There’s a story we tell ourselves about leadership.
It goes something like this: the higher you climb, the more self-sufficient you have to become. You’re the one with the answers now. You’re the one people look to. So, you’d better have it all handled on your own, all of the time.
I’ve watched that story run a lot of brilliant women into the ground.
Because it isn’t true.
Not even slightly.
The women in leadership, ranging from Director to C-Suite, who actually sustain themselves up there, year after year, without burning out or going hollow, are almost always the ones with the strongest support around them.
Not lone wolves.
They are well-resourced.
And here’s the part that surprises people: that support isn’t accidental. It’s built, it’s chosen, it’s tended like a garden.
The leaders who last don’t stumble upon a network of people who happen to back them. They put one together on purpose. They are by design, not by default.
I call it your personal advisory board.
An advisory board, not a cheer squad
Let me be clear about what I mean, because the phrase gets thrown around and often loses its true meaning.
Your personal board of directors isn’t your line manager. It most probably isn’t your best friend either, although either of them might end up playing a part. It’s a deliberate, curated group of people who do four things for you that you cannot reliably do for yourself: they challenge you, they champion you, they connect you, and they hold you accountable.
The operative word here is curated.
Anyone can collect a few supportive voices. An advisory board is different. You choose each person for a specific function, the way you’d choose a non-executive director for a company because of what they bring that the executive team lacks. You’re not after a room full of people who think you’re wonderful. Lovely as that is, it won’t grow you. You’re after a room full of people who want you to be better, and are willing to be a bit inconvenient about it.
Most women I work with have plenty of the warm, encouraging voices. What they’re missing is the rest of the board.
The five roles every board needs
When I sit down with a client and we map this out, the same five roles come up again and again. You might have one person covering two of them. You might have a column sitting empty that you’ve never noticed before. Either way, this is the shape of it.
The Mentor.
Someone who has walked the road ahead of you and will tell you the truth about it. We are not looking for the polished LinkedIn or textbook version. We are looking for someone who will tell the real truth, including the bits that went wrong. A good mentor saves you from learning every lesson the hard way, because they already paid for some of those lessons themselves and they’re willing to hand you the playbook.
The Sponsor.
This is the one that changes careers, and I’ll come back to it properly in a moment. Your sponsor is someone with genuine influence who says your name in rooms you’re not in. They don’t just advise you; they spend their own credibility advocating for you, putting you forward, defending the choice when someone questions it.
The Challenger.
The person who asks the hard question and then sits in the silence while you squirm. They don’t let you off the hook with the answer you’ve already decided on. When you bring them a plan you’re secretly hoping they’ll rubber-stamp, they’ll find the weak point in it instead. Irritating in the moment. Invaluable over your career.
The Mirror.
Someone who knows you well enough, and cares enough, to reflect back the things you can’t see in yourself, like your patterns or your blind spots. The way you shrink in a particular kind of meeting, or the brilliance you keep apologising for. We are all the worst possible witnesses to our own behaviour. The Mirror fixes that.
The Connector.
The person whose world is bigger than yours and who keeps pulling you into it. They make introductions you’d never have thought to ask for. They mention an opportunity before it’s been advertised. They expand the edges of what feels possible, simply by knowing more people and being generous with them. They help you keep your network working so that you don’t lose it.
Now, go ahead and read those back and notice where your gaps are, because that’s the real work in this blog. It’s the work you need to do and stop avoiding.
Most women are badly under-sponsored
I said I would come back to it. This is truly important because this is the gap I see most often and it’s the one that definitely costs the most.
Mentorship and sponsorship are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously. A mentor talks to you. A sponsor talks about you when you’re nowhere near the room. You can be beautifully, generously mentored for a decade and still be completely invisible to the people deciding who gets the stretch role, the board seat, the keynote or the promotion. All that wisdom poured into you, and nobody with power has ever fought for your name.
The research on this is consistent, and I can tell you that my confidence is high that this is the case. In an article by Executive Search company Madison Lincoln, they noted “McKinsey and LeanIn.Org found that women are less likely than men to benefit from sponsorship, despite its strong influence on promotion outcomes. Only 31% of women at entry level report having a sponsor, compared with 45% of men. At senior level this rises to 66% for women and 73% for men.”
Women, on average, are over-mentored and under-sponsored compared with their male peers. We get told to be patient and given lots of advice. We get advocated for far less often. If you want to verify that for your own context, McKinsey and LeanIn’s annual Women in the Workplace reports are the place I’d look, and they’re worth your time anyway.
But you don’t need a study to check this. You just need one honest question. When the important decisions about my future are being made, is anyone in that room actively saying my name?
If the answer is no, or you genuinely don’t know, that’s not something to ignore. You need to close that gap and fast.
The exercise that makes it real
Here’s where I want you to stop reading and pick up a pen. This takes about ten minutes, and it tends to be uncomfortable in a really useful way.
Draw five columns across a page. Head them up: Mentor, Sponsor, Challenger, Mirror, Connector.
Now write a name under each one. A real specific human being you could email today. I know that you may procrastinate on this; I know that you may even write down “someone like” or even a role or title. That’s not where change happens. It happens when you write down a name.
You’ll fill some columns easily; you’ll hover over others, and guaranteed there may be one or two that might stay completely blank. Now, that blank column will tell you something you’ve been avoiding.
So, the empty columns now become your priorities. They’re showing you exactly where you’re trying to lead without a structure beneath you to support you. These are the people you need.
Next, you’re going to take some truth serum, figuratively.
Look at your filled columns honestly and ask whether the names are really the names. Are they doing the job you put them under, or have you put a kind person in the Challenger slot because the truth-teller felt too risky to approach? I see you! I see you staff the board with comfort and then wonder why nothing shifts.
When you’ve got your gaps, don’t try to fix all of them all at once. You’ll overwhelm yourself; don’t. Pick the one that would make the biggest difference to where you are right now, this quarter, and go after that single person first. For most of the women I coach, that’s the Sponsor column, and it’s the conversation they’ve been putting off for years.
One last thing
I know how some of you think. You think that you have to do everything on your own, and if you ask for help, that’s weakness. Building a personal advisory board isn’t an admission that you can’t cope on your own. It’s the most strategic thing a senior leader does. It’s your biggest flex. It’s called hacking the system.
The myth of the self-made woman at the top is just that, a myth, and it’s an expensive one, because it keeps capable people isolated precisely when they most need a room of others around them.
You weren’t designed to do this alone.
None of us were.
So, stop trying to.
Go ahead, draw the five columns.
Find your gap.
And then, do the hardest thing, which could be the easiest… make the call.
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