Engage Mentors, Attract Sponsors, and Spend Time with Amazing People through the magic of books
April 16, 2021
By Matt Miner, MBA, CFP®
Executive Summary
In the Mary Beck White-Sutton interview we identified tools to identify work you love. In the follow-on episode about informational interviewing I gave you the best technique to build relationships that will be supportive of your career or business growth. Now we’re gonna unpack the steps to take once you’re part of an organization you love – one where you want to stay awhile and grow in your career – maybe grow a lot.
This episode connects knowledge and skill, mentorship, and sponsorship in a model for career and business success. We also discuss the inexhaustible fount of ideas and knowledge from books where we can access people with whom we may never share coffee, lunch, or a beer.
Translating Good Ideas into Action in a Hurry
The first part of today’s show is all about people – mentors and sponsors. And at the end of the episode I talk a little about the books I’ve been reading. People and books bring you into contact with ideas you might want to put to work, but you need a plan for when that happens so these gems don’t just dribble through your fingers.
Three Step Plan to Translate Ideas into Action
When you read something that appeals to you and you think can move the needle in your life, do three things:
Write it down somewhere you can find it again – in a journal, or by dog-earing the highlighted page of a book, by sending yourself an email you can reference, or entering in to Evernote. However you want to do it, capture the idea.
Spend a little time right then – maybe 5 minutes, maybe 30 minutes – and identify a specific area you’d like to apply the new idea.
Take the first step - even a tiny step! - to put your idea to work right away, and schedule the second step to run further with you idea on your calendar.
Example - I’m Implementing the Whole 30 Eating Plan
Here’s a recent case in my own life. In the Brian Larsen interview, he mentioned the Whole 30. I’d been casting about for a way to do something better with my eating and drinking. That was step one, an idea for action.
I wrote down why, and what I was considering. I added about 45 minutes of internet reading to my journal writing and I decided to complete the Whole 30 plan. That was step two.
As soon as I made that decision I did three things right then. I ordered the book, It Starts with Food by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig. I looked in the fridge to create a meal plan for that day and the following day for breakfast and lunch. And I told my wife that I was giving this a try. I expected the book to provide information, motivation, and inspiration. The meal plan made it seem real, and by telling Charity, and now you, I’ve increased my commitment to carry this forward.
For my follow-on step, I took out my calendar and planned a Costco run for the next day to get our food stocks up to speed with what I needed for my new plan. As I record this, I’m closing in on the end of day 6 and things are going great. I’ll share more at a future time, at least the fact that I managed to complete the my Whole 30. If there’s more to say about my experience that I believe would be helpful for you, I’ll pass that along too. For now, I just want to illustrate the process of beginning to translate an idea into real change. First, notice good ideas for action. Second, have a plan to write them down and reflect on them. Third, take the first step, even if it’s small, RIGHT NOW and create a next action that propels you forward.
Comparing and Contrasting Mentors and Sponsors
If you’re in the business world you already know about mentors. Your company may even have a mentorship program on offer. But for those with big goals for their careers, mentorship relationships alone won’t get it done. If your interest is the C-Suite, you’re gonna need the juice only sponsorship provides.
When it comes to mid-career and later promotions, sponsorship holds the key. Have you ever observed a member of an organization and wondered how they got so far so fast? If you’re part of a well-run organization, it’s almost certain this rockstar’s skills, work ethic, and work quality are excellent. Still you wonder, how did they cover so much distance so quickly? The answer is probably that they have a sponsor – a powerful member of the organization who is advocating for their career.
What is a Mentor?
Mentors are guides. You can bounce ideas off them with minimal political risk. They offer encouragement and insight from their experience. Mentors are a safe place to test your thoughts and conversations with mentors can serve as a pressure release valve when stress is high. Mentors can help you craft a vision for your career and offer suggestions for growing your network. Mentors will tell you the unwritten rules of the road which can help you avoid looking silly. Sponsors are senior-level folks with power and influence they are willing to put to work for you. A mentor can help you think through good opportunities for your career.
What is a Sponsor?
A sponsor can give you those opportunities by championing you – for exposure, experience, and higher compensation. Sponsors take reputational risk by attaching their name to your success in the work you do. Sponsors are attracted by hard work, loyalty, and your ability to deliver when it counts. Sponsors drive their protégé’s career vision. They model successful behavior within the organization, and make sure those they sponsor get the right experiences to advance in the company.
Got to Get me Some of That!
