Ten years on, women executives are still coming away from women-only leadership programmes empowered to lead, network and negotiate. But, despite the personal learning and heightened motivation that can be catalysed by a top-notch leadership programme, actual results as measured by women’s advancement into senior ranks have been meagre.

That is because most training programmes are still designed to produce self-development (or at worst, to “fix” the women so they can be more like the men) rather than to change the organisational network in which decisions that propel careers forward are made.

Research shows that the reason too few women are reaching the top of their organisations is that not enough of them are getting access to the mission-critical assignments and P&L roles that are stepping stones to top roles. Often, this is due to women not having powerful sponsors who advocate, demand and ensure that they get these critical assignments.

Yet sponsoring relationships are vital to women’s career advancement. A McKinsey study found, for example, that it isn’t having more mentors that leads to women’s advancement; it’s having senior mentors who are in a position to provide sponsorship.

Although both women and men viewed sponsorship by senior leaders as essential for success, women reported having fewer substantive interactions with senior leaders than did their male counterparts—a gap that widens as women and men advance.

The women in their study were also less likely to say that a senior leader outside their direct management chain had helped them get a promotion or challenging new assignment—even though women were more likely than men to have been assigned a formal mentor.

Women and leadership

Logically then, if women’s leadership programmes are to help women advance, they must be designed in ways that improve participant’s capacity to identify and work with sponsors from their companies who understand that their role is to help them get access to mission-critical assignments upon their return from the leadership programme.

In the London Business School’s Women in Leadership programme, we use three design features to support the development of sponsorship relationships between participants in women’s leadership programmes and senior executives in their companies:

1. Make the sponsorship process an integral part of the leadership programme

After letting participants know that they will have to designate a sponsor in order to be admitted to the women’s leadership programme, we guide them to identify and enlist the right person.

Research shows that the biggest predictor of sponsoring actually leading to positive career outcomes is the power and position of the sponsor. Therefore, we tell participants to strive to choose someone who is present when key staffing decisions are made and has relationships with other influential executives in the firm. We then give guidance on how to enlist that person, communicate what the role entails and provide their contact information to us once they have agreed.

Importantly, we reach out to the sponsors and provide them with training sessions as well.

2. Teach participants and sponsors how to move up ‘the sponsorship spectrum’

In the classroom, we teach women and their sponsors to see sponsorship not as an all-or-nothing proposition but as a spectrum of helping behaviours, one that allows various levels of commitment as both parties get to know and trust each other.

We have found that this more realistic approach—based on how real relationships develop—leads to better outcomes than having executives tick a box on a formal programme without ever really becoming an advocate. Understanding the differences in kinds of help allows women to better strategise how to see and seize opportunities to nudge the relationship up the spectrum, from providing mentoring in private to more public displays of advocacy.

Crucially, we also use this spectrum to teach sponsors about what roles they could and should be playing, especially help at the upper reaches of the spectrum, which have been typically less accessible to women.

3. Ask what’s working/not working

Finding out what’s working well or less well as sponsors and protégés get to know each other is also vital. We learned, for example, that sponsors tend to get stuck in the middle range of the “sponsorship spectrum,” comfortable having strategic conversations and making network connections for their protégés (roles “2” and “3” on the spectrum) but not with providing high-visibility opportunities or advocacy (roles “4” and “5”).

When we asked what it would take for them to feel comfortable moving up a notch, several said they wanted to see participants express more confidence. This led to a rich discussion about whether confidence should be earned or given, and about how evaluators mistakenly use expressions of confidence as a proxy for competence, particularly when assessing women—a discussion that was built into the next iteration of the training.

Authentic sponsorship relationships, we have learned, can be cultivated, over time, in a process with clear expectations and guidelines for both parties. When a women’s leadership programme is designed explicitly to foster this relationship not only are its advancement goals more likely to be achieved but the company also gets the benefit of training for the designated sponsors.

Herminia Ibarra is a professor and the Charles Handy chair in organisational behaviour at London Business School.