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Mentors advise. Sponsors say your name.
Published about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader,
"Just wait." It is one of the most common pieces of career advice in medicine, and most of the time it is offered kindly. Wait until you have more experience. Wait until your kids are older. Wait for the next cycle, when the timing will be better for you.
Dr. Shikha Jain has been given that advice for most of her career. Pregnant with twins, she was told she had ruined her chances at leadership. Interviewing for her first job with one child at home, she was advised to go part-time, because surely she would want more children. Later, that the leadership opportunity would open up in five to ten years, and until then she should keep her head down and keep working.
What she does with that advice on this week's episode is the part worth studying. She does not treat it as a personal insult. She treats it as a system behaving the way it was built to behave.
So here is the mechanism, because I think we teach this badly. Women have been roughly half of medical school classes for years and the leadership numbers have barely moved, which tells us the problem sits well downstream of the pipeline. Residents finishing at the same institution with the same credentials are offered different starting salaries, and since almost every raise afterward is a percentage of that first number, a small early gap compounds quietly across a whole career. Estimates put it at two to three million dollars. Meanwhile the capacities that actually make leaders effective, listening and collaboration and empathy, get filed under "lovely to work with" instead of "ready to lead." And in the room where candidates are chosen, Shikha has sat and listened to someone argue against a woman on the strength of a rumor that she might become pregnant.
"That is not a reason to not offer someone a leadership position if they are the right candidate for the job."
Notice that none of this requires anyone to be malicious. That is the part I want us to sit with. Most of the people who told Shikha to wait believed they were looking out for her.
Her alternative to waiting comes down to two moves, and the distinction between them is the whole lesson.
The first is information. When you are passed over, ask why, as a request rather than a challenge: what would make me the candidate next time? Sometimes the answer names a real gap you can close. Sometimes the answer tells you far more about the organization than it does about you. Either way you now have data instead of a story you made up about yourself.
The second is sponsorship, which is not mentorship wearing a different coat. A mentor advises you in private. A sponsor says your name in a room you are not standing in. Find someone holding the role you want, ask them what got them there, and tell them plainly that you want your name in the mix. That is a specific, askable thing, and it is the ask most of us never make.
Shikha's own version of refusing to wait became the Women in Medicine Summit, planned in the weeks after she came back from maternity leave with her twins.
Here's my question for you this week: when was the last time you said someone else's name out loud in a room they weren't standing in?
By Transforming Healthcare Coaching® Lillian Liang Emlet, MD MS CHSE CPC ELI-MP, Founder & CEO
Live well. Lead well. Grow Together. Weekly conversations to help you stay human in healthcare. We share practical ideas, podcast pearls, and curated reads that help you grow. Together, we can transform healthcare, one person at a time.®
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