So how do you get a mentor or sponsor? This question highlights a key difference in the two roles. While you can ask someone to be your mentor, your results must attract a sponsor. The only way to get a sponsor is to deliver the right results, day in, and day out and get noticed by a senior manager who believes in you and who believes your work can benefit their own goals, too. A sponsor sees something in you they actively want to support.
When it comes to finding a mentor, consider who has experience and wisdom you’d like to learn from and who you click with personally. Remember that mentors are people just like you, and treat them accordingly. Then, without being obnoxious, work to get on their calendars, bring thoughtful agendas, take action items away from these meetings, implement the actions in your work, and discuss the results with your mentor and lather, rinse, repeat.
The Dark Side of Sponsorship
Sponsorship is a quid-pro-quo relationship. If a sponsor recommends you for a job and you’ve accepted, at minimum you need to deliver really great performance sooner than later. Which might be really hard or unpleasant, depending on the situation. If a sponsor indicates that your next opportunity requires a move, extensive travel, or very long hours, you’re not in a position to say No. Instead, this is one more time to prove your loyalty and go get results. When a promising young manager is shunted off to a backwater - equities in Dallas! - or departing the firm on short notice, it may be that their sponsor said jump they weren’t ready with the only appropriate response.
Finally, employees and sponsors may be loyal to each other for the wrong reasons, allowing undesirable behaviors to persist within a small piece of the whole organization that would not be tolerated in the wider company. I saw this in one of my public company jobs. I worked alongside a manager who was a difficult and angry man – way out of bounds for this organization – but he took good care of his protégés and delivered for his sponsors. They put up with his temper and in some ways enabled it. He made it to director level and was running a large product group when he blew up at the wrong person. HR got involved and he went from managing a sizable business to retired in the course of a single day. Ouch.
Bringing it All Together - The Relationship of Knowledge and Skill, Mentors, and Sponsors
Here’s my model to bring this all together. The employee shows up with ideas, knowledge, and intellectual horsepower, along with hard and soft skills. Mentor relationships can be a huge help in applying the employee’s raw materials of knowledge and skill within an organization. This mixture yields excellent business results – a new product gets to market, a sales campaign yields huge revenues, or an analysis shows a big cost-savings. These outcomes attract a sponsor who becomes personally invested in advancing their protégé’s career. Hard work makes the wheel turn over, and politics and luck grease the axle bearings.
[Late] Summer Reading - Lovingly Curated Book List
These books bolster the human capital part of what today’s equation – at least by providing enjoyment that’s a big step above anything you can find on Netflix!
I’ve been reading a ton lately – mostly on Audible, but paper books too. I want to share these titles with you, because I’ve been loving all of them. They all came to me as recommendations from one trusted source or another. It’s fair to say they fit my interests like a glove. As an aside, If you really want to get to know someone, check out their bookshelves. It’s a more honest look than their social profiles!
Fiction
If it Bleeds, by Stephen King is a four-story collection. Though I gravitate to King’s 1980’s books – especially The Stand, The Dead Zone, The Shining, and Misery – if it bleeds is a solid entry into the King cagalog. The writing is tight and King always makes the characters come to life. Holly Gibney of the Mr Mercedes trilogy steals the show, but Drew Larsen and the rat are pretty memorable too.
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry – I was familiar with the name but had never read this book. The story is as breathtaking as the landscape. And I got to know the characters especially in the dialogue. McMurtry’s writing is terrific – Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986.
Augustus McCrae the most verbose of these colorful characters, is speaking to his self-righteous partner, Wilbur Call. McRae says, “I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day--that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.”
Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology
The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt – Haidt identifies his field as moral psychology, but this book is almost a complete philosophy of human relationships and morality. Haidt is an honest secularist and doesn’t worship at the alter of scientism. While Haidt and I disagree on our most basic presuppositions, his observations of human morality in action are stunning. And frequently laugh-out-loud funny. He says of his efforts, “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.”
Post-Christian: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, by Gene Edward Veith Jr – if you’re interested in a careful study of the place of Christianity in the world in 2020, this book is a great place to start, especially for Christians who wonder whether their religion can bear up under the weight of post-post modernism.
Non-Fiction
Ten Years to Midnight: Four Urgent Global Crises and Their Strategic Solutions by Blair Sheppard – Blair Sheppard was the dean of Fuqua while I was there, so when this book came out I was interested to read it, because I knew the author. Blair identifies four looming global crises – asymmetric wealth distribution, technological disruption to workers, the breakdown of trust in governing institutions, and the polarization of people – that he believes need solutions in the next ten years. The book ends with a strategic framework for addressing these challenges, but connecting the strategy to action is discussed mostly on a very local scale. Blair will be on the show to talk about his book later this fall.
