The People Who Open Doors: Why being known isn’t the same as being backed

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[00:00:23] There's a particular kind of conversation that happens in organisations all the time. It usually isn't advertised. It may not appear on an agenda, and the person whose career is about to be affected may have absolutely no idea it's happening. Someone says, "We need somebody to lead this," or, "Who could take this on?" Or perhaps, "Who do we think is ready for the next step?" And then the names start. Someone says, "What about Anna?" Another person says, "Yes, she'd be good." Someone else says, "Have you thought about Michelle?" And slowly a shortlist begins to form. Not necessarily a formal shortlist, not yet, just a collection of names in the minds of people who have some influence over what happens next. And somewhere else in the organisation, there may be a woman who would be absolutely brilliant at that opportunity. She's capable. Her work is strong. People know who she is. She may have a very good reputation. She may even have been told that she's regarded as having potential. But in that particular room, at that particular moment, nobody says her name.

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[00:02:19] But there's another step, and it's quite a different one. You can be visible and still not be advocated for. People can know your name and never put it forward. They can think highly of you. They can tell you that you're doing a wonderful job. They can give you excellent performance feedback. They can mentor you. They can encourage you. They can tell you that you should apply for the next role. And still, when you're not in the room, they may not say anything. That's the distinction I want to explore today. Because there's a difference between being known and being backed. A difference between somebody recognising your capability and somebody being willing to do something with that recognition.

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[00:03:58] If I'm sitting in a room with people who don't know you particularly well, and I say, "I've worked closely with her. She's very capable. I think she could do this." The people around that table aren't evaluating only what they know about you. They're also evaluating what they know about me. Do they trust my judgment? Do they think I understand what this role requires? Do they know that I don't recommend people lightly? Because if they do, then my reputation has, in a very small way, become part of the evidence they're using to assess you. I'm putting my reputation behind yours, and that, I think, is where sponsorship starts to become much more interesting than simply having somebody in your corner.

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[00:05:29] For years, one of the most common pieces of career advice given to women has been find a mentor, and mentoring can be enormously valuable. I've had mentors in my own career. I've mentored other people. I've seen what a good mentoring relationship can do. A good mentor can help you make sense of what's happening around you. They can challenge your thinking. They can help you see possibilities you hadn't considered. They can share the benefit of experience without you having to acquire all of it the hard way. They can help you prepare for a difficult conversation, think through a career decision, understand where you need to develop, or work out what your next move might be.

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[00:07:20] A sponsor does something different. The sponsor is in a conversation with someone else and says, "I think you should consider her." That's the shift. The mentor is primarily working with you. The sponsor is also working for you in the system around you, and that means sponsorship involves something that mentoring doesn't always require: political capital. Not politics in the grubby sense. I mean the ability to influence what happens, access to people, credibility with decision-makers, knowledge of where opportunities are emerging, relationships across the organisation. Enough standing that when this person says, "I think she's ready," other people take that judgment seriously. And that brings us back to the idea of reputation because a genuine sponsor is doing more than being supportive.

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[00:09:06] Now, I'm not suggesting that every sponsorship decision is some enormous reputational gamble. Usually it isn't. But there is a transaction of trust happening. The sponsor has accumulated credibility within the organisation, and they're prepared to place some of that credibility behind someone else. That's why I keep coming back to the phrase, " Putting your reputation behind someone." Because I think it captures something that support and even advocacy don't quite capture.

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[00:10:36] That requires more than a pleasant conversation over coffee. They need a reason to believe in you. They need enough exposure to your work, your judgment, your character, or your potential to feel confident advocating for you. And they need something else as well. They need relevant influence. Because you can have someone who believes in you enormously but has very little access to the people or opportunities that matter for where you want to go. Wonderful advocate, not necessarily an effective sponsor. And you can have someone with enormous organisational power who barely knows you. Powerful person, not yet a credible sponsor. Sponsorship sits at the intersection of those two things, belief in you and influence with others. And when those come together, something quite powerful becomes possible. Someone with political clout can say your name in a room that you aren't in and put their own reputation behind it.

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[00:12:29] But I remember very clearly the distinction she made. Her sponsor wasn't there simply to give her career advice. The relationship had been deliberately established with the expectation that this person would help advance her career, put her forward for opportunities, help her make connections, increase her exposure, advocate for her, use their own organisational reach to help create opportunities for someone the organisation had already identified as having leadership potential. And Heather talked about how valuable that relationship had been to her career. She did ultimately become a partner at KPMG.

