Women Are Losers

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Women Are Losers: Why traditional mentoring programs can be detrimental to women’s careers

Competencies: coaching, talent management, mentoring

Who benefits: while this article is primarily about women, the content is useful to upward and outward mobile employees and their bosses and mentors

Consultant Usage: career development specialists, executive coaches, some trainers

What’s it about?  Wait! Wait!  Don’t jump on my a**.  The title was just to get your attention.  Read on.  I am only reporting on a personally eye-opening article in the just released September issue of Harvard Business Review.  Written by three women. 

The article is Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women.

The article poses and answers three questions and offers a solution.

The three questions/answers are:
1. Are women as likely as men to get mentoring? Yes.
2. Does mentoring provide the same career benefits to men and women? No.
3. Can mentoring be harmful to a woman’s career? Yes.

Before commenting on the third question/answer and the solution, let me present a metaphor that works for me (and probably only me) and a recollection of advice given by one my all time favorite motivational speakers. 

My metaphor (sort of).  Have you ever “lost” your car or house keys (of course you have)?  Did you eventually find them in the very last place you looked (of course)?  And did you comment to yourself something like “I should have known they were there all this time?” (probably)?  That’s how I feel about this article.  It presents me with something I probably should have known for the past 40 years and I flat out missed it.

One of my all time favorite speakers is Morris Massey.  I remember some of things he said.  I had to remember.  If you are not familiar with him, he speaks too fast to take notes.  If you are familiar with him you already knew that.  One piece of advice he gave was “Never should on yourself” (enunciate carefully if you say this out loud), which I just did in the above paragraph.  And one of the reasons he gave for that advice was that most of us make the best decisions we can with the information we have at the time (this does not always apply to politicians, but that is another story). 

Now back to the article.  After reading it I was shocked and appalled at my own shortcomings.  I have over a 30 plus year span mentored more than a dozen younger professionals, a majority of them women.  I gave them advice, connections, assignments, sent them to training courses and anything else I could think of to help them along. 

Except the one thing they needed the most.  And I missed it. 

So now let me go back to question #3 above and the solution proposed in the article.

Can mentoring actually be detrimental to a woman’s career.  Yes.  Why?  Simply because we mentors can get them doing all the peripheral activities that we think will make a big difference in their careers … and we take them away from their primary work responsibilities … those activities that are crucial to their next and future promotions.

Some of these traditional mentoring activities are good.  But what is missing, what I overlooked, what appears so obvious that most of us will knee-jerk and say “Oh of course I was doing that” … I wasn’t and probably you weren’t either, was Sponsorship.

It is like the old expression of being all dressed up and no place to go.  Mentoring is getting dressed.  Sponsorship is having somewhere to go.

Sponsorship is the active pursuit of getting someone promoted.  It is identifying a position or positions that the mentee could reasonably fill in the short term and then lobbying the higher ups and anyone else with influence to get your mentee that next job. (One caveat, this all assumes your mentee is seeking upward or outward mobility.)

In my semi retired state not so many people seek me out anymore.  But I am proudly playing the role of mentor to a young lady going to a university in Mexico.  (Hola Karen, I know you read my posts, so pay particular attention to this and the next paragraph.)  I have paid part of her tuition, given her advice, made some suggestions and she has responded perfectly.  She has a very bright future ahead of her.

But I realize now that I am failing Karen if I don’t undertake the additional role of Sponsor.  It is not enough for her to graduate from university.  She is a business major and I need to make sure she gets into the mainstream of the business world.  I need to “promote” her with people who can hire her and see that she succeeds (she has the brains and the personality, she just needs the guidance). 

To those of you I helped in the past, I apologize for not doing better.  I just didn’t know “better”.  And to the authors of this must read article, I thank you for your insights.  This is one old dog who just learned a new trick.

Catch you later.
[tags]mentor, mentoring, sponsors, sponsorship, career, careers, career development, career management, promotions, promotability, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.