It Starts with Food, by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig
Promised Land – How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America, 1929 – 1968, by David Stebenne. I am super intrigued by how this period, which lasted only 39 years in this telling, became normative for the expectations of big swaths of the country for the fifty-plus years since! What I’m really thinking about is what can take the place of this retrospective view of America from 2020 on in to the future.
Transcript
[music]
[00:00:02] Matt: In the Mary Beck White-Sutton interview, we identified tools to track down work you love. In the follow-on episode about informational interviewing, I gave you the best technique to build relationships that will be supportive of your career or business growth. Now we're going to unpack the steps to take once you're part of an organization you love. One where you want to stay a while and grow in your career, maybe grow a lot.
Hey, and welcome to the Work Pants Finance podcast. I'm Matt Miner, your money guide. Work Pants Finance is the show for MBAs, entrepreneurs, and other professionals who want their financial plan to work as hard as they do.
Last week's episode featured three themes, being present in the moment, the certainty of heartache and loss before we shuffle off this mortal coil, and the importance of mentors for career and business success.
Today's episode unpacks that third theme of mentorship, connecting knowledge and skill, mentorship and sponsorship and a model for career and business success. After the discussion of mentorship and sponsorship, I pivot to the inexhaustible fount of ideas and knowledge and books that give us access to people with whom we may never share coffee, lunch, or a beer. Are you ready to slurp the elixir of career and business success?
Here's your Money Guide Quick Tip. The first part of today's show is all about people, mentors, and sponsors. At the end of the episode, I'm going to talk a little bit about books, which I love. People and books bring you into contact with ideas you might want to put to work. When that happens, I've got a three-step process so these gems don't just dribble through your fingers when you run into worthwhile ideas on the page or in a conversation. When you read something that appeals to you, and you think can move the needle in your life, do three things.
First, write it down somewhere where you can find it again, in a journal or by dog earing the highlighted page or sending yourself an email you can reference, or entering it into Evernote, whatever floats your boat, capture the idea.
Then take a little time, maybe five minutes, maybe 30 minutes, and identify a specific area you'd like to apply the new idea. Finally, try to take the first step to put your idea to work right away and schedule the second step to run further with your idea onto your calendar.
Here's a recent case in my own life. In the Brian Larson interview, he mentioned the "Whole 30." I've been casting about for a way to do something better with my eating and drinking. I wrote down why and what I was considering. I added about 45 minutes of internet reading to my journal writing, and I decided to complete the Whole 30 plan. That was step one.
As soon as I made that decision, I did three things immediately for step two. I ordered the book It Starts with Food by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig, I looked in the fridge to create a meal plan for that day and the following day for breakfast and lunch. I told my wife that I was going to give the Whole 30 a try. I expected the book to provide information, motivation, and inspiration. The meal plan made it seem real. By telling Charity, and now you, I've increased my commitment to carry this plan forward.
For the third step in this process, I took out my calendar and planned a Costco run for the next day in the afternoon to get our food stocks up to speed with what I needed for my new plan. As I record this, I'm closing in on the end of day six and things are going great. I'll share more at some future time, at least the fact that I managed to complete my Whole 30. If there's more to say about my experience that I think would be helpful for you, I'll pass that along too.
For now, I just want to illustrate the process of beginning to translate an idea into real change. First, capture the idea and reflect on it. Second, take the first step, even if it's small, right now. Third, create a follow-up action that propels you forward, and be sure to stick around to the end of today's episode. I've got a report on what I've been reading and why. I've been consuming tractor-trailer loads of philosophy, theology, psychology, a pinch of history and some excellent fiction. You'll have to judge for yourself whether my literary diet is influencing my podcasting.
Today's episode is Engage Mentors, Attract Sponsors, and Spend Time with Amazing People and Ideas through the Magic of Books. You can read more at workpantsfinance.com/18.
[music]
If you're in the business world, you already know about mentors. Your company may even have a mentorship program on offer. If you've got big goals for your career, mentorship relationships may not be enough. Less is said about sponsorship, but when it comes to mid-career and later promotions, sponsorship holds the key.
Have you ever observed a member of an organization and wondered how they got so far, so fast? If you're part of a well-run organization, it's almost certain that this rockstar's skills, work ethic and work quality are excellent. Still, you wonder how did they cover so much distance so quickly?
