Don’t Just Sponsor Women and People of Color — Defend Them

Marissa Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo, was a prominent female leader in the technology industry. She began her career as Google’s 21st employee, and her career rose in tandem with Google’s ascent. She was known for her user-focused approach to products, which was a key part of her success while leading Google Search and UX as a vice president in 2006.

Yet, when she left to lead Yahoo as its CEO in 2012, her star had already begun to fall, stemming in part from two main criticisms: her lack of interest in operations and finance, and her unemotional leadership style. “She doesn’t seem to have a lot of human emotion,” said one former colleague.

Having an “overly” analytical and unemotional leadership style is a complaint many female leaders and leaders from marginalized racial groups have levied at them. Others are criticized for being “too emotional.” In general, these leaders often suffer from the Goldilocks dilemma: They’re either being too much of one thing or not enough of that same thing. They’re too bossy or not assertive enough. They’re too emotional or too cold. They’re micromanagers or they don’t take enough interest in their employees.

This tightrope that these leaders, particularly those from marginalized racial groups, must traverse — also known as the double-bind — manifests in ways that can inhibit their career advancement. For example, because female leaders have a more limited range of behaviors that are deemed to be acceptable (for example, they must be warm and competent), they receive significantly more commentary on their interpersonal skills in their performance evaluations than do men. Evaluators might acknowledge that a woman performs at a high level, but still rate her as lacking leadership potential. Combining gender with race or ethnicity complicates the picture further. For example, Black women are not penalized to the same degree as white women for behaving dominantly, and East Asian American women are disliked more than white American women when they behave assertively. Finally, women and racial minorities are more likely to raise concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion, but are also rated lower in leadership quality for doing so than are men and white individuals.

Regardless of the precise underlying reason, the outcome is clear: Women and racial minority employees are more likely to be criticized for their interpersonal leadership.

When such criticisms are levied, it’s critical for female leaders and leaders of color to have people willing to sponsor them by defending them to others. Defending comes with a certain amount of risk, and it’s the responsibility of the most powerful sponsors — typically white men — to take on that risk.

What Defending Looks Like

Sponsors work to confirm, create, or change a person’s or audience’s perception of and behavior toward a protégé. Sometimes that external party already has a positive view of the protégé, and a sponsor simply provides further confirmation of that impression. In other cases, the sponsor can create a positive view of the protégé by introducing them to the external party, using the protégé’s association with the sponsor to seed the relationship.

Anyone, regardless of how much power they hold, can sponsor others by confirming a positive impression or creating one by introducing them to an external party. But changing other people’s opinions of a protégé by defending them from criticism is something that is best done by sponsors in positions of power.

For example, Tina,* a country-level managing director for a global biopharmaceuticals company, knows the importance of having highly placed sponsors who can not only create and confirm positive impressions, but also counter potential criticism. Before taking on leadership roles in biopharma, Tina worked at a global consulting firm, where she had a highly regarded sponsor who not only confirmed her abilities and created relationships that allowed her to advance, but also defended her when hurdles arose. His support was especially critical when her performance faltered during a transition between offices and supervisors. Because of their close relationship, he was able to gather information about the context and “paint a picture for the review committee of what [she] brought in terms of value” by telling a “multi-faceted story about the context and [her] perspective.”

Tina’s abilities needed to be put into context again when a senior leader of a biopharmaceutical company sought to hire her into a leadership role. In the new position, Tina would not only be moving from consulting to biopharmaceuticals, but also from a client-facing role to one more focused on managing large internal teams. Insiders at the hiring firm pushed back on her potential appointment, questioning whether she had the leadership abilities necessary to succeed in her new role. Tina’s sponsor countered by providing additional information about her prior success in leading large teams in an informal capacity. Once hired, her high performance led her to quickly rise to even higher levels in the organization.

Who Should Be Defending

Defending protégés is risky business, no matter how much power we have. This is because when we defend our protégés, we’re functionally telling other people that we disagree with them, that they’re wrong, and that they should change their minds. Most people don’t like to be told any of those things. That makes it so that when sponsors defend their protégés, they run the risk of alienating their peers and damaging valuable relationships. This potential risk may be particularly high for sponsors who are themselves members of marginalized groups.

For example, in a 2019 episode of HBR’s Women at Work podcast, lawyer Cristina Massa speaks about her sponsorship of her protégé, Julia Gonzalez. Massa, the sole female partner in a 20-partner law firm, describes how her advocacy for hiring Gonzalez has made their careers intertwined. Massa says, “Since I introduced her to the law firm, Julia’s mistakes are also my mistakes. If she doesn’t make it here, it’s on me as well…I knew that people were watching…[because] women can be riskier hires than men, just because of the way things work.”

Many companies have embraced the strategy of “trickle-down” diversity, or the belief that greater diversity of representation in leadership will result in greater diversity at lower levels. There’s some evidence that increasing female and minority representation in top leadership positions will indeed increase female and minority representation throughout a company. For example, the greater the gender diversity of a board of directors, the more likely a female CEO will be appointed and the longer her tenure will be. Other research finds that having a female CEO is associated with increased representation of women in leadership.

One of the expectations of “trickle-down” diversity is that when women and racial minorities are in leadership roles, they will be more likely to advocate for policies and structures that enhance equity throughout the organization. They’re also likely to be expected to sponsor junior women and employees of color. But this expectation can fuel further inequity. When we expect — implicitly or otherwise — sponsorship relationships to be same-gender or same-race, we functionally ask female and minority sponsors to advocate for protégés who are more likely to encounter bias and are therefore more likely to need defending. In doing so, we’re asking those same sponsors to take on reputational risk by putting themselves in situations where they’re more likely to be penalized by peers for raising concerns about potential bias.

If defending puts sponsors’ relationships at risk, if female and racial minority protégés are more likely to need defending, and if sponsorship relationships are expected to be same-gender or same-race, then the potential cost of furthering DEI goals in organizations becomes an inequitable burden shouldered mostly by women and members of marginalized groups. It also means that the most powerful sponsors (usually white men) see themselves as being off the hook for building strong relationships with women and members of marginalized groups.

. . .

Anyone can be a sponsor. But not all sponsors can engage in the same forms of sponsorship. The riskiest form — defending — is precisely the form of sponsorship that female and minority protégés are more likely to need. When we combine this with our expectations that female and minority leaders are more responsible for sponsoring diverse talent, we run into a system that threatens to recreate the very inequities we’re seeking to address through DEI efforts. What this means, then, is that the “risk” of sponsorship is greater for some of us than others. The onus should be on those in positions of power who are not women and members of marginalized groups to speak up and change minds.

*Name changed for privacy.

Copyright 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

Explore AAPL Membership benefits.