Latest / Women Who Ship / 8. Who Is in Your Corner? Why Tech Careers Fail Without a Mentor, a Sponsor, and a Coach
Transcript
- Sarah Williams: Welcome to Women Who Ship, the podcast for women in tech who are tired of proving themselves in rooms they've already earned a place in and are ready to lead like they know it. I'm your host, Sarah Williams. Let's dive in. Sarah: Hey friends, welcome back to Women Who Ship. And we've been talking a lot on the podcast recently about showing your work and increasing your visibility and how that plays into your recognition and promotion. Today's topic is going to fold right into that discussion because as with anything that you're doing in life that is important, you really need a good support system, or what I like to call a squad. So for recognition and promotion, you need a squad. That squad should consist of a mentor, a sponsor, and a coach. So thinking about yourself and your work, I'm imagining that you're probably a high performer and you're doing your work quietly. So you're shipping a high impact project. Maybe as you were doing it, you created the perfect documentation, you've been mentoring a junior colleague. But what you've been doing is just hoping that your great work speaks for itself and that your manager or your informal mentor will put you up for promotion. But what's actually happening is that where the promotion decisions occur in those rooms, Your name isn't being mentioned. Quiet competence is a beautiful thing, but in a noisy tech ecosystem, it's also a career trap. We've been taught as women to collect gold stars and hope that someone else shines light on us. But a gold star without a sponsor is just a nice piece of paper in an empty drawer. So we know that tech environments are male-dominated, and as such, they're designed to reward vocal self-promotion and high visibility execution. And with AI consolidating traditional roles, we're going to see the competition for senior roles get more and more intense. Recently I was reviewing the 2025 AWF's Women in the Workplace study. And there were some really interesting findings. So, first was that It's kind of commonly understood that women lack the drive to be promoted. So there was a distinct gap between the women who were seeking advancement, who were seeking to be promoted, and their male counterparts. But what the study actually found was that it wasn't a lack of ambition. It was actually a missing support system. So when women do receive The same manager and sponsor support as their male peers, they found that the ambition was not fixed. They could be just as ambitious as their male counterparts. But what's missing is that only 31% of entry-level women have a sponsor compared to 45% of men. And the key thing about having a sponsor. Is that having one increases your promotion rate by nearly double? So 65% of sponsored employees received a promotion in the last two years compared to just thirty-five percent of those without. Now I want to talk a little bit about how this is showing up for women. So in one way, you can end up being what I call a mentor collector. And we're all guilty of this, myself included. You find a woman whose career you admire, but you admire her from afar. You're reading her blogs, you're following her LinkedIn. She has no idea that she's what you would call your mentor. There's no active engagement here. It's kinda like me and Henry Capill. He has no idea he's my husband. Now, another way this can show up is if you're doing that, and we've talked about this a lot on the podcast, if you're that invisible glue worker. So you're doing all those things behind the scenes that are super important for the team, but maybe are sabotaging your career ambitions. So things like the mentoring that you're doing for junior level employees, the documentation that you've been working on. The times where you're celebrating everyone's birthdays or you're organizing those team building events. And admittedly, these are all great things for the team. But what you'll often be told then is, you're just too important where you are. You're doing such a great work. We can't have you working on those stretch assignments. We can't have you moving into that more senior level role. And that can always be very hard to hear because you are doing great work. But you're not being seen as strategic enough to move to that next level. So the last is what you really want to move towards if you're seeking that recognition and promotion. And that's what I like to call sponsor activated. So this is where you are putting your hand up for the stretch roles. And now you're working with senior leaders or executives, and they're getting to see your execution firsthand. So they have a front row seat to your amazingness. The conflict that we often see with this is that women in tech are over-mentored and under sponsored. And what's important is understanding the distinction between those two roles and what it means for your career. So mentors are there to advise, but they aren't always in the right room to advocate for you during performance or promotion conversations. In addition, women are socialized to believe that their good work will just speak for itself and that they should wait for permission to speak up, to receive that stretch assignment. And they're told to kind of be modest and stay quiet. Don't talk about your work. It'll see be seen as braggy. You need to share credit where credit's due, all of those things that are kind of holding you back from being visible in all of the great work that you're doing. So as you're thinking about your recognition and promotion squad, I want you to think about it in this way. A mentor talks to you, a sponsor talks about you, and a coach talks with you. So the role of the mentor is to be an advisor and to help you navigate what you don't yet know. The role of the sponsor is to advocate for you in the rooms that you are not in. And the role of a coach is to help you with the mindset piece, to help you unpack any self-limiting beliefs that prevent you from stepping into those rooms and that visibility in the first place. And of course, as usual, I have a few tools to help you build out your recognition and promotion squad. So the first thing I want you to do is structure your mentorship. So I want you to stop collecting passive mentors. That's great. You can admire women from afar. I'm super happy for you to do that. But if you're really looking for mentorship, I want you to pick someone, ask them directly. And formalize that relationship with a specific goal and time frame in mind. So, as an example, maybe you've seen a woman who seems to really have it together in meetings and especially meetings where executives are present. She seems put together, she knows her stuff, she's visible with her decision making, she answers the questions in the right way, or she has a great script for. How to deal with it if she doesn't quite know the answer off the top of her head. And you're like, hey, that is a really cool skill that I would like to have. I want to know what she knows about this. So you would go to her and say, Hey, I'd really like to develop my executive presence over the next three months. Could I meet with you once a month? And here's the very critical piece. If you get that meeting, Then I the mentee needs to drive the engagement. So you need