Coaches, Sponsors & Mentors

tl;dr? Jump straight to the key takeaways.

Personal growth is a constant topic in the workplace. Any conversation about progress, levelling or advancement infringes on this abstract subject. I've both sought and asked for help with it often, yet, I've struggled in getting it right, so much so that I nearly gave up on it. Growth seemed to be an elusive lottery event: you somehow get it if you're at the right time and place.

I resorted to using a patchwork of requests to people I admired in an effort to continue growing. Some requests yielded successes whilst others languished or quietly faded away. Numerous requests, variations in their framing, mixed successes and incremental learnings finally formed a critical insight: personal growth, as I was referring to it, is three different things - coaching, sponsorship and mentorship^lara-hogan. This lets me get specific on important yet different internal development and external support needs and highlights differing requirements for a support network^terms. Whenever thinking about personal growth, I was conflating these three, asking for the wrong thing and omitting help for the right!

Coaching: Personal Learning

Coaching focuses on learning^pip. Successful coaching is a well-scoped personal development activity that has a clear output, timeline and success criteria. If you were being coached to run a 3-hour marathon, the coach would provide a concrete weekly mileage plan, with benchmarks and care routines until race day. Coaching focuses on how rather than why or even what, the latter two questions often being better suited to mentorship and sponsorship. Content and delivery are personalised in successful coaching: coaching to run a marathon is different for a trail runner than a cyclist.

A Coaching Example

Say I'm learning Scala so that I can use it for a smaller project next quarter. I ask my expert-friend Melissa how to get going. Sharing my specific experience, e.g. Python, Node, Java stack ranked in comfort; she suggests an online course, other online resources and a topical book. That's enough for me to self-learn. I circle back after a few weeks, as I've progressed, asking for practical examples of variance within Scala. I have a handle but need to internalise it better. Melissa shares a few pointers from our codebase with me and walks me through them. With a couple of examples in hand, I spend more time solo to get familiar and follow up with increasingly refined questions. To cement things, Melissa shares a few canonical examples of how variance is used in our codebase. She also proposes a couple of mini-projects, building off these examples, to get me more practice. Learning Scala was my coaching exercise with a finite timeline (quarter-ish) and an outcome (contribution to our codebase). My coach provided me with sufficient support to ensure that I could be successful and helped me learn when I was struggling.

Sponsorship: Proving Grounds

Sponsorship is an opportunity to demonstrate your talent. Skills built through coaching are integrated with others in meaningful projects that let you learn and grow. The value from these projects isn't purely internal: successful sponsorship opportunities generate extrinsic value to the team, product, or other audience. Rehearsing lines teach much, a stage performance teaches more.

I find that ideal sponsorship opportunities should either focus on integrating or scaling skills, but not both simultaneously. When integrating skills, I'm trying something I'm unfamiliar with and need a space where existing strengths can keep work standards high. Once comfortable with these skills, I need to understand where I can continue to grow and learn, and opportunities that scale my skills become essential. This duality doesn't translate perfectly to messier real-life opportunities, but I've found that if I'm thinking about what I'm scaling versus integrating, I'm better focused on learning through application.

A Sponsorship Example

I've been working on rebuilding our data systems, however, the effort seems to have plateaued. We made substantial progress within our existing division, but there are now dependencies against the larger organisation, and it's challenging to move ahead. The broader organisation is large and amorphous, and I wasn't sure how to get plugged in. I've worked with the data platform lead a few times and contacted him to see how I can help their division. Some ideas come forth: a few short term projects and access/introduction to a company-wide forum. The team and I can't do all the proposed projects, so we stack ranked a few opportunities looking at the effort, reward and counterfactual. We tackle these to build organisational rapport, better understand broader pain points, and help them with our expertise. I also start taking part in the company-wide forum with the support of the data platform lead. This allowed me to build new relationships with the platform and broad organisational leaders. For the next six months, this forum provided me with other opportunities to improve our data systems and highlighted gaps and pain points through the company in first-hand accounts. I was able to bring these back to the team to steer our efforts with focus, eventually building valuable inroads into the broader organisation.

Mentorship: The Glue

Mentorship connects sponsorship and coaching together. By understanding your abilities today, and your vision for tomorrow, effective mentorship is a strategic pursuit to achieve this vision. Successful mentorship works by repeatedly building a diagnosis, hypothesis and a set of ensuing coherent actions^good-bad taking inputs from tangible projects and personal experiences.

