Calls for mentors to take on mentees and entreaties for women to seek out mentors are constant. They appear in business magazine articles, serious books, not-so-serious “how-to” books, and newspaper articles.1 One rather melodramatic female interviewee emoted to an author, “He [the mentor] believed in me, more than I believed in myself, and it changed my life.”2
Strictly speaking, these incessant offers of wisdom (“Get a mentor,” in fact, “get several of them”) are beyond the scope of this book.3 This is because this book attempts to approach issues of women’s advancement into leadership positions from the perspective of corporate employers and the industry, not that of aspiring women; nor am I interested in putting the entire onus on women (lower your voice, avoid having children, dress for success). What individual women should do (avoid stereotypes, build a network, obtain mentors, lean in) is not a subject for this book, at least not directly.4
Following the lead other advice book readers have mapped, “most researchers on gender and IT have noted the importance of mentoring for all students, but particularly women.” Universally, those researchers fail to mention reservations about and the downsides to mentoring. Since its founding in 1997, MentorNet has attempted to match IT students with mentors, but its success in matching them has been reported as insignificant (ten thousand overall since its founding).5
From an institutional standpoint, the real question to ask is, Why, despite thirty years or more of calls for mentoring, women have made little progress? To be sure, individual testimonials abound. “My favorite mentors guided me to act, respond and manage to my long term potential and aspirations. They helped me understand how IQ got me in the door and in my seat, but EQ [Emotional Quotient] would take me the distance.”6 But if mentoring worked so well, wouldn’t we have gotten much further along? If mentoring were that great, we would expect to find many more success stories. If mentoring lived up to the claims its adherents make for it, even some empirical study demonstrating its efficacy might exist. Is there something missing? Something perhaps from the industry side? If the answers to some or all of those questions might be “yes,” is institutional involvement of some sort an answer to curing the deficiencies?
The entreaties for and praise of mentoring are extremely one-sided. They express no reservations, tending even to be over-the-top. “Mentors are more important to career success than hard work, more important than talent, more important than intelligence. . . . You need to learn how to operate in the work world . . . and mentors can teach you how.”7 More than a few caveats about mentoring are in order, and may be part of the reason mentoring has not produced the results foreseen for it. Mentors disappear. They transfer to another location within the company. They move on to a competitor entity. They themselves may become victims of downsizing or reorganization. They retire.8 Mentoring often is a herky-jerky proposition.
According to many women, even when mentors stay in place, they may become overprotective, losing sight of how they can help women work around or over obstacles, replacing it with efforts to shield their mentees from obstacles or roadblocks altogether. Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter describes the phenomenon:
Many women object to the protectiveness that they perceived in their sponsors that “encased” them “in a plastic bubble,” . . . rendering them ineffectual. . . . Women complained about the “people who want to move walls for me instead of saying, ‘Here’s a wall. Let’s strategize working through it.’”9
Certain sponsors thus may engage in “negative mentoring,” advising women to move sideways into human resources, staff positions, or “pink-collar,” female-dominated jobs not likely to lead toward advancement. Earnest mentors may offer such advice out of a well-intentioned conclusion that the female mentee needs sheltering from the sudden storms that may arise in line and operations positions.
Overprotective mentors may morph into avuncular or patriarchal figures. Male mentors come to regard female protégés as ersatz daughters or nieces. The British critics of certain forms of mentoring may refer to a mentor of that sort as an “office uncle.”10 With many mentoring relationships, it has been said, an element of the parent-child dynamic creeps in, rendering the relationship very different from what mentoring advocates and mentees had envisioned.
Mentoring may encourage a mentee to engage in conduct that may backfire, many times severely so. Thus, a mentor’s presence may provide an impetus for “the lower level organization members to bypass the hierarchy: to get inside information, short-circuit cumbersome procedures, or to cut red tape. . . . [They] also provide an important signal to other people, a form of ‘reflected power.’” Proper use of a mentor may be an elusive thing, capable of abuse by the mentees, who must “be careful about the way they use the reflected power of the sponsors.” For instance, “you can’t use” reflected power “with your own manager or you will get into trouble.”11 A “fast tracker” or a “rising star” should never use sponsorship to avoid or run roughshod over the chain of command.
Those, then, are a few of the seldom-heard criticisms of mentoring, mostly from the female manager’s side rather than from the perspective of what corporations might do.
