Ashwin had a mentor for six years. Quarterly conversations. Career advice. Book recommendations. His mentor was generous, experienced and deeply invested in Ashwin’s development. Ashwin developed significantly. He also watched three colleagues with less experience and less skill get promoted ahead of him.
His mentor helped him get better. Nobody was helping him get seen.
The distinction between mentors and sponsors was defined by Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s research at the Center for Talent Innovation. A mentor talks to you about your career. A sponsor talks about you to the people who control your career. A mentor invests time. A sponsor invests reputation. The sponsor says “put Ashwin in the room” during the meeting where Ashwin’s next role is being discussed. The mentor says “you should work on your executive presence” during a coffee chat that the decision-makers never hear about.
Both matter. But at mid-career, the bottleneck is almost never development. It’s visibility. You are skilled enough. Your work is good enough. The gap is not between where you are and where you need to be. It’s between where you are and where the right people can see you.
Mentors are abundant at mid-career because mentoring is low-risk. Sponsors are rare because sponsoring requires putting your own reputation behind someone else’s advancement. That asymmetry explains the supply gap.
Sponsorship requires something mentorship doesn’t: the sponsor must have positional power and be willing to spend it on you. This means the sponsor is typically more senior, more politically connected and more selective about whom they back. You don’t find a sponsor by asking for one. You find a sponsor by producing work that makes a powerful person willing to attach their name to your trajectory.
In Indian organisations, sponsorship operates through specific channels. The pre-meeting alignment. The succession planning conversation. The “who should we consider for this?” discussion. These moments happen in closed rooms. Your mentor prepares you for the open rooms. Your sponsor represents you in the closed ones.
Ashwin’s mentor eventually introduced him to a senior leader who became his sponsor. The introduction took five minutes. The impact took six months to materialise and changed his career trajectory permanently. Six years of development created the foundation. One sponsorship relationship built the building on top of it.
Do you have someone who mentions your name in rooms you’re not in and do you know what they’re saying?
Ashwin developed for six years. One sponsor moved the needle. Who’s mentioning your name? careers.deliberx.com