Webinar Date: January 8, 2025 – 01:00 PM ET
Chief Operating Officer at Fair360
Chief Diversity Officer at The Hershey Company
Partner, Tax at KPMG
Fair360’s January 8 webinar, titled “The Secrets of Successful Mentoring & Sponsorship Programs,” featured leaders from The Hershey Company (No. 1 on the 2024 Top 50 list) and KPMG (No. 5 on the 2024 Top 50 list). Shane Nelson, Chief Operating Officer at Fair360, facilitated the discussion.
Nelson started the discussion by highlighting the main differences between mentorship and sponsorship.
Mentorship:
- Centers on building skills
- Provides guidance through career challenges
- Offers advice, helps mentee navigate their career
- The mentor “talks with you”
Sponsorship:
- Involves a senior leader active advocating for the career advancement of a junior employee
- Career opportunities (visibility, promotions) for sponsee using the sponsor’s network and influence
- The sponsor “talks about the employee” to others for advancement
What the Data Shows
Data from Fair360 shows that leading companies make mentorship a priority. In fact, 98% of Top 50 and Hall of Fame companies retained mentorship programs from 2021 to 2024. Additionally, 82% of companies that took our annual Top 50 survey but didn’t make the Top 50 list retained mentorship programs during the same timeframe.
Sponsorship is also important for best-in-class companies. From 2021 to 2024, 91% of Top 50 companies retained their sponsorship programs. Among companies that took the survey but didn’t rank in the Top 50, 67% retained sponsorship programs from 2021 to 2024.
Boosting the Bottom Line
Over the last year, Fair360 has worked to show companies how the five inclusion initiatives (Mentorship, Sponsorship, Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), Executive Diversity Councils and High Potentials) correlate to the bottom line. We’ve done this by measuring voluntary turnover (VTO) rates among the top four levels of management. Companies with lower voluntary turnover, or higher retention, have better performance among the five key inclusion initiatives, Nelson said during the webinar.
READ: The Path to Parity: Why Workplace Inclusion Will Take Until 2046 to Balance
The large gap seen in VTO between top companies with mentorship and sponsorship programs and those without them shows that mentorship and sponsorship programs are “helping your organization save millions of dollars by not having to recruit folks for open positions because others voluntarily left your organization,” Nelson said. He added that these companies are retaining talent across people of different races, ethnicities and genders.
Developing Mentorship and Sponsorship Programs
There’s a lot that goes in at the leadership level when developing mentorship and sponsorship programs.
Alicia Petross, Chief Diversity Officer at The Hershey Company, said when leadership develops these programs, they want to make sure they can measure the impact and effectiveness of them. Hershey recently “retooled” its mentorship program by moving it online through what it calls Mentor Match. When doing so, it was important for leadership to understand if everyone in the company could access Mentor Match digitally.
Before rolling out Mentor Match, Petross said leadership evaluated:
- Accessibility
- Key points of measurement
- How the program tied back to human capital and workforce optimization metrics
Through Mentor Match, mentors and mentees enter leadership behaviors online, and then they are paired based on similarities. Petross added that Mentor Match made it easy for mentors and mentees to opt in by filling in leadership behaviors. People sometimes know what they are good at and and where they need to improve, but they’re not sure where to start.
If there’s a list of leadership skills or behaviors, you can go, ‘oh yeah, I am kind of good at that, but this one I need some help with.’ It took a lot of mystery out of the game to go, ‘they’re really good at that; they can help me with that,'” she said.
Maintaining Appeal for Programs
To keep mentorship and sponsorship programs fresh and attractive for new participants, Crystal Wiley, Tax Partner at KPMG, said partners at the firm need to be involved as mentors.
“We’re the leaders of our organization,” she said. “It starts with our leadership. Seeing that the partners are actively involved and engaged and it’s really important to them, I think it does keep the programs fresh and continues to have people be interested in the programs.”
Wiley added that constantly getting feedback from employees is another way to maintain appeal for programs. It’s important to ask mentees what their career goals are and find out what’s important to them.
“Engagement is what makes the programs attractive,” Wiley said. She added that it’s also important to share program success stories.
“A lot of times we talk about ways in which these programs have really helped certain people advance their careers,” she said. “I often talk about my career trajectory to people, and I know I would not have made partner in public accounting if I did not have both the formal mentors and sponsors, but also I had some fantastic informal ones. I am candid with people about how those relationships shaped my career and helped me to make partner.”
Watch the full webinar recording for more insights!