The answer is probably that they have a sponsor, a powerful member of the organization who is actively advocating for their career.
Mentors are guides, you can bounce ideas off them with minimal political risk. They often offer encouragement and insight, especially from their experience. Mentors are a safe place to test your thoughts and conversations with mentors can serve as a pressure release valve when stress is high at work. Mentors can help you craft a vision for your career, and offer suggestions for growing your network. Mentors will tell you the unwritten rules of the road, which can help you avoid looking silly in the office.
Sponsors on the other hand, are senior-level folks with power and influence that they are willing to put to work for you. A mentor can help you think through good opportunities for your career. A sponsor can give you those opportunities by championing you for exposure, experience and higher compensation. Sponsors take reputational risk when they attach their name to yours and it's tied to the success of the work that you do.
Sponsors are attracted by hard work, loyalty, and your ability to deliver when it counts. Sponsors drive their protegees' career vision, they model successful behavior within the organization and make sure that those they sponsor get the right experiences to advance in the company.
Now that we've talked about what mentors and sponsors are, how do you get a mentor or a sponsor? This question itself highlights a key difference in the two roles. While you can ask somebody to be your mentor, your results will have to attract a sponsor. The only way to get a sponsor is to deliver the right results day in and day out and get noticed by a senior manager who believes in you and believes your work can benefit their own goals too. A sponsor sees something in you that they actively want to support.
When it comes to finding a mentor, you can consider who has experience and wisdom that you'd like to learn from, and who you click with personally. Remember that mentors are people just like you and treat them like people. Then, without being obnoxious work to get on their calendars, bring thoughtful agendas to your meetings, take action items away from those meetings and implement those actions in your work and discuss the results of those actions with your mentor at a later meeting. And lather, rinse and repeat.
Now before I wrap up this segment of the show on mentors and sponsors, I want to note the dark side of sponsorship. Even if you're lucky enough to have an excellent sponsor, sponsorship by its nature is a quid pro quo relationship. If a sponsor recommends you for a job and you've accepted, at minimum you need to deliver really great performance in that job sooner than later. This might be really hard or unpleasant, depending on the situation, but you just got to suck it up and do it because your relationship with your sponsor dictates that that's what you're going to do.
Now, if a sponsor says that your next opportunity requires a move, maybe extensive travel, maybe very long hours, you're not in any position to say no. Instead, this is one more time to prove your loyalty and go get results. As an aside, when you see a promising young manager shunted off into a backwater position or departing the company on short notice, it may be because when their sponsor said jump, they were not ready with the only appropriate response.
Finally, employees and sponsors may be loyal to each other for the wrong reasons, allowing undesirable behaviors to persist within a small piece of the whole organization that wouldn't be tolerated if they saw the light of day. I saw this in one of my public company jobs. I worked alongside a manager who was a difficult and angry man. He was way out of bounds for this organization but he took good care of his protegees and he delivered results for his sponsors. They put up with his temper, and in some ways I would say they enabled it. He made it all the way to director level and was running a good-sized product group when he blew up at the wrong person. HR got involved and he went from running a good-sized business to retired in the course of a single day.
Here's my model to bring all this together. The employee shows up with ideas, knowledge, and intellectual horsepower, along with both hard and soft skills. Mentor relationships can be a huge help in applying the employees' raw materials of knowledge and skill within an organization. This mixture yields excellent business results. A new product gets to market, a sales campaign yields huge revenues or analysis shows a big cost saving. These outcomes attract a sponsor, who becomes personally invested in advancing their protegee's career. Hard work makes the wheel turnover and politics and luck grease the axle bearings.
[music]
Today's show is brought to you by the Steve Stuart, my amazing editor. If you plan to create your own podcast and want help with the editing part go to workpantsfinance.com/steve. There’s a link there to Steve’s four minute video on finding your very own podcast editor.
In the front half of the show, I shared a model of human capital, mentor and sponsor relationships. The books I'm about to talk about aim to bolster the human capital part of that equation, at least by providing enjoyment. That's a big step above anything you can find on Netflix.
Now like I said earlier, I've been reading a ton lately, mostly on Audible but paper books too. I want to share these titles with you because I've been loving all of them. They all came to me as recommendations from one source or another, so this is a lovingly curated booklist for y'all.