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[00:14:03] That's very different from the way sponsorship often happens, because in many organisations, sponsorship is almost entirely informal. Nobody calls it sponsorship. There isn't a meeting where someone says, "Congratulations, you've been allocated David." It just develops organically. A senior leader works with someone and is impressed by them. They give them another opportunity, then another. They introduce them to someone. They invite them into a meeting. They mention their name to a colleague. They recommend them for a project. Over time, they begin to take an interest in that person's career.

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[00:15:39] And once you see sponsorship through that lens, it becomes part of the hidden ecology of an organisation. On the organisation chart, two emerging leaders may look almost identical. Same level, similar experience, similar performance, both regarded as talented. But underneath the organisational chart, their worlds may be completely different. One has a senior person who regularly says, "Give her a go." The other doesn't. One has someone who makes introductions, the other doesn't. One gets mentioned when an opportunity is still only an idea, the other finds out about it when the email goes around. One has somebody with political clout quietly building confidence in her across the organisation. The other may be every bit as capable and every bit as visible, but nobody's actively doing that work for her.

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[00:17:40] And that's what I found so interesting about Heather's story. Her organisation had taken something that normally sits in the informal system, who is prepared to back whom, and made it deliberate. Not, "Let's hope one of the senior partners notices her." Not, "She should really network more." Not, "Perhaps she needs a mentor." But we believe this person has potential, so who is going to put some political capital behind helping that potential go somewhere? That's a very different question.

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[00:19:11] Think about how informal sponsorship begins. A senior leader sees someone doing good work. They develop confidence in them. Perhaps they have a conversation after a meeting. They work together on a difficult project. The senior leader gives them a slightly bigger opportunity. They deliver. Trust grows. Then another opportunity appears, and the senior leader thinks of them again. Eventually, without anybody ever formally declaring it, that senior person has started sponsoring their career. That's a perfectly understandable human process.

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[00:20:28] Because sponsorship involves reputational risk, if I'm going to put my reputation behind you, trust matters, and human beings don't build trust in a perfectly objective way. We tend to find some people easier to connect with than others. Similarity can play a part, shared backgrounds, shared interests, shared experiences, sometimes simply familiarity. None of that requires somebody to sit there consciously thinking, "I'm going to sponsor someone who looks like me." That's precisely why informal systems deserve scrutiny. And there's another complication for women. In many organisations, particularly as you move further up the hierarchy, the people with the greatest political capital are still disproportionately men.

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[00:22:45] And that's one reason I keep coming back to Heather's story, because when sponsorship is deliberately established by the organisation, some of that ambiguity disappears. Everybody knows why the relationship exists. The emerging leader knows, the sponsor knows, the organisation knows. The sponsor has permission, in fact, a mandate to take an active interest in that person's advancement. That doesn't magically remove every bias or guarantee an outcome, but it changes the architecture around the relationship.

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[00:24:00] Because there's a subtle trap here. An organisation can have a beautifully designed formal talent process and still have a completely different informal opportunity process operating underneath it. On paper, everyone may have access to the same jobs, but before the job appears, some people have had years of people saying, "Watch her. Give her this one. Introduce her to James. She should be in that meeting. Let her present this. I think she's ready." Those moments accumulate, and by the time a formal opportunity arrives, one person may have an entire network of organisational confidence sitting behind them. Another may arrive with only their own track record.

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[00:25:20] So by this point, you might be thinking, "Right, I need a sponsor." And this is where some of the career advice around sponsorship becomes a little unhelpful. Because you can ask somebody to mentor you. You can say, "I really value your experience. Would you be willing to meet with me occasionally and help me think through my development?" That's a perfectly reasonable request. But sponsorship doesn't work quite like that. Imagine walking up to the most influential person you know and saying, " would you please put your professional reputation behind me in rooms I'm not in?" It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that because sponsorship isn't really a role you appoint someone to, unless, of course, you're working in an organisation that has deliberately created a sponsorship program like the one Heather described.

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[00:27:40] The second thing is aspiration. Do the people who might advocate for you actually know where you want to go? This is something I see women underestimate. We assume people will somehow work it out. Surely, my manager knows I'd like a bigger role. Surely, they know I'm interested in strategy. Surely, they know I'd love international experience. Perhaps they do. But perhaps they think you're perfectly happy where you are. Perhaps they know you're ambitious but have no idea what you're ambitious for. Perhaps an opportunity comes up, and they don't connect it with you because you've never given them the information that would allow them to make that connection. A sponsor can't connect you to an aspiration they don't know you have.

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[00:29:30] And then there's a fourth piece that I think is easy to miss. Reciprocity, not transactional reciprocity. I'm not suggesting you owe somebody something because they advocate for you. But sponsorship is a relationship in which your performance has consequences beyond you. If someone puts their reputation behind you and you get the opportunity, what you do next matters. You deliver, you behave with integrity, you use good judgment. You don't make the sponsor regret having backed you.

