life, when people every once in a while someone will post about, like the pod or something that Mel has written or I've written, or something like that on LinkedIn unasked just this is amazing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Read it and it always just feels so good because most people are out here trying, trying their best, most people show up to work or their craft or whatever they're doing, and to just have someone recognize them and be seen without being asked even in the most simple way, is just. It's fuel for a week. Information, yeah, but just the juju is. Oh, my God, thank God.

Speaker 1:

No, that's right. That's right. I think being seen is something that we all want, obviously being seen for the right reasons. We want it for ourselves and we have the ability to do it for others.

Speaker 2:

When you imagine workplace cultures where everyone is thinking about opening doors, what's one norm that needs to maybe go away to support?

Speaker 1:

that this like hyper fixation on high performers, as opposed to trying to use ways to identify high what I would say like catalysts or like accelerators. So these are the people who maybe they're not the highest performer on these other metrics that are easily measurable, but that they bring something else to the team. And I see sponsors as being that you don't have to be the best employee to be a great sponsor, but you are doing a huge service to the group. And if you don't reward people for engaging in sponsorship, then it becomes this thing that people just do for out of the goodness of their heart. To get to that culture of sponsorship that, like Francesca, is so excited for, you need to reward the people who can see the possibilities in others and to make them more visible to the rest of the group. So it's not just rewarding that person who then goes on to become a great performer, but it's also rewarding the person who noticed them and made that possible.

Speaker 2:

All right, roslyn, we're going to do a little wrapping round. How are you feeling about it? Are you game Feeling awesome? Okay, okay, we're going to jump right in. It's 2030. Loaded question.

Speaker 1:

What's work?

Speaker 2:

going to look like it's going to look like it looks now. Yeah, we think the same. What's one thing about?

Speaker 1:

corporate culture you'd like to see just die already. Oh, meetings without agendas.

Speaker 2:

Yes, thank you. The meeting. That could have been an email, right? Yes, exactly what's on your playlist right now? What music are you listening to? Oh, before we started recording.

Speaker 1:

I mentioned I have an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old, so I was recently introduced to K-pop demon hunters. Even when my kids aren't around, I listen to it as well.

Speaker 3:

I will tell you, I've had this song free on repeat all week long. I love it, I love it From that?

Speaker 2:

what do you think the greatest opportunity most organizations are missing out on right now?

Speaker 1:

They don't talk enough to their customers, and I don't even mean that in terms of making their products or their services. They need to be doing a better job of communicating how what they do has an impact on the world and bringing that back to their employees.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a good point. What are you reading right now? I shouldn't be embarrassed. What are you reading right now?

Speaker 1:

I shouldn't be embarrassed, but I am a little bit embarrassed. I just finished Onyx Storm, so that's the fourth wing Rebecca Yaros dragon romantic series. I can't handle real life anymore, so I have to resort to fantasy.

Speaker 2:

As a fellow ACOTAR fan, I get it. Who do you really admire?

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's a really good one. There are several women in my life I really admire. Some of them are my colleagues. So actually right next door to me is Anita Woolley. If you've ever heard the term of collective intelligence, she is the one who put that term on the map. Collective intelligence is basically IQ, but for teams, and so she has pioneered that work and I don't respect her because of that work. Actually, I respect her because she does that work and she's an amazing mother of three kids and she's an amazing colleague and a friend. She's incredibly principled in how she lives her life. I just think she's like a superwoman and just such an inspiration.

Speaker 3:

It's so nice. Now I'm going to go down a rabbit hole on collective intelligence. It's so nice when people are doing really amazing things. Then behind them they're just really good people.

Speaker 2:

It's nice to hear what's a piece of advice you would want everyone to know Do stuff that your future self would be thanking you for. I really love that. I think that's sound advice, right? Make yourself proud when you look back at this moment. What were you really going to? You really what's? What's a way people can stay in touch with you and your work, because it's so incredibly important, you can go to my website.

Speaker 1:

Rosalind chow to find out more about me. I do post about other people's work on LinkedIn. I do sometimes post about myself there, but mostly if you're really interested in learning about cutting edge cool social science research, I would be a good follow. Followed.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me on. This was really great. Thank you, great Thank you. This episode was produced, edited and all things by us, myself, mel Plett and Francesca Ranieri. Our music is by Pink Zebra and if you like this, please rate and subscribe. We'd really appreciate it. That helps keep us going. Take care, friends. All right. Bye friends, bye friend.

People on this episode

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Francesca Ranieri

Co-host
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Mel Plett

Co-host