Institutional involvement in mentoring does emerge from time to time on the corporate side. Companies formally install a matrix form of organization under which a manager, including a female manager, has not only a black line responsibility to the person or persons above her in the organizational chart or chain of command, but also a “dotted line” responsibility or responsibilities to others in the organization who may have a comparable position at another or a larger subsidiary. Or the “other” may exercise supervision over that subject area from a perch at corporate headquarters.
To set out an example, consider a European subsidiary and the second-in-command of marketing whose charge is clothing and accessories. Her direct reporting is to the subsidiary’s chief marketing officer (CMO) and perhaps then upward to the subsidiary’s CEO. She may also, however, have a dotted line responsibility to a counterpart at a larger subsidiary in East Asia, or to a smaller one in Australia. She may have a further dotted line responsibility to the head of design or to a marketing person at corporate headquarters.
What do dotted line responsibilities entail? Everything under the sun, everything from A to Z—with a wide range of variations. Some managers communicate along dotted lines once a year, or not at all. Others compare notes twice a week. In certain companies, the dotted line responsibility involves affirmative reporting requirements and veto authority from above. In still other cases, the relationship is a much softer one, resembling a penitent–father confessor or nephew/niece–uncle/aunt tie. The matrix form of organization then is an empty vessel into which various companies and organizations pour various things. Most often, though, corporations utilize the matrix form of organization to introduce to their company the framework for mentoring, although companies seldom articulate it as such.12
When the company installs a mentoring-like system from above, the company also may ameliorate certain of the pressures older males especially feel in wholly voluntary mentoring setups. Fully two-thirds of men fear that attention toward younger women would be wrongly perceived by coworkers and superiors.13 “Men who would like to fill gaps in mentoring [for women] frequently are worried about the appearance of forming a close relationship with women.”14
Another reason mentoring relationships as they presently exist in many companies may not produce the results their supporters envision is that mentoring quickly evolves into something else. What one person regards as mentoring may in reality be, or evolve into, a “star system,” incorporating a patronage rather than a merit pathway to promotion. In many corporations’ management echelons, probably far too many, a star system holds sway. Stars of the first magnitude, those managers within one or two reporting levels of the CEO, may assemble around or beneath them one or several stars of lesser magnitude. Merit becomes less and less relevant. Personal loyalty and obeisance replace it. The lesser stars rise because they are the favorites of stars of the first magnitude.
Sponsorship is sometimes generated by good performance, but it also can come . . . “because you have the right social background or know some of the officers from outside the corporation [for example, the golf course or the tennis courts] or look good in a suit.” . . . Boy wonders rise under certain power structures. They are recognized by a powerful person because they are much like him. When women acquired sponsors, the reasons were often different from the male sponsor protégé situation. . . . Officers were looking for a high performing woman they could make into a showpiece to demonstrate the organization’s openness toward women.15
In many or even most cases, at some point the leading star will fall out of favor. Eventually he may fall, either temporarily or permanently, from the firmament, in which case the lesser star will fall farther yet. The whims of the CEO and the trickle down from that may determine who is in favor that day, week, or month. The system resembles a medieval court.
At a major Fortune 500 forest products company, the CEO “managed through chaos,” acting on whims and changing favorites every month or two. An MBA from a quality business school, with over twelve years at the company, suddenly found himself out of a job when his mentor, or star, fell out of favor with the CEO. He ended up working for a firm that imported tires from Korea.
Both from the corporate governance standpoint and from the standpoint of individual employees, a star system within a corporation’s management structure is a snake pit. Backstabbing, rumormongering, extortion, and conduct resembling blackmail become everyday occurrences. Any rising woman manager should ask herself whether what she sees within a corporation is a good-faith monitoring system, a corrupt “star” system, or something in between. She should be aware of the possible detriments, as well as the benefits, and the ins and outs of mentoring, a subject markedly absent from the reams of advice authors write for women in business. Aspiring women should be aware that a thin line separates sponsorship (a good thing) from a whimsical star system (a not-so-good thing). They should periodically make the attempt to discern between the two. On the other side of the equation, periodically corporations should ask themselves whether their mentoring arrangement, sponsorship, or a matrix form of organization is degenerating into a star system.