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[00:30:34] Which brings us back to a question I asked earlier, who would put my name forward? If you have an immediate answer to that question, that's wonderful. But if you don't, I don't want you to leave this episode thinking, "Great, another thing I'm doing wrong." That's not the point. I want you to get curious. Perhaps lots of people know your work, but very few influential people have actually seen you operate. Perhaps senior people know you're capable, but don't know what you want next. Perhaps you have wonderful mentors, but they're outside your organisation and can't influence the opportunities inside it. Perhaps you have strong advocates in your own function, but you're trying to move somewhere their influence doesn't travel. Or perhaps, and this matters, you're operating in an organisational environment where sponsorship simply isn't distributed very well. Those are different problems, and they require very different responses.

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[00:32:09] So I want to give you something practical to do with this, and it isn't go and find yourself a sponsor. Instead, I want you to map the advocacy that already exists around your career. Take a piece of paper and divide it into three columns. At the top of the first column, write "Who knows me?" These are the people who know your work. They've seen what you contribute. They understand something about your capability. Some might know you extremely well, others might simply know your professional reputation.

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[00:33:08] And then write the third heading: Who advocates for me? And don't rush this one, because I'm not asking who likes you. I'm not asking who says nice things about you. I'm not even asking who believes you have potential. I'm asking who acts on that belief. Who has introduced you to somebody because they thought the connection would help you? Who has recommended you for something? Who has deliberately created exposure for you? Who has said, "You should talk to her"? Who's put your name forward for a project, a role, a client, a committee, or a board opportunity? Who has said in one form or another, "I back her"?

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[00:34:58] Who would be in a position to hear about the opportunity? Who would have access to the relevant people? Whose recommendation would carry weight? And who knows you well enough to make that recommendation with confidence? Because this is where we bring together the two sides of sponsorship we've been talking about, belief in you and influence with others. If somebody has enormous influence but doesn't really know your work, there's a gap. If somebody knows your work intimately and thinks you're extraordinary but has no connection to the opportunity you're seeking, there's a different gap. And if somebody has both, that's a relationship worth noticing. Not exploiting, not suddenly inviting them for coffee because you've decided they're strategically useful. Noticing. Because political intelligence isn't about treating human relationships like pieces on a chessboard. It's about understanding the ecology you're already part of.

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[00:37:03] And there's one more possibility. You may look at your map and realise that the people who know you, advise you, and believe in you are all concentrated in exactly the same part of the organisation, your immediate team, your profession, your geographic location, your current level. That's useful information too, because your network may be strong, but its reach may be narrow. And that gives you a much more intelligent development question than how do I network more? Perhaps the question is, where does my reputation need greater reach? Not because you need hundreds more contacts, but because the opportunity you want may live in a different part of the organisational ecology where your current relationships don't travel.

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[00:38:24] So let's come back to that room. The opportunity has emerged. Perhaps it's a role. It could be a project. Perhaps it's a client, a secondment, a board position, an introduction. Maybe it's something that doesn't even have a name yet, just a conversation about what the organisation needs next, and you're not there. Someone asks, "Who should we consider?" We've spent a lot of this season talking about what happens before that moment. The quality of your work, whether that work is visible, how people perceive you, how well you understand the hidden ecology of the organisation around you, the relationships you build, all of those things matter.

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[00:40:15] I think that's why this matters so much because careers don't move only through formal processes. Opportunity moves through human systems, through conversations, introductions, recommendations, trust, judgment, and people willing to use the political capital they've accumulated to create possibilities for someone else. Sometimes that happens naturally. Sometimes, as in the story I shared about Heather, organisations deliberately create the conditions for it, and perhaps more organisations should. Because if we're serious about creating more equitable pathways into leadership, It's not enough to ask whether people have access to development. We also need to ask whether they have access to advocacy. Who gets coached, who gets mentored, but also who gets backed.

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[00:42:17] That's the question I'd like you to sit with this week. And I've created a field guide to accompany this episode, including the advocacy map we've talked through today, so you don't need to remember all of this or try to recreate the exercise yourself. You'll find the link to download it in the show notes. Use it to map who knows you, who advises you, and who actively advocates for you. Then choose one opportunity you'd genuinely like to move towards and ask, "If this opportunity appeared tomorrow, who would put my name forward?" And if you discover a gap, don't immediately rush to fix it. Get curious about it because once you can see how opportunity and advocacy move through the system around you, you can start making much more deliberate choices about where you build trust, where you need greater reach, and where your work needs to be experienced, not simply seen.

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[00:44:05] Thanks for joining me on The Archetype Effect. If this episode sparked an insight, share it with a woman who leads or leave a review so more women can find these conversations. Until next time, lead with purpose and power that feels like you.