Need a sponsor for you career? Nope. Instead, go where the love is.
“To be promoted, develop networking, work with mentors and find sponsors” we are told, over and over, especially if we are a woman or from a minority group. Sponsors are those who ‘give you a voice at the table’, invite you to management meetings, advocate on your behalf to be promoted. At a recent workshop to celebrate and empower women, I interrupted: “Can I challenge this concept of sponsorship?". I think we are reproducing a domination system here. I want to scream : forget about sponsors, instead, go where the love is.
Love allows you to be vulnerable.
Love is a place where you feel safe. You feel safe to fail and to say ‘I don’t know’. Love knows you have the skills and the competences. Managers and colleagues who love you know you are not that great at interviews and speaking in public, they explain to others. They know you need to be reassured and they provide you with guidance, with information, with perspective. They support you when you feel vulnerable, they tell you “Yes! Saying that you don’t know, this is strength!”.
Love allows you to be innovative.
Love allows you to try, to iterate, to ask questions, to pilot, to test until you find a solution. Love provides you a space to do things. Those who love you will use their network to mobilize resources, they will move their resources for you to pilot your weird ideas - like... the Future Ministry of Finance. They don’t really understand where this will lead, but they trust you will come up with something positive, not only for you, but for them. ?
Love allows you to be yourself.
Love understands that when you say “I am sorry to bother you”, you mean “it is really important, pay attention”. Love does not care about how you say it, love knows you have things to say, you have things to bring to the team and they stop everything to listen to you.
Love understands there are different leadership styles.
Love knows that there is more than Harvard, Oxford. ENA, MIT and Fortune 500. Love knows that you can lead from behind, that you can sit at the back of the room and stay silent, that you can burst and say to the World Bank HR vice president “I don’t trust you and any of your word !”. Love smiles and thinks “ok, maybe that’s too much here”.
Love allows you to flourish.
What is the point of career development if you end up being a director, traveling three weeks a month, in the middle of nowhere for your birthday, divorced and estranged from your children? How many times have I heard that at the World Bank, the only women who have succeeded are alone. Nope. We want to have a community, we want to have the five friends we sit with at the kitchen table to gossip, we want to have a purpose in life, we want to balance our commitment to work and to our families. Love understands this struggle and allows us to err, to navigate the unknown.
Love is about trust. We need to be in an organization and a team who trust in our abilities to contribute, who trust in our sanity and our judgement, who firmly know we have the experience and the skills, who know we are not perfect, but we can make a difference. Career development is not about grade, and more money. Career is about this delicate balance between what we want in life, what our purpose is, how work contribute to that. It is about belonging and overall, about happiness.
“Go where the love is” is a trademark expression of Benjamin Herzberg, whom among others, provided me with love at the World Bank.
Problem solver who dedicates myself to improving lives | continuous learner | devoted leader | ?? Let's unite and develop, create, and innovate together!
11 个月Thank you for sharing this topic and all those tips. It is like an answer for all the questions I had in th past few months! And although I left my job, I feel like I did the right thing because love can shift with time and with people, and it's more than ok to move on.
Thanks for giving me the copyright for this! Actually, please verse all my royalties directly to Deborah Isser who came up with "go where the love is" 23 years ago (yes we are that young!) when we lived in Sarajevo and it's the best advice I ever received and have given to others along the way. I did this again no later than last Friday. What matters more than the level of a job position is how much you are wanted and appreciated there, how much trust people place in you, because that will determine how much you can and want to give back. It will directly impact how much you are willing to lead yourself and others towards making an impact. It will be a factor of why and how you deploy your energy and innovation to achieve whatever it is you'll be doing. If you have a choice between two paths, the decision should be easy: Go where the love is. (Writing this, I shall apply this good advice to myself and therefore will soon be heading to your office so we can have coffee and walk around the block, hard workers that we are...).
Sociocratic facilitator, leadership co-trainer, book co-author
11 个月How refreshing to read that. Love it.
Leadership Expert | CEO of Leadership Lab International | UNICEF Consultant | Guest Lecturer at Sciences Po Paris
11 个月What a bold recommendation… !