There is a tendency to treat sponsorship as something that happens to you: a recognition of merit that arrives when the right person notices your work. That framing is understandable, but it is not especially accurate, and it leaves professionals without a useful way to think about why sponsorship develops in some cases and not others.

Sponsorship follows a logic. It is not arbitrary, and it is not purely about performance. Understanding how senior leaders actually think about sponsorship decisions is more useful than waiting to be discovered.

What sponsors are calculating

When a senior leader considers advocating for someone’s advancement, they are making a judgement that involves more than an assessment of that person’s capability. They are also assessing the risk to their own credibility and political capital, the timing relative to their own priorities and relationships, and whether the person they are considering sponsoring fills a genuine gap in their portfolio of relationships and influence.

Performance is a precondition, not a differentiator. Most of the people a potential sponsor encounters at senior level are performing well. What distinguishes the professionals who attract sponsorship is a combination of strategic visibility, a clear and consistent leadership perspective, and the kind of presence in high-stakes settings that gives a sponsor enough evidence to advocate with confidence.

The risk calculation matters more than most professionals realise. A sponsor is putting their name behind someone in rooms where that person is not present. That requires a level of trust that goes beyond a strong working relationship. It requires the sponsor to be confident that the person they are advocating for will represent them well in contexts they cannot anticipate or control.

The mutual dimension

One aspect of sponsorship that tends to get overlooked is that it is not a one-directional dynamic. Senior leaders seek out sponsorship relationships that serve their own strategic interests as much as the sponsee’s development.

Sponsors benefit from access to perspectives, networks, and ways of thinking that they do not already have. Ethnic-cultural professionals, who have often navigated complex organisational environments across cultural contexts, bring precisely this kind of value. The ability to read dynamics that others miss, to build trust across difference, to bring external perspectives into internal conversations, these are not peripheral qualities. They are directly relevant to what senior leaders need in order to remain effective in increasingly complex organisations.

Understanding this changes the framing. Sponsorship is not a favour extended downward. It is a relationship of mutual strategic value, and positioning yourself within it means being clear about what you bring to the sponsor’s priorities, not just what you are hoping to gain.

Where sponsorship tends to develop

Sponsorship relationships rarely form through formal processes alone. They develop through sustained exposure in settings where senior leaders can observe how someone thinks under pressure, navigates ambiguity, and handles the informal dynamics of organisational life.

This is where structural inequity tends to compound. The settings in which sponsorship most naturally develops, (senior offsites, informal leadership gatherings, high-visibility project work), are not equally accessible. Ethnic-cultural professionals are, for a range of reasons, less likely to be present in those contexts, which means the conditions for organic sponsorship to emerge occur less frequently.

This is not a reason for passivity. It is a reason to be deliberate about creating visibility in the right contexts. Not through self-promotion, but through consistent, substantive presence in the conversations and relationships that carry weight.

A structural note for organisations

Organisations that rely on informal sponsorship networks to develop their leadership pipeline will tend to reproduce the leadership profile they already have. The dynamics through which sponsorship forms naturally, (proximity, familiarity, shared context), favour those who are already closest to the centre.

Intentional sponsorship programmes, when designed well, do not replace the organic quality of these relationships. They create the conditions for them to form across a wider range of people, which is where the organisational value lies.

The question for senior leaders and organisations alike is whether the sponsorship relationships forming in their culture reflect the full range of talent available, or a narrower subset of it shaped more by access than by potential.