A diagnosis is an educated guess on the best way to get there from here. No matter how much time is spent in research and vetting, it is always a guess. This is where coaching and sponsorship help: in providing confidence signals. Coaching extracts my affinity for tangible skills (e.g. building design docs, gathering requirements, building mocks). Sponsorship tests and reveals my affinity for using these skills to create tangible value (e.g. shipping feature X, a root-cause-analysis of Y, growing DAUs by Z). Situations where working on the project is more enjoyable than leveraging the skills required, the opposite, and a spectrum of intermediates are common. This is where good mentors are invaluable: working together with you to resolve conflicting interests to build a hypothesis that frames the direction forward.

There can be many hypotheses, however, strong mentorship focuses on identifying the prime reason. This resultant hypothesis guides a set of coherent actions: next steps that work collectively to move the hypothesis forward. Some will be coaching exercises (e.g. focus on improving succinctness in presenting); others will be non-developmental (e.g. build a list of presentation opportunities).

A Mentorship Mini Example

As a tech lead, a past cross-functional experience has highlighted a few friction points: communicating direction effectively to the team, prioritising and getting buy-in, and being effective at debugging and responding effectively to urgent & on-call events. My struggles here have made it harder to get more of these high-visibility opportunities that I both seek and enjoy. My mentor has collected feedback from colleagues and myself, and we think getting better at triaging and solving urgent problems will build comfort with the systems and confidence with others. This needs some coaching on these systems and to find a lower-stakes opportunity where we can still apply our learnings in practice. We line up some coaching by pairing up with a couple of senior engineers. With no shortage of incidents, we have another opportunity, but to ensure that we're not jeopardising the product, we think pairing up with another tech lead to drive this incident successfully will sell our sponsor (the PM) on our participation. She's a lot more experienced than I and while I'll drive, she'll ensure that I'm successful and act as a backstop. My mentor has been very helpful in identifying and managing this risk, and driving some of the conversations on my behalf. Not a typical arrangement, but everyone is bought in thanks to the organisational trust extended to me by others, and I get another bite of the apple.

Building a Vision with Mentorship

Personal, and by extension career, vision is critical. Journeys presuppose a destination, even if that destination is in flux. Mentors that help navigate this vision are very hard to come by in my experience. Successful mentors require a deep understanding and relationship with the mentee that is very personal. This deep context means that starting a new mentorship relationship to clarify vision struggles. However, evolving one into this space has been successful and benefits from extra runway to improve trust and explore interpersonal working styles.

Using all Three

Coaching is a development activity that builds upon and adds to your aptitudes. Sponsorship provides a forum to produce meaningful value whilst solidying your aptitudes and learning about yourself. Mentorship is both the glue connecting these together, and the overarching guiding force.

All three of these activities exist on a spectrum. Coaching can range from self-guided reading to instructor-led coursework. Sponsorship varies from staccato engagements (e.g. a C-suite presentation) to more regular opportunities (e.g. driving a feature team); scale (in time and resources) and scope of these also vary of course. A formal mentor or mentorship programme to a council of advisors or a superpartner, mentorship too exists on a spectrum. All combinations of these exist, creating a lot of diversity.

The complexity can be overwhelming, it certainly was for me, but this isn't a make-it-or-break-it scenario. Understanding what you need and where you want to go are critical to have but are easily adjustable. Perfect is the enemy of the good: start off with an educated guess and go from there. Writing down what I'm pursuing and why, reflecting regularly and then iterating as needed is good process hygiene that helps me stay organised and honest to myself. A good mentor helps to manage this too.

Requirements for Coaches, Mentors & Sponsors

Mentors, sponsors and coaches have different roles and requirements. This is why I struggled previously with "growth": the mismatch in what I needed and what was offered by my partner doomed us. By getting more precise, I can build the best support structure, which invariably means that one person doesn't do all three.

Requirements: Coaches

Successful coaching is action-focused with clearly defined outcomes and timelines. Coaching can be self-guided, yet good coaches can accelerate skills development by at least an order of magnitude. Good coaches:

• assess and understand your current capabilities and build an appropriate curriculum
• provide effective feedback that close understanding gaps and are tailored to your working style
• are dependable; can be called upon to help

For introductory or broadly known topics, the Internet makes an ideal coach for me. Learning to create an iOS app is an excellent example of this. Many resources exist, but as things get more complex, options dwindle, and human coaches excel. Building your Hello World app is one thing, but creating an app that would be featured in the App Store another. I search for human coaches when the domain has inherent complexity,  hard-to-acquire depth or nuance borne from experience. Strong coaches have built up a library of design patterns and are effective at sharing them with you.