to come, bring the agenda, bring your questions, and bring the action items. You should be tracking your action items. So don't show up expecting that mentor to be directing your career. You've noticed something about them that you admire. You want to know what you don't know about that skill set that could make you better. Now, thinking about this, typically when you're selecting a mentor, it's someone who's like maybe one or two steps ahead of you. But there's also a really great benefit to developing your peer-to-peer mentoring network as well. So this is something that has worked great for me throughout my career, having a really supportive cohort of peers that can offer like a sounding board that can share frameworks that are working for them, that can You know, you can give them your work to review. You can ask how you did in a meeting, how you presented yourself. Was there any questions? Was there anything, you know, that they would improve? These types of things can be really beneficial to a mentoring network as well, because you're kind of all in the same space, you're all learning together, you're all sharing the great tips of what you know. And it's just a great way to build a team. So that is an alternative if it's really difficult. To get on an executive schedule or really develop that structured mentoring relationship, that's another alternative. Also, some companies offer a structured mentoring program. So if that's something that is available at your company, check into it, see what it takes to sign up and put yourself forward for that. Be on the lookout, see who you want to be part of that mentoring relationship, and remember to drive that engagement. So the next tool is to build your sponsor network. And this is going to be a bit different from the mentoring because you can't just ask someone to be your sponsor. They're going to need to see your work in action. So the best way to make this happen is to get assigned to a project that they're leading or an OKR that they're already sponsoring as an executive. So this is so common in the tech industry. The managers, the executive leaders, they've all got their projects that they are the executive sponsor of. And so if you can get yourself assigned to that project, then that person is going to have a front row seat to the way that you work. You'll have a reason to reach out to them, to talk to them. They'll get to see what it's like to see you execute. And all of that is going to build you up and they'll. They'll know exactly the details of what you're doing. In addition, helping them to succeed makes your work impossible to ignore. So again, you got to be ready when you step into this role to show up, do your best work. Another thing to think about your sponsor network is I wouldn't assume, even if your manager is great and has the best intentions, they may not always be able to detail your wins or your specific project updates in the forums that they're in. I know for my team in particular, my leadership team, we've had a very short amount of time together every week, and that agenda was always packed. So it's important for you to also proactively build some of those relationships. You know, you've already got that great relationship with your manager. They're probably an advocate for you. You can talk during your one-on-ones about what you're doing, but maybe think a little bit about what their manager, your skip level manager needs to know about what you're doing, or what some of your manager's peers might need to know. So what that could look like is just sending a quick. you know, DM update to one of those people, your skip level manager, maybe another manager on the team with a quick update about a project that you're working on and just finding out if it would be useful for them to know that. So like, hey, I've got this quick update on this project. This is what we did. This is the impact that it had. Is this something that will be useful for you? Do you have any questions about it? And the last thing is just thinking about the piece that a coach will help you with. So a sponsor and a mentor is only going to work if you're mentally ready to let your work be seen. So a sponsor can definitely open doors for you. But if your internal narrative is running that script of self-doubt, you will quietly sabotage that opportunity, or you'll kind of shrink in a room where you really need to step into confidently. Now, mastering that internal narrative, stepping off the validation roller coaster and retraining your brain is a massive topic on its own. It's so critical that I'll dedicate my next episode to a step-by-step self-coaching toolkit. But for today, the shift is simply realizing that we need to calibrate our internal story so we can actually step into the rooms our sponsors open up for us. All right, your assignment for this week, I want you to take 15 minutes and run through what I like to call your visibility circle mapping. So write down your skip level manager, your manager's peers, and maybe one cross-functional part. Pick a person from that list and send them a quick DM or a short one-on-one request to share a very specific impact statement from your recent work. So the framework for this is I action, which resulted in impact. So that could look something like hey, I automated our weekly dashboard using an AI script, which saved the team four hours of manual tracking every week. Does this seem like the kind of thing that your team would benefit from as well? point here is to stop doing invisible glue work quietly and start letting the right people know what you've shipped. Thanks for listening. Go map your visibility network. Build your recognition and promotion squad on your own terms. And let's go ship some good stuff together. If you've been listening to this episode and nodding along, you might be asking yourself, how do I actually take the amazing work I'm already shipping and make it visible to the sponsors and leaders who influence my career? Because here is the hard truth for senior women in tech. Quiet high performance is not a career plan. Too often we hold entire projects together with invisible glue work, doing the heavy operational lifting, stabilizing the team after re-orgs, and writing the documentation. But we do it in silence, waiting for a gold star that is never going to be handed to us. If you are ready to break that cycle, I want you to download my free Get Recognized at Work playbook. It is a practical five-step system designed to help you stop waiting for external praise, build an unshakable private evidence file of your own wins, and start talking about your impact with calm, unapologetic confidence. Inside you'll find my exact template to turn your day-to-day tasks into high impact metrics using my formula, How to build a weekly recognition retro ritual that retrains your brain to notice your own value. And a step-by-step roadmap to map your own visibility circle so you can share your work with skip levels and key partners without feeling like you're bragging. You don't need to be louder, flashier, or someone you're not. You just need a system to make your results impossible to overlook. Visit Go. dot coachsarahwilliams.com forward slash recognition right now to download your copy. Let's stop doing the invisible work and start getting recognized for the results you actually create.