Lifting as You Climb Is Not a Slogan. It Is a Leadership Obligation.
I have been in rooms that changed my life.
Rooms where someone with more access than me chose to use it on my behalf. Where a door was held open rather than pulled shut. Where someone said, in a meeting I was not in: you should hear from Patrice on this.
Those moments were not accidents. They were choices. Someone decided that their progress and mine were not in competition. That there was room, and that they would help make it.
I carry every one of those moments with me. And they have shaped, more than almost anything else, how I show up for other women now. It is part of what drives the work I do as a leadership coach for women, because I know, from lived experience, what a difference it makes when someone in power decides to use it generously.
What is the difference between mentoring and sponsoring women at work?
There is an important distinction that gets lost in the conversation about supporting women at work. The distinction between mentorship and sponsorship.
A mentor advises you. A sponsor advocates for you. In the rooms you are not in.
McKinsey and LeanIn.Org's Women in the Workplace research has documented this consistently: women receive advice in abundance. What they receive far less of is someone with power actively putting their name forward, putting their reputation behind them, and creating access that would not otherwise exist.
McKinsey and LeanIn.Org's 2024 Women in the Workplace report adds a sharper edge: women of colour are the least likely of any group to have a sponsor, and the most likely to report that their ambitions are not supported by senior leaders. Cranfield School of Management's Female FTSE Board Report 2024 confirms the scale of the structural gap: women hold 42.1% of FTSE 100 board positions yet only 8.9% of those companies are led by a woman CEO. The pipeline is not empty. The sponsorship is not.
This gap matters enormously because career progression, particularly at senior levels, is rarely determined by merit alone. It is determined by who knows you, who vouches for you, and who thinks of you when the important opportunities arise.
Mentoring tells a woman what to do. Sponsoring opens the door and walks in with her. We need both. We are desperately short of the latter.
What does lifting as you climb actually look like in practice?
I became the first non-HR woman at Virgin Atlantic to be trained as a facilitator for the Global Springboard Programme not because it fell into my lap. I asked. And having asked and been given that opportunity, I made sure I used it to develop other women in ways that extended well beyond my direct role.
Uplifting is not always a grand gesture. In my experience it is usually something much smaller and much more frequent. It is crediting the idea in the meeting. It is making an introduction you did not need to make. It is sharing an opportunity you could easily have kept to yourself. It is saying, to someone who is doubting themselves: I have watched you work and you are ready. For more on what that kind of self-belief requires, see our piece on knowing your worth.
The case for sponsorship and advocacy is not just ethical. It is a business performance argument. Catalyst's research on inclusive leadership found that when senior leaders actively champion inclusion, employees are nearly ten times more likely to report high innovation. When the source details for this finding are confirmed, the precise figures will be added here.
How does sponsorship build cultures where everyone can rise?
What I have discovered about lifting other women is this: it is not transactional and it is not linear, but it is never wasted.
The woman I championed three years ago is now championing someone else. The introduction I made in a room I barely had access to myself created a relationship that has since opened doors I could not have anticipated. The time I invested in someone's development came back, not from them specifically, but from the ecosystem of generosity that those investments help build.
This is also where mentoring across generations becomes a structural strategy rather than a personal gesture. When organisations build reverse mentoring programmes that pair junior talent with senior leaders, they create the cross-generational dialogue and mutual visibility that sponsorship requires. It is not enough to tell senior leaders to be better sponsors. You have to build the relationships in which that sponsorship becomes natural. That is what a well-designed inclusive leadership development programme actually does.
This is how cultures change. Not through policy alone. Through the accumulated weight of individual choices made daily by people who have decided that someone else's progress does not diminish their own.
What can every leader do right now to advocate for women?
I want to end this differently. Not with a question but with a challenge.
Think of one woman in your professional orbit who has the capability and not yet the access. Who is ready for an opportunity she has not yet been offered. Who would benefit from your voice in a room she cannot yet enter.
And then use your voice. This week. Not eventually. Now.
Sponsorship is not complicated. It does not require a programme or a policy, though both help. It requires a decision, made by individuals with access, that their advancement and someone else's are not in competition.
For you to sit with: Are you primarily a mentor to the women around you, or are you actively sponsoring them? What would it take to shift that balance? Who opened a door for you that changed your trajectory, and how are you honouring that in how you show up for others?