The most oft-stated criticism is that mentoring leads nowhere. Women who have assiduously courted mentoring relationships far too frequently feel that their efforts produced few, if any, results. After four, five, six, or seven years in one or more mentoring relationships, women remain at a rank equivalent to the rank they had at the beginning. Whether because of the office uncle, the glass bubble, the pink collar, the star system, or some other phenomenon, mentoring relationships do not yield anything resembling the efforts women have put into them.
It has been found that “no significant relationship exists between having a mentor and receiving a promotion.” One female executive explained, “I’m going to get mentored to death before I get promoted.”16 Another executive opines, “If you look around . . . we’re putting women in mentoring programs, we’re giving them special leadership programs, [and we’re] telling them how to ask for a promotion, but we are not promoting them.”17
Women in Australia voiced these complaints about mentoring and its role in increasing gender diversity on Australian companies’ boards of directors. The Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) listened, and acted. The AICD theorized that what the situation demanded was not mentorship but mentorship combined with sponsorship. To meet that demand, the AICD launched its mentorship/sponsorship program in March 2010.18 Mentee applicants for board memberships must attend either the AICD’s “Directors’ Course in Mastering the Boardroom” or its “International Company Directors’ Course.”19 Once they have become “ASX 200 board ready,” through attendance at one of the courses, and through their experience as lawyers, accountants, financial officers, corporate managers generally, or in not-for-profit entities, women candidates join with a mentor who is board chair of an Australian public company.
Initially, sixty-three women qualified. On the other side of the equation, fifty-six ASX 200 chairpersons had signed on in the first wave. Those board chairs pledged not only to mentor the candidate with whom the AICD had conjoined them but, after one year, to place that woman mentee on the board of a publicly held corporation.20
Between April 2010 and November 2010, the percentage of women directors on Australian corporate boards increased 2 percent, from 8.5 percent to 10.4 percent, and continued to increase thereafter.21 As the program gathered speed, the percentage reached 13.8 percent by March 2011. In 2011 alone, ASX corporations “made more than 20% of their board appointments to women.” In subsequent years, the AICD program has continued steadily to move the needle, moving the proportion of directors who are women from 8 percent to 20.1 percent in publicly held Australian corporations.22
Caveat: at first blush, numbers such as sixty-three or fifty-six may seem small, but boards in Australia tend to have five to seven directors, whereas the average U.S. board has about 10.6 members, according to one study. In addition, the Australian base is much smaller: compare the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) 200 to the Fortune 500 (and probably more comparable, the Fortune 1000).
The realization has come to some women that an aspiring woman needs both a mentor and a sponsor, not one or the other. “You can survive a very long time in your career without a mentor but you will not survive without a sponsor,” states Carla Harris, a vice chair of global wealth management at Morgan Stanley.23 The mentor is an experienced person to whom a female executive on the rise can tell the good, the bad, and the ugly. She should feel comfortable sharing with that person the bad and the not-so-good as well as positive achievements and recognition. She can hypothesize goals and objectives and how to get there, as well as mistakes and how to learn from them. “A mentor talks to you, offering advice and sharing experiences. A sponsor talks about you, advocating on your behalf, lending . . . his or her reputation and credibility.”24
By contrast, then, a “sponsor is not the person you tell the good, the bad and the ugly. They’re the person you tell the good, the good and the good.”25 Ms. Harris expands on that sponsorship role and why the difference exists:
[A] sponsor is the person who carries your resume into the room when it comes time for a possible promotion. He or she is the person who will go out on a limb and vouch for you passionately, behind closed doors. They are expending valuable political and social capital on you, and you have to articulate to them [the potential sponsor] why you are worthy of that capital.26
Does the recommendation to have a mentor and a sponsor both seem duplicitous? Not particularly, because the aspiring executive is not telling one thing to one person and the other the opposite. Can the need for and actions of the sponsor morph into a far less desirable “star” system? Yes, in certain instances. The mentee has to evaluate and, if necessary, change course as she goes along.