First, the fun stuff, fiction. If It Bleeds, by Stephen King is a four-story collection. Though I gravitate to King’s 1980s books, especially The Stand, The Dead Zone, The Shining, and Misery, If It Bleeds is a solid entry into the King catalog. The writing is tight and King always makes the characters come to life. Holly Gibney of the Mr. Mercedes Trilogy steals the show but Drew Larson and the rat are pretty memorable too.
Lonesome Dove is a great sweeping 950-page book by Larry McMurtry. I was familiar with the name, but I had never read it. The story is as breathtaking as the landscape that McMurtry describes. I got to know the characters, especially through the dialogue. McMurtry's writing is terrific. Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986. Augustus McCrae, the most verbose of these colorful characters is speaking to his self-righteous ranching partner Woodrow Call and tells him, "I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. You can't avoid it. You've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life, it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day. That way they ain't usually too much worse than a dry shave."
Next, I'd like to talk to you about the philosophy, theology, and psychology books that have been rocking my world a little bit this summer. First of all, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. He identifies his field as moral psychology, but his book is almost a complete philosophy of human relationships and morality. I call Haidt an honest secularist. He doesn't worship at the altar of scientism. While Haidt and I disagree on our most basic presuppositions, his observations about human morality and action are stunning and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. He says of his efforts. "I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them not to hate them, but to understand them." In The Righteous Mind, he takes us a few steps forward in understanding the people that we spend time with.
The next book is Post-Christian by Jean Edward V. Jr. If you're interested in a careful study of the place of Christianity in the world in 2020, this book is a great place to start, especially for Christians who wonder whether their religion can bear up under the weight of post-postmodernism.
Another one in this category is Seeing Jesus From The East by Ravi Zacharias and Abdul Murray. I'd call this one a biblical theology of Eastern culture in the Gospels. It's also a defense of the idea that biblical Christianity is not a Western white man's religion. Finally, Saving Truth, also by Abdul Murray. In this book, Abdul argues compellingly for propositional truth, specifically truth about God and His creation, and he draws extensively on arguments from agnostic and atheist authors to make his points. I've got just a few more. Thanks for hanging in there with me.
This is the nonfiction that I've been reading this summer. This book is called 10 years To Midnight by Blair Shepperd. Blair Shepperd was the Dean of Foucault while I was there. When this book came out, I wanted to read it, since I felt like I knew the author. Blair identifies four looming global crises-- Asymmetric wealth distribution, technological disruption to workers, the breakdown of trust in governing institutions and the polarization of people, that he believes need urgent solutions in the next 10 years.
This book ends with a strategic framework for addressing these challenges, but connecting the strategy to action is discussed mostly on a very local scale. I'm excited to share the Blair and I are recording an interview about his book on September 23rd, and I look forward to sharing that interview with you sometime before Thanksgiving.
Earlier I referenced It Starts with Food by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig, and I look forward to talking to you more about that at a future time. Then finally, for a pinch of history and analysis, I'm reading Promised Land: How the Rise of the Middle-Class Transformed America, 1929-1968 by David Stebenne. He's a prof at the Ohio State University. I am super intrigued by how this 39-year period of time became normative for the expectations of big swaths of the country for the 50 plus years since and what I'm really thinking about is what can take the place of this retrospective view of America, from 2020 on into the future.
Wow, we have covered a lot of ground today. When it comes to mentors and sponsors, the individual brings skills and ideas, mentors land wisdom and insight, sponsors let it all hang out in support of your career. You can ask people to be your mentors, but sponsors are drawn to results like honey draws flies. I shared a monster book list with y'all and I'd always love to know what you think about any of this. Please be in touch, in any way that suits you. Thank you so much for listening to the show.
[music]
[00:15:24] Ms. Miner: Matt Miner is a fee-only, fiduciary financial advisor and Founder & CEO of Miner Wealth Management, a North Carolina Registered Investment Advisor where Matt provides personalized, unconflicted, advice to clients for a fee. He’s also my dad, so please be nice when you talk to him! Matt is a Certified Financial Planner Professional and holds a Series 65 securities license. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Finance from Arizona State University, and his MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Work Pants Finance is Matt's financial media business where he talks about work, entrepreneurship, kids and money, taxes, investing, and other personal finance topics. WorkPantsFinance.com exists to share wisdom and provide general financial information. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice. You are an individual and probably need personal advice for your specific situation. You should consider building relationships with helpful, caring, and competent professionals who understand your unique context and can provide advice that is tailored to your needs.
[00:16:14] [END OF AUDIO]