Sponsorship programs represent a shift within corporate America, a
realization that while mentors have coached and supported women of
color, they haven't necessarily boosted them to the executive ranks.
Unfortunately, sponsors and mentors aren't always in ready supply for
the women who want their help. In instant polling conducted at Working
Mother Media Town Halls across the country, mentoring consistently
rated as a top need. For example, at the Atlanta, Boston, Redmond, WA,
Houston, Chicago and Washington, DC, town halls, attendees rated the
lack of sponsors or mentors as the No. 1 most serious problem related
to race and gender that they face at work. Women were more likely than
men to feel limited by a lack of mentors, according to the town hall
polling. 

While sponsor programs vary from company to company and may be
targeted to all races, experts say they're especially critical to women
of color because they offer a powerful avenue for advancement.
"Sponsorship is the next big frontier. It's essential to the
advancement of minorities," says Vanessa Weaver-Coleman, author of
Smart Women, Smart Moves and founder and CEO of Alignment Strategies, a
Washington, DC-based diversity management and organizational firm.

Mainstay with a twist
To be sure, sponsorships are as old as corporations themselves. More
infamously known as "the old boys' network," they've always been the
informal system by which executive talent was identified and advanced
through a firm. These days, however, this old support system is being
updated and given a makeover in an effort to diversify the boardroom.
Companies that may have once had informal, "almost clandestine
systems," as Weaver-Coleman calls them, are now trying to make these
networks more accessible to women of color.

"Corporations have always focused on creating access to mentoring
relationships that help people with their career development and their
knowledge of the organization," says David A. Thomas, a professor of
business administration at Harvard Business School and a coauthor of Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America.
"But now they are focused on making sure that people get the
opportunity to move into higher-ranking positions. That's where
sponsorships are critical."

Hewlett-Packard has a "development program" with components of
mentoring and sponsoring included. Begun a decade ago for employees of
all races, the one-year program pairs participants with senior
executives. Last year, 14 of 32 sponsorees were women of color. The
program's success can be measured by the fact that most participants
gained promotions, added responsibilities and new assignments,
according to Sid Reel, HP's vice president of diversity and inclusion.
Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble created a sponsor program
some five years ago to advance high-potential candidates of all races.
The program evolved out of a need to promote more women to higher
levels of the company, says Joe Lovato, P&G's associate director of
global diversity. Over the past three years, 19 women, including five
women of color, have been promoted to the executive ranks. That's a 53
percent increase in the number of women promoted to the vice president
and general manager level. The company's strongest results have been in
advancing women to positions where they have direct responsibility for
a unit's all-important bottom-line profits and losses, Lovato says.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has two sponsor programs. A mentoring
partnership program was created six years ago as a way to advise
high-potential women and minorities on how to rise to the firm's top
ranks by expanding their network. And a partner candidate development
program for high-potential employees of all races, launched in 2003,
assigns a senior-level executive to serve as an employee's advocate and
to guide the candidate toward nomination for partner. Not everyone who
enters either program is assured a partnership, but 120 participants
have made partner so far. "You have to take ownership of your own plan
and work closely with someone who can give you sound advice," says
PwC's Kim. "Thomas Moore was right there with me."

Risky business
The difference between mentoring and sponsoring can be a matter of age
or timing. For those early in their career, the quality of the
mentoring matters more than the power the mentor has in the
organization, according to Harvard's David Thomas. However, once
employees reach management level, after, say, the first five to seven
years, their connection to a powerful mentor becomes more critical.
Says Thomas: "The pyramid is narrower, where just being good at what
you do is not sufficient. If you don't have somebody who can speak on
your behalf and has high power, your chances of breaking through are
greatly diminished."

Still, the effectiveness of sponsor programs depends on many
factors, warns Thomas. To make such programs successful, corporations
need to help middle managers find job opportunities that feed the
executive level and assist those employees in forging significant
relationships with top management. In addition, companies need to hold
their senior executives accountable for ensuring that women and
minorities are given opportunities for top jobs. "It's about management
accountability," says Thomas. "It's about whether anyone is being held
accountable for not seeing enough minorities and women in the pool of
job candidates. If you don't have that, no sponsor program will work."

