Mentors talk to you. Sponsors talk about you. Most senior women have plenty of the first and almost none of the second.
By the end of this you'll know the one sentence your advocates need from you, and why the ask you have been dreading is not the ask you think it is.
There is a question I get asked more often than almost any other, usually near the end of a coaching conversation or virtual coffee chat and usually a little embarrassed: how do I get somebody senior to actually back me? If you have been collecting mentors diligently and wondering why nothing is changing, this episode is about the thing you have been missing
A mentor talks to you. That relationship happens in a room with two people in it and you are one of them.
An advocate talks about you. They say your name in rooms you are not in, they put you forward for the stretch project, and they say "I think she's ready" when somebody else is not sure. Career sponsorship for women is the piece that almost nobody explains, and it is the piece that actually moves careers.
Here is what I see constantly in my coaching practice. The women I work with have been mentored extensively and have had nobody argue for them when it mattered. And when I say the word sponsor out loud, I watch faces close, because what she is thinking is that she does not want to play politics just to get ahead.
That objection is not silly and it is not going away on its own. But the sleaze is not in the advocacy. It is in how you have been imagining the ask. You have been picturing yourself going to somebody senior and asking them for a favor, asking them to like you enough to spend their own credibility on you. No wonder it feels awful.
Advocacy is not a favor you ask for. It is a handover. Your advocate needs something specific to say and evidence behind it, and your job is not to be liked enough. It is to make yourself advocable. This episode covers the five steps that do that.
WHAT'S COVERED
→ Why you have been collecting the wrong thing, and what a mentor cannot do for you
→ The reframe that makes the ask stop feeling grubby
→ Why you almost certainly have more advocates than you think, and how to find them
→ The one sentence that decides what gets said about you when you are not there
→ Why advocacy for women skews toward character and what that costs
→ Why evidence matters more than relationship when somebody puts their name behind yours
RELATED EPISODES
Why you're not being seen as the leader you want to be: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/310-why-youre-not-being-seen-as-a-leader-at-work/
Office politics for women who hate office politics: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/296-office-politics-women-hate-office-politics
From tactical to strategic, the unspoken rules for women stepping into executive leadership: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/292-executive-leadership-for-women-strategic-shift
FREE RESOURCE
Seen as Strategic, the checklist for what senior leaders are actually reading when they decide whether you are executive material: https://tonicollis.com/resources/seen-as-strategic/
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