We Can’t Sponsor Everyone, But Anyone Can Become a Micro-Sponsor

Monday, November 6, 2023   (0 Comments)

Posted by: Sacha de Klerk

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“There are not enough good sponsors to go around.”

We have all heard this, and it’s a very real challenge. While sponsors are crucial for fostering a supportive and collaborative environment at any law firm, the act of sponsorship requires a considerable amount of time and resources to be effective. For this reason, it’s usually impossible to sponsor more than a few protégés at once.  

What’s more, research substantiates that women and people belonging to underrepresented and underserved communities are less likely to be the beneficiaries of the kind of organic sponsorship that happens amongst men – and, in particular, white men.

As part of diversity and talent management programs, we try to close this gap by appointing matched sponsors. We work to make sponsors accountable for their protégé’s progression to help these relationships take root and substitute the kind of mutual trust and personal investment required to be truly effective.

Sponsorship, in its purest form, is intensive.

Sponsors bring their protégés along with them to support their upward trajectory. Their mutual success is intertwined as they advocate for their protégé, connect them with others, and give them opportunities. The more influential and impactful their protégé becomes, the greater the benefit to the sponsor’s practice. It is rare to find a successful partner without at least a protégé or three working with them.

Law firms are built on relationships. While we can’t control how organic relationships form, we can try to close the gap for women and underrepresented and underserved communities. But how do we get these groups access to sponsorship when sponsors who are both well positioned and inclusive are few and far between?

How can we create authentic organic relationships that result in sponsors being truly invested in their protégés, even when they aren’t typically moving in the same circles? How can we bridge the gap with people who are not yet at a career stage where they want to commit to the demands of a full sponsor dynamic?

The answer is that tre

es don’t become 10 feet tall overnight. We must sow seeds. One way to do this is through creating a culture of micro-sponsorship and normalizing these behaviors for partners.

What Is Micro-Sponsorship?

The Clayman Institute for gender research defines micro-sponsorship as focused advice and advocacy in the moment. Micro-sponsorship is not a substitute for full-blown sponsorship and mentoring. Still, these small actions create cultural micro-shifts, mitigate some of the impact of micro-aggressions, affirm competency, amplify quieter voices, build confidence, and open doors to new opportunities and networks.

Micro-sponsorship can be compared to micro-investing, a type of investment strategy that allows individuals to invest small amounts of money regularly over time. Some of the most significant advantages of micro-investing is that it’s accessible to everyone and allows you to increase the range, variety, and volume of investments you make, which leads to increased potential impact.

It is the same with micro-sponsorships, which allow everyone to use their influence and relationship capital to benefit a broader range of people. And it could also lead to the kind of relationships and mutual trust that result in more traditional sponsorship.

Examples of impactful micro-sponsorship behaviors include:

• Making positive introductions. Take care when introducing a colleague to someone and consider how you can set them up with a positive first impression. Consider sharing their area of expertise, a recent success, or even an area of interest they have. Positive introductions can be very influential in creating new relationships that result in securing work opportunities. For example, “I would like to introduce you to Mira, she is quickly becoming my go to for employment law issues.” Or “I would like to introduce you to Arjun. He has been involved in some high profile work recently and I think it would be useful for the two of you to connect.”

  
  

• Creating space to speak. There are many reasons an individual might struggle to create space to contribute to a discussion including hierarchy and bigger voices. Consider how you could offer them space to contribute their ideas, feedback, and perspective. Inviting them into the conversation shows you respect and value their contribution and expertise.

  
  

• Being an advocate when they are not in the room. Advocating for opportunities is an act of traditional sponsorship, but it could also be done on a micro level by ensuring someone is being considered for an opportunity or by challenging an assumption others have made about the individual. Women and racialized individuals are more likely to be on the receiving end of personality criticism, judged more harshly for their mistakes – and to have their mistakes remembered for longer. Having someone advocate for them to be fairly considered when they are not in the room could grant access to work opportunities and new relationships that lead to work opportunities.

  
  

Creating a Culture of Micro-Sponsorship

To increase the practice of micro-sponsorship as part of your law firm’s culture, start by identifying processes where you are not seeing equitable outcomes and then build micro-sponsorship behaviors into the existing processes.

For example, you might notice that at the end of your student recruitment process that the distribution of candidates from top to bottom is not equitable. Through no intentional agenda, women and racialized individuals are at the bottom of the list.

There could be several layers of contributing factors, but one such factor is often as simple as the women or racialized students did not have someone championing their candidacy at the end of the process, despite receiving excellent feedback during the process.

Embedding an act of micro-sponsorship could involve creating awareness of this factor and its role in the process outcomes and then asking the committee members to ensure each candidate has a champion who will advocate for their candidacy.

Integrate behaviors like positive introductions into your training programs for lawyers. If you are training on teamwork, consider how you can promote collaboration where colleagues intentionally invite each other into conversation. Does your evaluation process account for giving feedback where these behaviors could be recognized and rewarded?

Consider how you can help partners identify behaviors like personality criticism, so they are able to call it out when they see it.

Acts of micro-sponsorship help to create a supportive culture where everyone feels valued and recognized. It also promotes career advancement and reduces some of the emotional tax that comes with micro-inequities, unconscious bias, and out-grouping.

Micro-sponsorship costs nothing and connects our humanity to corporate values in a way that builds strong relationships between colleagues and workplace experiences for everyone.

Inclusive workplaces and great places to work are underpinned by caring about our colleagues and their workplace experiences.

Sacha de Klerk is head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Norton Rose Fulbright in Canada and a member of the Association of Law Firm Diversity Professionals (ALFDP). She is a strategic and creative leader with over 20 years of experience in human resources, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and learning and talent management in both financial and professional services. In her current role, Sacha leads strategic and tactical program development for diversity, equity, and inclusion across her firm in Canada, as well as its global projects and initiatives. She is also co-founder of the Inclusion Simplified Blog.