As almost everyone with a successful career can attest, having a mentor or sponsor can make a huge difference at work. For women, having a mentor or sponsor is particularly important since we have been shown to have weaker professional links and career networks. The problem, unfortunately is that there generally aren’t enough mentors or sponsors to go around for everyone who may want (or need) one.
How can we disrupt this status quo? At an individual level, women can take certain matters into their own hands. If you’re a senior woman at your company, you can consciously carve out time out to mentor other women and amplify the contributions of other women around you. If you’re just starting out in your career or somewhere in the middle of it, you can also make it a point to try to develop authentic relationships over time with colleagues, managers and executives.
Companies, too, can play a role. Many employers offer formal mentoring programs that involve companies creating pairings among employees. In 2013, a survey by the Society of Human Resource Management found that 20% of organizations offer their employees formal mentoring programs. In larger companies, these programs are more common, with the American Society for Training and Development finding that 71% of Fortune 500 companies offer formal mentorship programs.
We discovered that the following 64 companies do offer some type of mentorship program*:
1. Abbott
2. AbbVie
3. Accenture
4. ADP
5. Aetna
6. Allstate Insurance Company
7. Apple
8. AT&T
9. BASF
10. Boeing
11. Colgate-Palmolive
12. Comcast
13. Cox Communications
14. Cummins
15. Daimler
16. Dell
17. Deloitte
18. Dow Jones
19. EF Education First
20. Eli Lilly and Company
21. EY
22. General Electric
23. General Mills
24. Google
25. Hartford Insurance
26. IBM
27. Intel
28. JCPenney
29. Johnson & Johnson
30. Kaiser Permanente
31. KeyCorp
32. KPMG
33. Kraft Foods Group
34. Marriott International
35. Mars
36. Mastercard
37. Medtronic
38. Merck & Co
39. Monsanto
40. New York Life
41. Nielsen
42. Northrop Grumman
43. Novartis
44. OnDeck
45. Rockwell Collins
46. Royal Bank of Canada
47. Procter & Gamble
48. Prudential Financial
49. PwC
50. Salesforce
51. Sodexo
52. Square
53. Target
54. TD Bank
55. The Coca-Cola Company
56. TIAA-CREF
57. Time Warner
58. Time Warner Cable
59. Toyota Motor North America
60. Verizon Communications
61. Walgreens
62. Wells Fargo
63. Wyndham Worldwide
64. Zynga
Mentorship pairings can be cross-departmental, can involve senior-employees assigned to more junior-level employees, or even peer mentor matching. Some companies take things to another level and offer official sponsorship programs for women or other minorities. Sponsorships are a highly specific type of mentorship that requires someone to make a bigger investment in a mentee. The idea is that a senior leader or person in a position of power at a company uses their influence and clout to advocate for another employee who is seen as having high potential.
Information about corporate sponsorship programs was more scarce, but we discovered that the following 11 companies offer formal sponsorship programs.
- American Express
- AT&T
- Citi
- Credit Suisse
- Crowell & Moring
- Deloitte
- Deutsche Bank
- EY
- Genentech
- Intel
- Morgan Stanley
While sponsorship is positioned as a key way to increase the number of women in leadership positions, ultimately, the devil seems to reside in the details. Mentorship and sponsorship initiatives seem to come in many shapes and sizes. Implementation, adoption (and probably efficacy) vary widely even among companies with formal programs in place.
Over the long run, we also hope to highlight some of the best practices, learnings and success stories from these programs as well, so that all employers may benefit from the wisdom of the crowds. Please contact us if you would like to share details and success stories regarding your company’s sponsorship and mentorship programs!
*Based on a range of publicly available information sources available on the internet. For any corrections or additions, please email [email protected]
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