To be sure, official sponsor programs can carry some risks. For an
employee, there's the possibility of a stigma attached to being
promoted through a special program for a select group. And for an
employer, there's the potential for creating false hopes if results
don't meet expectations.
To counter such pitfalls, IBM favors a top-down commitment to diversity
rather than a specific type of program. In fact, the computer products
and services company has moved away from programs that offer direct
sponsorship or that place certain employees on a fast track, out of
concern that such programs can alienate those employees who aren't
selected. Instead of having a formal sponsor program, IBM invites its
300 top executives to identify "next genners"—the next generation of
leaders—and to offer guidance. Maria Ferris, director of global
workforce diversity programs at IBM and a mom of two kids, 13 and 11,
believes that such approaches can help employees gain visibility.
"Anytime you can expand the network of people who know your skills and
your desires, it puts you in a better position to be considered for a
job," she says. "You can't rely on keeping your nose to the grindstone
and hoping that people will notice you."

In succession planning meetings, IBM executives are told to go back
and diversify if the slate of candidates for a particular position
isn't diverse enough, says Karen Fukuma, vice president of production
solutions for the printing systems division and a mother of an
11-year-old. The result: 65 percent of IBM's female execs are working
moms; in 2005, nearly a quarter of the total IBM workforce in the
United States was minority. "You don't get results if there isn't a
commitment by the executive team to make fundamental changes," Fukuma
says.

IBM's commitment to advancing its multicultural employees can be
seen in its 160 diversity initiatives. Among them is a new study
conducted by Working Mother Media and spearheaded by Meow Yee, program
executive for Asian initiatives, and Margaret Ashida, director of
university talent programs, that examines Asian leadership globally.

But when it comes to mentoring, "there's no silver bullet," Ferris
says. "Some of our constituencies have formal mentoring programs within
their task forces. Others are less structured." In Europe, IBM is
experimenting with cascading, a domino effect of mentoring. "They
assigned each of their senior women a mentor, and then asked the senior
women to mentor someone else, and asked those women to mentor others,"
Ferris explains.

Sponsors at Accenture, the management and technology consultancy, are
required to evaluate their own performance in many areas, including
sponsorship. Every year, partners put together personal objectives,
such as their commitment to their business operation or how they will
generate sales and revenues, while also advancing diversity and
inclusion. By year's end, when sponsors are reviewed, they refer back
to their personal objectives.

"You're given a rating at the end of the year based on performance
of your personal objectives," says Kedrick Adkins, Accenture's chief
diversity officer. "Your individual rating in some ways is contingent
on the success of helping your sponsoree grow professionally." Over the
past year, since the sponsor program was rolled out, Accenture has seen
a 20 percent increase in the number of minorities up for promotion at
the senior executive level, Adkins says.

Mentoring up
Even without a formal sponsor program, you may already have a sponsor
working on your behalf. In four Fortune 50 companies surveyed by
Alignment Strategies, most managers did have a sponsor, even though
more than 70 percent of middle managers and first-level executives
indicated they didn't think they did. "Sponsorship happens at every
company, but not everyone is open or formal about the process," says
Alignment's Weaver-Coleman. "It's almost impossible to get promoted to
executive levels without a sponsor. It's unheard of for multicultural
executives. The higher you go in an organization, the more your sponsor
network expands. More people have a vote on the position you get."

Linda Clement-Holmes knows she's had sponsors during her 23-year
career at Procter & Gamble, but she hasn't always known who they
were. Today, as general manager of infra-structure service and
governance, the 44-year-old African-American mother of two is a sponsor
(and mentor) to several people at once. But the relationships aren't a
one-way street, she says. Instead, she gets back as much as she gives.
In fact, she finds that these relationships have the potential to take
on different shapes and can become reciprocal over time. You can be a
mentor, mentee, boss or subordinate at different times in your career,
Clement-Holmes says.

Career counselors call this "mentoring up." Prot