Mentoring may be a buzzword in the business world, but it's not always carried out effectively. More often, mentoring turns into glorified networking or rare meetings for a quick coffee. Recently, the idea of sponsorship — intentional advocacy for mentees — has been added to the conversation to help businesses focus on developing and promoting employees to develop strong and diverse teams.

Sponsorship and mentoring are different from each other, but they should not be done in isolation. Within a business, the only truly effective way to implement these processes is to view them as two parts of a cycle that must be repeated over and over again. For this to happen, those in leadership roles must embrace a deliberate approach aimed at continuous development.

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Mentoring aimed at sponsorship

To mentor their employees effectively, mentors must develop specificity view for the professional growth of their employees. To develop these goals, they must be on the lookout for two key areas of development: strengths and weaknesses.

• Identify strengths: By identifying strengths in your mentees means working closely with them to discover their experience, skills and passions. These strengths are not limited to knowledge in their field, but can include personality traits such as leadership skills, the ability to learn quickly, or an interest in a particular role or field.
• Identify the gaps: For mentoring to be an ongoing and effective process, consider what your mentees still need to learn moving forward. They may have knowledge gaps that require further training, or perhaps they have the knowledge for new roles but lack the skills to lead a team or communicate effectively with customers. Consider how you can assign stretching projects that provide an environment for them to ask questions, discover new skills, and feel supported in a new environment.
• What it is not: Mentoring isn't just about networking or turning an employee into an assistant. Effective mentoring look forward to sponsorship, equipping employees to grow within your company.

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Strategic sponsorship

Sponsoring employees from within means intentionally drawing on knowledge gained through the mentoring process to put employees forward for new roles and responsibilities. This requires flexibility and a willingness to repeat the cycle over and over again.

• Flexibility: As a mentee's knowledge and skills increase, so will their role and recognition. Being willing to change or develop one's role within the company allows you to place employees in roles where they will contribute most effectively to your business and gain the most satisfaction.
• Ongoing mentoring: Employees should never be promoted and then left to figure it out on their own. Once a mentee has been sponsored into a new role, they will have new strengths and gaps that require development and training. This may even mean equipping them to be mentors in turn.
• What it is not: Sponsorship is not adding more responsibility to an employee's plate without proper promotion or redefinition of their role. To create a healthy team atmosphere, employees who have grown enough to take on new roles need to feel that their growth is being formally recognized and celebrated.

Repeating the cycle

While mentoring and sponsorship may sound like one-on-one experiences, when combined, these processes can foster the growth of an entire team at a time. We have seen this increase in Step forward regularly. Some time ago, we hired a new SEO specialist; let's call him John. I quickly identified two of John's key strengths: his ability to learn extremely quickly and his previous experience. I started mentoring and training him on our internal processes, how we run our SEO meetings and more. I brought his potential to the attention of our executives and within six months, we promoted him to lead the SEO team. I continue to mentor him as a leader in his new position.

Our process does not stop there. John quickly realized that Jane, a member of his SEO team, was contributing above and beyond her current role. He now directs her to handle SEO quality assurance in a role that recognizes the full potential of her contributions to Outpace. These are just two examples of how mentoring and sponsorship can have a ripple effect and empower team leaders to become mentors and sponsors themselves.

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Individual Relationships: Team Benefits

Clearly, mentoring and sponsorship affect the entire workplace, not just individual employees. When employees see potential for it professional development in their current company, their job satisfaction increases. Instead of making employees feel overwhelmed, this cycle offers them opportunities and recognition. This helps increase employee retention as employees don't have to look elsewhere to feel they are making progress. One of the main benefits of mentoring and sponsoring employees is that they also become strong leaders and mentors. This allows the process to be repeated with new employees. Over time, mentoring and sponsorship form strong businesses where interconnected teams continually grow and advocate for their peers.