Is there one decision that improves diversity at the top?
When leaders are asked how to improve diversity at the top, the answers tend to cluster around development: more training, more mentoring, stronger pipelines, better preparation. All valid . . . to a point. Exhausting, certainly. But are they really sufficient to achieve outcomes more decisively than we have managed to date?
One approach that that could materially improve diversity at the top is moving from potential to visibility by formalising sponsorship.
That is easier said than done! Sponsorship is one of the most demanding – and most rewarding – professional relationships. A sponsor is someone prepared to invest not only time, but reputation, in helping another person progress. This is not a light commitment.
Until proven otherwise, I have yet to see lasting success when sponsorship is treated as an HR‑driven matching exercise. Such ‘allocation’ may offer orientation for those who haven’t yet found the courage to ask, but the real catalyst lies elsewhere: it’s the human tango between two people who choose to invest in each other because they recognise shared values and mutual resonance; it’s what matters for themselves and the organisation they inhabit.
It may sound uncomfortably close to courtship: in a healthy, transparent sense, it is exactly that. Sometimes it begins with a simple email, often unexpected, sent to a potential sponsor. How promptly someone chooses to ask, and how promptly the recipient responds is an indicator of readiness for reciprocity.
Human connection begins there.
Why sponsorship changes outcomes
For me, this is the most critical element: to understand sponsorship as one of the most valuable of leadership relationships – for both individuals and for the organisation – rather than as a benevolent add‑on, or a vague cultural initiative. Sponsorship is a deliberate leadership mechanism which can and should be most powerful.
Why? Because the progression through leadership roles has never been neutral.
We often speak about senior leadership as though it were awarded on capability alone – the title, the office, the visible markers of status. In practice, leadership progression is conferred.
People rise when they are seen as credible, trusted with consequence, and endorsed by those who already hold authority. Long before roles are advertised or promotions decided, informal judgements are already forming: who looks ready, who is spoken about with confidence, who is introduced as ‘someone to watch’.
This is where all-to-many diversity efforts stall.
Organisations invest heavily in developing underrepresented talent, yet overlook how ‘readiness’ is, judged. Competence in isolation rarely suffices. Perception does: how, in reality, someone shows up (including that first email), where they are seen, the scope they are trusted with, and who is willing to back them in senior forums.
Once you start paying attention, the pattern becomes difficult to ignore. Whether we like it or not, leadership progression is perception‑led long before it becomes merit‑led. End of story!
Sponsorship in practice
Reflecting on this, I realise how formative sponsorship has been in my own career.
My first sponsor was the county Director of Education who reminded me that I had a rare mix of qualifications, movement discipline, and ambition. He asked a simple question: what else might I do with all that? I proposed creating a new curriculum and writing a textbook in a foreign language on a subject I cared deeply about. He nodded – and that nod was effectively a blank cheque, backed by his reputation.
The second was a regional president in what was then ‘New Europe’, who entrusted my one‑year‑old start‑up with building the first integrated digital geographic infrastructure for a city – before the internet existed as we know it. He had heard me speak, noticed the tidiness of the team, and decided that was enough.
The third was a CEO who trusted me to design and lead a programme for a large multinational, believing I could deliver insights more grounded than those of a major consulting firm.
What they shared was trust, respect, and an ability to recognise integrity in how I behaved, communicated and paid attention to detail. In short: shared values. Treat others as you would like to be treated.
There was, however, one additional dimension. All were men. Women were largely invisible at that time. That realisation shaped my decision to found Image Ability in 2019, to work with women navigating senior progression.
Since then, I have found it strikingly difficult to encounter women acting as sponsors at the same scale. For me, this remains work‑in‑progress – and a deeply intriguing one. I know from my work that I am not alone in noticing it. Talent leakage is real, and significant. Too few women seem prepared to step into visible sponsorship of others.
All of which reinforces the importance of formalising sponsorship with a clear understanding of human resonance . . . and its limits.
From development to endorsement
When it works, sponsorship works because it intervenes directly in the perceptual reality of leadership.
A sponsor does more than open doors, they shape how someone is seen. They widen exposure to consequential work – and reinforce authority in front of powerful stakeholders. They lend credibility at precisely the moments when leadership is quietly assessed.
This is why sponsorship is not mentoring. Mentoring supports development. Sponsorship transfers legitimacy.
The breakdown in many leadership journeys occurs not because talent is missing, but because that transfer never takes place.
What needs to change
The shift required is deceptively simple: progress from a development‑only mindset to a mindest based on human-opportunity.
If leadership is conferred as much as it is earned, then diversity at the top becomes less a pipeline problem and more a question of how consciously organisations manage endorsement.
Formalising sponsorship makes this process visible and accountable. It turns informal advocacy into a shared leadership responsibility: naming talent early, widening exposure deliberately, and backing people for serious, consequential work – not just for safe or contained assignments.
Over time, this approach can help reduce – though never fully eliminate – invisible bias in who is seen, heard and trusted.
But this requires honesty about perception, and perception is never superficial. It is deep, subtle, and often uncomfortable to acknowledge. It sits close to confidence, communication, presence and style of leadership and more.
Credibility accumulates through what I call an image narrative: the signals created over time through behaviour, communication and visibility, especially under pressure. ‘Readiness’ becomes a judgement of coherence – whether what someone does, says and signals aligns with the outcomes they are trusted to deliver.
This is the work I do with my clients, and I owe much of my understanding to those early sponsors who trusted me.
I remain sceptical of the prescriptive confidence economy and its surface polish. But I deeply believe in image literacy: the ability to understand how leadership credibility is constructed, and to manage it deliberately and ethically as part of organisational reality. I have been developing this as a discipline precisely because behaviour, communication and appearance are still treated as fragmented aspects of leadership identity. More on this in Vitruvian Woman (my book to be published soon).
A closing reflection
Diversity at the top improves when organisations stop treating perception as incidental and start recognising it as intrinsic to how leadership works. What is often labelled a ‘confidence gap’ is more accurately a visibility and credibility gap – the slow work of being recognised. Sponsorship accelerates that recognition.
If leaders were to take one decision today, it would be this: formalise how leadership credibility is identified, endorsed and transferred. With two conditions:
First, allow space for genuine human connection and resonance – anything forced will fail.
Second, educate both parties in the realities of personal and cultural practicalities of image literacy on both sides – sponsor and sponsored.
Only then does formal sponsorship stand a chance of working.
Leadership is not built through effort, experience or HR processes alone. It is built through recognition – and recognition, however uncomfortable it may be to admit, is never purely objective.
So, the question worth returning to is a simple one: who are you actively helping to be seen? Not, who has potential on paper, but who you speak about with confidence, trust with real work, and support when it counts.
Leadership takes shape through acts of endorsement that feel informal at the time, yet carry lasting weight. It rarely arrives in a single moment. Making sponsorship explicit does not dilute merit. It simply acknowledges how leadership becomes real inside organisations – and allows that recognition to be shared more deliberately, and more fairly.
One more thought for leaders: consider yourself privileged – whether sponsoring or being sponsored. You are building a legacy, so make it last.
Perhaps you wish to stop reading here to write that first email to your desired sponsor? You might receive a response you can build upon – and if it doesn’t come, you try again – differently, or even elsewhere.
If you are looking for a sponsor or want to become a sponsor, contact me for a conversation. I’d be happy to share some ideas to get you started.