Internet resources are great for introductory topics, but for hard-to-acquire or complex knowledge, human coaches excel by sharing their hard discovered design patterns.

Multiple simultaneous coaches have been helpful when the domain is subjective or challenging. Public speaking is a good example and an area where the wisdom of the masses is helpful. I seek out coaches that bring unique perspectives that are not at odds with each others' insights. However, with multiple coaches, one needs to take a more active role in winnowing and internalising feedback.

Multiple coaches are helpful for subjective or challenging areas; seek out coaches that bring unique perspectives.

Requirements: Sponsors

Sponsors create or connect opportunities to build incremental value from your personal development. Successful sponsorship requires sponsors to:

• understand what the sponsored needs in an opportunity
• have a reliable and consistent method to discover or create opportunities
• extend their organisational trust to the sponsored

A good sponsor needs to understand the need and then materialise a matching opportunity. Requests aren't cut-and-dry and often require discovery and iteration, both with the sponsored and any other organisational partners to finesse the right opportunity. A sponsor with a process, formalised or not, is more likely to yield a high-quality opportunity. As a sponsor, having a reliable and consistent process is critical to ensure that I maintain a practice of sponsorship. Without consistency, I can create implicit biases by unevenly supporting people which can easily snowball into a large negative.

A good sponsor must extend organisational trust. Whether scaling or integrating skills, the sponsored is going outside of their comfort zone. By extending organisational clout, a sponsor increases the runway for success while also signalling confidence. When I've been stretching my abilities, this has been immensely helpful in getting me a crack at the bat and space to swing.

Good sponsors extend organisational trust increasing the runway for success and signalling confidence in you.

Trust is also critical in searching for a sponsor. I look to find ones whose incentives and successes align with mine as this greases the wheel, especially when extending trust - a naturally risky affair. Aligning incentives often takes explicit work on my part: I'll look to see if there are specific problems that my potential sponsors are facing where I can work with them. This builds trust and context that translates to a stronger sponsorship relationship.

A direct manager is a natural prime candidate. However, as my organisational scope has increased, my manager's ability to create appropriate opportunities has often diminished. Work becomes much more cross-cutting and abstract, and creating opportunities requires being in the proper forums or having suitable access. Changing managers may make sense, but you can also maintain your existing relationship and seek additional sponsors. I've found it helpful to build a network of potential sponsors in each company slowly over time. I draw from collaborators on past successful projects, referrals from my manager or peers and the occasional cold call.

Build a network of sponsors slowly but consistently drawing from past collaborators, referrals and cold calls.

Requirements: Mentors

Good mentors are good strategists, helping their protégé navigate to their vision. Requirements for a "good strategist" are challenging to pin down, but there are a few heuristics that I've found helpful below. Building a personal relationship is essential of course. Here are what I find as baseline requirements for a mentor:

• Deeply invested in you and your outcomes
• Compatible working styles, especially in communicating and feedback
• Able and willing to build a safe space and be vulnerable
• Organised: keeps track and follows-up effectively; manages the meta-aspects of mentorship
• (useful) Has different perspectives and experiences than you
• (useful) Has specific expertise navigating others/themselves through similar problems

Mentorship requires strong rapport, premised on trust, yielding honest and vulnerable conversations. A mentor's intent must be beyond reproach, especially when uncomfortable or challenging discussions come up. I've found that the challenge-to-support ratio, a crude metric around how often I'm directly challenged on a perspective versus supported, is a strong signal for a successful partnership and consequently mentor. I think the ratio sits somewhere between 3:2 and 1:2 for me, depending on the topic. Good mentors have been able to navigate this variation, supporting when I falter and challenging when I'm surging. Experience both general and specifically applicable to you is helpful, but neither a deal maker nor breaker alone. These are nice-to-haves that can really help unstick you but IMO it is important to not trade-off the other requirements.

Rapport, trust, honesty and vulnerability are critical to having a long-standing & successful mentorship. Experience, both in general and specific to your situation, are very useful but you should not compromise on the others.

