Kelly opens the door for Rosalind Chow, an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University. Her new book is called “The Doors You Can Open: A New Way to Network, Build Trust, and Use Your Influence to Create a More Inclusive Workplace.” 

Let’s start with the difference between mentorship and sponsorship. 

“When you think about mentorship, the person who’s being asked to change is actually the mentee. Oftentimes when we think about mentors, it’s a senior person who’s trying to help coach, guide a more junior person. You give them feedback on areas of potential growth. You coach them through politically perhaps tricky situations, or you just give them general career advice. But all of that is meant to try and get the mentee themselves to change something about them. Sponsorship is asking a completely different person to change, not the person who’s being sponsored, but the audience to whom the sponsor is sponsoring the person to. It’s this third party who’s being asked to be changed that they actually see the protégé or behave differently toward the protégé than they had before.” 

You link the idea of trust with gossip, and that’s not something you hear connected very often. 

“You know, we all have a negative impression of gossip because we’re quite frankly afraid to be the target of gossip. And it’s typically because when we think of gossip, we’re thinking about negative gossip. And the people who are negatively gossiped about are typically the people who have violated some norm that is deeply held by the group. And so obviously, we don’t want to be targets of gossip for that reason. And I think that’s why gossip has this negative connotation. But the flip side is that we all benefit from gossip as well, because what gossip allows us to do is not have to learn from personal experience, who’s not to be trusted.” 

It’s also worth noting the difference between power and status here. 

“The difference between power and status is that for the most part people see them as interchangeable, but they’re not. Power refers to control over resources. So, if I control some resource that you want, to the extent that you can’t get that resource from anywhere else, I have a lot of power over you. And so, I can get you to do things that I want because you kind of feel like you have to do what I tell you to do because otherwise bad things are going to happen to you. Status operates differently. Status is when people do things for you because they want to, because they like you and they trust you. And so, if you tell them to do something, they’re like, ‘Well, Kelly told me to do this, and I trust Kelly.’” 

Photo Credit: Christy Filkins.