The two relationships most professionals build too late — a sponsor, and an external mentor

By the time most people feel ready to progress, they realise they’ve never built the relationships that would actually help them do it. Fixing that under time pressure rarely works. These relationships take deliberate nurturing, well before you need them.

Your internal sponsor or champion

This is someone senior enough to understand what a role genuinely requires, and close enough to your work to assess your capability with real accuracy — not the polished version you present, the actual one.

What makes this relationship valuable is precisely what makes it uncomfortable: it only works with honest, unsugar-coated feedback. A good sponsor will tell you where your self-view and the organisation’s view of you don’t match, and name the specific trade-offs — scope, visibility, skills, time, exposure to risk — required to close that gap.

To build this before you need it:

• Identify who actually has visibility into the roles you want, not just seniority

• Give them real problems to see you work through, not just updates

• Ask directly for their honest read on your gaps — and take it without negotiating it down

Your external mentor

This relationship does something different, and a sponsor structurally can’t do it: give you distance. Someone outside your company, and ideally outside your current industry, brings less bias toward preserving the internal status quo, and a wider view of what’s actually possible — including paths outside your current employer, or outside your current field entirely.

This is the person who asks the question your sponsor won’t: are you even climbing the right ladder?

The combination is the point

A sponsor sharpens your case for advancing where you are. A mentor keeps you honest about whether that’s still the right place to be advancing. 

Most professionals invest in neither until they urgently need both — and by then, the relationship has no history to draw on.

Start now, regardless of where you are in your career. The value of both relationships compounds with time invested, not with urgency of need.