An overlooked requirement for a mentor is their ability to organise. Mentorship can be a formal engagement with specific times, actions and requirements, an informal gathering, and everything in the middle. Navigating that gamut is a relationship exercise, but, also an organisational one. Managing expectations (what to expect from each other), logistics (e.g. meeting times, turn around times, follow ups), and information (e.g. taking & reviewing notes) are table stakes. Attention to structure ensures that the work put into the mentorship is catalysed into value efficiently. This process hygiene isn't solely the responsibility of the mentor, and some affinity for it is important in both parties. Lacking this, mentorships over longer time spans can become circular, tactical and eventually ineffective.

An organised mentor helps coalesce, structure and refine thinking. They also help build structure to ensure the mentorship stays on track and remains fruitful over time.

As with sponsorship, I slowly build a pool of potential mentors over time. Unlike sponsorship, the pool I draw from is much larger and not limited to the workplace. As long as they resonate with me on the points above, they're a candidate. Of course, sourcing from the workplace comes with shared, often helpful, context. Coaching and sponsorship partners, respected colleagues, superpartners are all potential sources amongst many others. I take a semi-active approach: while not explicitly looking for a mentor, I am explicitly looking for people with the qualities of a mentor. These are people I would enjoy working with, so even if mentorship isn't in the cards, I still have a potential colleague or advisor.

A pool of advisors or counsellors is very beneficial and a pleasant consequence of the search for mentors. Getting a fresh perspective on a line of thinking or seeking the wisdom-of-the-crowds on occasion can yield invaluable insights. Fact checking and seeing around corners are other high value benefits. Unlike a mentor, advisors are leveraged for their insights in a more limited or ad hoc scope. The relationship isn't transactional, but exists on a spectrum alongside a bona fide mentor.

Build a pool of potential mentors over time drawing from sources far and wide. Candidates from the workplace provide a natural context edge, of course. This pool of potentials serves double duty by also being a great source for future partnerships and advisors, if not bona fide mentors.

I would not recommend multiple simultaneous mentors. I've never experienced this personally as mentorship is very time and effort consuming, and I've never had the bandwidth to have more than one at a time. I'm also concerned with peanut buttering, since mentorship requires concerted effort. In short, I don't recommend having more than one mentor at a time but YMMV.

As Applied to Teams

As a leader on a team, a chief responsibility is growing team members. When it comes to coaching, sponsoring, and mentoring there are three core steps:

• understanding the needs of team members
• building networks of coaches, sponsors and mentors
• match-making & follow-up

Regular personal conversations should strive to understand what growth is needed and desired and look to diligently assess the specific needs for coaches, sponsors and mentors. Aggregating this information across the team provides a holistic view of how to help your team grow and helps shape the support structure you need to build for your team.

Finding coaches, mentors and sponsors at the team level is the same as for yourself, but with a larger, more diverse list of needs. Recruiting others to accelerate the search will help with the scale and peers within the team or on sister teams are strong candidates. In searching for coaches, sponsors and mentors, my personal experience shows that coaches and mentors within the team resonate most, while external partners are stronger sponsors. Not a rule, just an observation.

Connecting the team to support resources is the final activation step. Sometimes introductions are all that's needed. Other times a more guided 1:1:1 is helpful. In all cases, I've needed to spend time connecting, following up or otherwise incubating. Follow-ups over time are especially important as matches may fizzle out and need the occasional helping hand.

Process is critical to build scale and equitability. Approaching team growth in an ad hoc manner creates systemic biases of over- and under-served team members. Dedicate time to assess individuals' needs, aggregate those needs, build support networks and play matchmaker. Also important is to find others who can help manage this process. When running smoothly, it doesn't take much effort, but (say) 30% of the time more effort is needed and having a partner or two to spread the load makes this more sustainable and successful in the long run. A helpful side-effect of good process is that effective metrics can be built too. I'm still trying to understand what these look like but am starting with some simple counters of connections made and successful relationships. Once I have more meaningful data, I'll write more.

The Evolution of the Manager

Early in career, a manager normally fills all three roles. However, very quickly other coaches start stepping in, if not at the start. Onboarding or new hire orientation in most workplaces provide a natural framework for this sort of relationship, with a manager playing a pivotal role in introducing and shepherding people, with other team members supporting in part or whole.

With seniority, coaching is not something the manager is normally able to define. They can (and should) co-ordinate getting support but are normally unable to get specific as to what's needed. Since most managers have a strong sense of the day-to-day for their teams, a limited sense, if not complete, mentorship helps the two navigate to good solutions. As you grow in seniority, your manager isn't able to be your coach.

