Making Real Connections (HBR Women at Work Series)

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Want to Be a Better Manager? Get a Protégé

by Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Who benefits when a manager or executive sponsors someone more junior, offering guidance, advocacy, and support? If you answered, the protégé, you’d be only getting it half right.

Sponsorship—a relationship in which an established or rising leader picks an outstanding junior talent and develops that person’s career—certainly does boost the protégé, who has access to the sponsor’s experience and connections. But data shows that the sponsor also gains enormous value from this relationship. According to a nationally representative survey conducted for my book, The Sponsor Effect: How to Be a Better Leader by Investing in Others, senior-level managers who have a protégé are 53% ...