A few of the better American diversity gurus have finally cut through the volumes of hoopla about mentoring, noting that “what aspiring leaders need most is not simply mentors but sponsors. . . . Women in management are over-mentored and under-sponsored relative to their male counterparts.”27 A respected authority on diversity concludes that women “should not be shy in asking for mentoring and especially for sponsorship.” That expert, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, published Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor: The New Way to Fast-Track Your Career.28
Some mentoring programs do exist in the United States, but by and large confine they themselves to preparing women aspirants for director positions. Only 16 percent of these mentoring programs have been judged to be “well-implemented.”29 In varying degrees, these programs offer a hint toward sponsorship but nothing resembling a firm commitment as in Australia. Catalyst, with offices in New York, Toronto, and Sunnyvale, California, conducts programs for women aspirants from time to time.30 Catalyst also maintains a database of boardroom-ready women (Catalyst Board Resource).31 Boardroom Bound, which operates from Washington, D.C., and Chicago, does something of the same.32 In 2008 the American Bar Association launched its DirectWomen program, which offers a yearly weeklong program of instruction for thirty aspiring women attorneys, in its beginning years held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan.33 WomenCorporateDirectors (WCD), also a New York City–based organization, runs a short course entitled “On Board Bootcamp” for female director aspirants.34 Deloitte & Touche, the international accounting firm, conducts evening sessions, in select cities, on “financial oversight, business strategy, risk, and securities regulation” in its Board Ready Women Initiative.35 The Women’s Forum of New York, an affiliate of the International Women’s Forum, maintains another roster of women deemed to be boardroom ready.36 Again, though, these programs dispense advice on potential pathways toward board seats but stop considerably short of active sponsorship.
It is possible that an AICD-type program could be transferred to the United States, at least for corporate directors. The applicability of a mentoring/sponsorship program to senior managers would be more problematic, for the simple reason that while appointment to a board position is binary (one is either on the board or not), appointment or elevation to a senior management position is subjective, more complex. How does one judge whether a transfer or promotion actually is a step up, or is sufficiently a step up to satisfy a program’s goals? It is not a simple binary proposition.
A second difficulty is similar to the difficulty with pledge programs discussed in chapter 10. The Davies Report in the United Kingdom assigns to the company chair the role of focal point in signing the pledge, in implementing it, and in monitoring progress. In this respect, the AICD mentoring/sponsorship is much the same. Company chairs, who occupy important positions in Australia similar to company chairs in the United Kingdom, play a key role (the key role) in guiding, nurturing, and sponsoring female candidates.
In Australia, for example, and in most other industrialized nations, non-executive chairs predominate.37 But in the United States a different pattern plays out. In approximately 70 percent of U.S. publicly held companies, the same individual holds the offices of both CEO and chairperson of the board.38 U.S. companies tend to have two-fisted, all-powerful CEO-chairpersons and, in many cases, experienced and influential directors who act as “lead directors” in companies that combine the CEO and board chair positions. CEOs tend to be extremely busy individuals. Whether they would agree or have the time to act as mentors and sponsors to women candidates for directors is problematic. Reluctance of CEOs to participate may be a large—but not insurmountable—obstacle to adoption of an AICD-like mentoring program for women in the United States.
Undaunted, in May 2016 Catalyst announced a program combining mentoring with sponsorship that will attempt to enlist CEOs of public companies to act as mentors/sponsors to women who aspire to board seats.39 In fact, indifferent to any obstacles that might exist, Irene Lang, former president and CEO of Catalyst, put the onus squarely on CEOs: “Your CEO should commit to sponsor high-performing female leaders as ‘boardroom ready.’ . . . These are women with whom your CEO has worked or whom he or she assesses as qualified for corporate service.”40
Later in 2016, Ellen Kullman, former CEO of DuPont, spoke on behalf of a newly formed organization that she chairs. Titled Paradigm for Parity, the organization also has adopted the mentoring plus sponsorship model. In its initial foray, the organization signed forty highly placed, “influential” business executives who have indicated a willingness to act as a mentor/sponsor for women managers aspiring to higher ranks.41 Further, Paradigm for Parity also “demands that businesses set measurable targets for women at every level,” a subject developed in chapter 19. Thus, a bit late to the table, and with modest initial forays, some U.S. organizations have perceived the weaknesses in mentoring alone and have followed the Australian path.
An additional problem would arise in attempts to evaluate such programs to increase female advancement not only at the director but also at the senior management level. Who or what positions within corporate hierarchies could or would act as focal points for such a program? How, again, would success be determined, as it no longer is a question of a binary proposition?
So sponsorship combined with mentoring, perhaps in conjunction with a matrix form of organization, should remain on the list of possibilities for adoption by individual companies, groups of companies, or the entire information technology industry.