Sponsorship is a critical component of being a people manager. Regardless of seniority, my experience consistently calls out the importance of a manager being a sponsor. With large scopes, this can get much harder, and a larger sponsorship network than the manager alone is needed for success. Even with a limited ability to sponsor, managers should still facilitate constructing and expanding a sponsorship network.

As for mentorship, I haven't seen any consistent trends. Sometimes a manager is a strong mentor. Other times, they are an advisor. Since mentorships rely on a strong personal connection, this is somewhat expected. Good managers are consistently involved in personal growth though; an advisory role is the minimum IMO if not "full strength" mentorship.

When early in career, managers often perform all three roles: coach, sponsor and mentor. As your skills progress, supplemental coaches are needed and the manager as a coach takes a back seat. Managers are critical to sponsorship, either directly or by helping you build a sponsor network. As for mentorship, there's much more variety here, but a manager should at least be an advisor if not a mentor.

Key Takeaways

Thinking of personal growth in terms of coaching, sponsorship and mentorship, makes it more tangible, actionable and achievable. This framework helped me drive my own growth confidently. As I moved out of entry level roles, a lack of sponsorship made it difficult to understand what I needed. Mentorship meandered  taking me nowhere. Coaching became disconnected and apathy took over. As a mentor myself, I was often confused around what I needed to provide and how to explore their needs effectively, so that my help actually helps. This was magnified dramatically at a team level, especially when scaling teams aggressively. Luck is present more disproportionately in success than my ego would prefer, but by being clear and precise around what aspects of growth are important and essential for me, I've been able to work my way out of ruts and get better at pushing past plateaus.

• Thinking of personal growth as coaching, sponsorship, and mentorship clarifies your needs precisely and helps you seek support resources with greater success.
• Coaching is a well scoped development activity with clear outputs and timelines. Good coaches:
  • Assess and understand your current capabilities, and build an appropriate training plan.
  • Provide effective feedback that is easy to internalise and closes understanding gaps.
  • Are available and dependable to help.
• Sponsorship is an opportunity to demonstrate your talents generating value for yourself and others. It also lets you validate your strengths and discover areas for growth.
  • Build a network of sponsors slowly, drawing from peer & manager referrals, collaborators from past projects and cold calls.
  • Ensure your sponsors understand your needs, and can reliably create helpful opportunities for you.
  • Loans their organisational trust to you, giving you more runway and (organisational) confidence to be successful.
• Mentorship guides coaching and sponsorship to get you to your vision. Personal compatibility is needed; trust and a safe space that enables vulnerability is critical.
  • Mentors need to be deeply invested in you and your outcomes.
  • A mentor that can organise and structure this long-term engagement effectively is a key requirement as well.
  • Mentors with rich experiences, including similar concerns as yours, can be very helpful, but don't sacrifice on trust and vulnerability.
  • Building a pool of advisors, in complement to mentors, to fact check and vet thinking helps to bridge context and visibility gaps.
• For teams, get clear on what each member needs for each of coaching, mentorship & sponsorship. Build a support network for the team based on these needs and help matchmake relationships.
  • Build processes that you can share and iterate with others. This will help to ensure consistency and sustainability.

Related Reads

Here are a few interesting articles and books that informed different aspects of my thinking above. Please know that I may collect Amazon affiliate credits for purchasing through some of these links. Any credits I earn are used to buy and read things I think are cool.

• Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt.
• The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier
• What Does Sponsorship Look Like, Lara Hogan
• What Great Mentorship Looks Like in a Hybrid Workplace, Harvard Business Review.

1. I first came across the term sponsorship when Lara Hogan talked about the challenges for advancing underrepresented groups in the workplace. Le mot juste, it ended my parade of clumsy alternative terms.
2. The terms I've used aren't universal and various books often conflate coaching with mentorship. Sponsorship is generally ignored unfortunately. A rose by any other name still smells as sweet: I would focus on smell rather than the name.
3. A PIP (performance improvement plan), a standard process in companies to improve "wayward" employee performance, is an example of a coaching-like process. Intent is important, and in this case, it isn't typically coaching, as it focuses on mitigating risk for the company rather than growth for the individual.
4. This split parallels strategic thinking closely. In this analogy, the vision is set by the desired sponsorship opportunity, execution capabilities defined by your current skills, and the strategy represented by mentorship connects the two. Everything about good strategy (and bad) applies here.
5. Chapter 4 of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy talks about this from the perspective of the structure of good strategy. It is an interesting read that I strongly recommend for how to think about challenging problems.