In the new book, The Broken Rung, the McKinsey authors point to the significant role that “experience capital” plays in career journeys: While half a person’s lifetime earnings stem from the value of what they bring to the table—their natural talents and formal education— the other half is driven by the value of the skills and experiences they gain on the job. Variations in building experience capital can lead to imbalanced outcomes among peers, such as promotion rate and income growth.
Sponsorship, in particular, plays a vital role in accelerating growth, ensuring that individuals receive not just guidance but active advocacy that opens doors to new opportunities.
To explore these ideas further, we spoke with two of McKinsey’s regional people leaders—Wendy Miller (North America) and Wieske Heinen Elgün (Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa)—about how organizations can help colleagues build experience capital and the role people leaders play in fostering career development through intentional sponsorship.
What can people leaders do to support their employees’ career journeys and building of experience capital?
Wendy Miller: The Broken Rung provides considerations for individuals across several areas. Organizationally, one area where people leaders can have an impact is sponsorship. Organizations often focus on mentorship, and that’s important. But a critical lever is sponsorship, particularly since some research shows that individuals can be over-mentored and under-sponsored.
Sponsorship goes further than mentorship, which is primarily about giving advice and guidance. Sponsorship is about opening doors and leveraging networks to create opportunities for colleagues and actively advocating for them.
There have been several times throughout my own career when this was particularly influential for me—as I wanted to pivot my career to a new area, as I moved into the next levels of management and leadership, and as I went through periods of needing to manage family commitments. It was a couple of my sponsors who not only encouraged me to explore moving into our People Function but also connected me with other colleagues and advocated for me to take on additional roles and responsibilities—even for roles I wasn’t sure I was ready for.
Our responsibility as people leaders is to ensure that sponsorship is a priority across our organizations—to facilitate a culture where it is valued, supported, and deliberate, and to help people make stronger connections across our growing and complex organization.
At McKinsey, we strive to make the community feel smaller by understanding where our colleagues are in their journey and identifying the sponsorship they need. Ensuring that sponsorship is embedded in our culture means recognizing that colleagues at different career stages require different forms of support.
Wieske Heinen Elgün: For our early-career colleagues—business associates and associates —we focus a lot on apprenticeship; coaching, feedback, and guidance in the team room from the people you are closely working with. But success isn’t just about gaining experience; it’s about having the right support structures in place. No matter your tenure, it can be really helpful to have someone you can go to, to help you think through your mental model, explore alternatives, and shape your career path in a way that works for you. However, as you become more senior, sponsorship becomes essential. Your role becomes more complex, and your success more dependent on the relationships you build. Progressing in your career also often coincides with other life events (for example, becoming a parent, having to care for others). All these challenges require sponsorship.
How can organizations do this?
Wieske Heinen Elgün: Sponsorship can be a tough nut to crack because it needs to be so personalized. But we’ve found one way that we can address this is to regularly look at colleagues’ sponsorship and identify who may need additional, or different, sponsorship. We have conversations with our leaders about our colleagues—their goals, where they are in their career trajectory, and what they may need—and then we identify ways to address those needs, often including who we can connect them with to further support and advocate for them.
Wendy Miller: This can be such a valuable step. While individual leaders are tapped into the colleagues they currently sponsor, people leaders can keep an eye on the broader sponsorship environment, and they can ensure their talent systems facilitate a more complete view of colleagues’ needs.
Wieske Heinen Elgün: Yes, and we review both the quantity and diversity of a person’s sponsorship. As the book notes, for every new sponsor you have, your chance of being promoted increases by 10 percent, and if you have four or more sponsors, you are five times more likely to be promoted. So quantity certainly matters to some degree.
Diversity in sponsorship is equally critical. We want to ensure colleagues receive support from sponsors with different areas of expertise, backgrounds, genders, and levels of seniority. This not only broadens individual opportunities but also strengthens the organization by allowing for better talent identification and deployment to meet business needs.
In some regions, like Africa, we’ve seen incredible success with name-by-name discussions and tailored career support. The challenges—huge distances, scattered clients, market volatility—could have been barriers. Instead, they became opportunities to build a platform that truly supports individuals.
Wendy Miller: We also recognize that people don’t typically become your sponsor immediately—they often begin as a simpler connection, or someone apprenticing you in your day-to-day work. Then, as they work with you over time, the relationship may progress to sponsorship. That means it’s important for organizations to create an ecosystem with all these elements, so the conditions exist for this progression to happen more easily. People leaders play an important role in shaping this.
Wieske Heinen Elgün: Let me also add that organizations can help people build sponsorship skills. At McKinsey, we teach about sponsorship in our learning offerings—how to be a good sponsor and how to build successful sponsor relationships.
What can individuals do to build their experience capital?
Wieske Heinen Elgün: In The Broken Rung, the authors emphasize the importance of making big, bold moves throughout one’s career, as it’s often those experiences that provide significant growth. I personally experienced this earlier in my career when I went for a role that I was rather junior for, but I got it. It really challenged me, but I learned so much and it catapulted my career.
Wendy Miller: Mindsets also matter. Be aware of any ways you have a limiting mindset that may be holding you back from exploring and taking on opportunities, especially ones that can seem like a big stretch. And don’t be afraid to experiment. This is a journey and takes real work—from the sponsors and from all of us who want to be sponsored. There is no one- size-fits-all approach, so you have to continue to work at building these relationships and shaping a group of people who can support you throughout your ever-evolving career. When I transitioned from consulting, I ended up taking a six-month rotational role in our People Function that turned into a 20-year career, and it became my life’s work and passion.
Wieske Heinen Elgün: This is again where sponsorship is so important; having those people who not only encourage you but who guide you to experiment, push your thinking on what you are capable of and ready for, and open doors for you to make those leaps.
So sponsorship is a critical enabler. How do you know your organization’s sponsorship efforts are working?
Wendy Miller: With the variety of experiences our firm offers, there’s more opportunity than ever to create flexibility when a colleague needs it. We focus on tailoring a rich and exciting professional path for each individual, working closely with their support system to make it happen. We also lean heavily on data and analytics to get a pulse of what’s working and where there may be gaps for us to address. We have several ways we gather insights throughout the year.
We have annual surveys on colleague experience, including one specifically on mentorship, apprenticeship, and sponsorship, where we get detailed information from colleagues on these areas—both what they are receiving and who is actively providing these things for them. That has also helped us know who our “super sponsors” are, and we are working with them to help with our learning programs on sponsorship and to apprentice other sponsors.
Wieske Heinen Elgün: We also leverage regular project experience surveys throughout the year to ask about development goals and sponsorship, which the teams discuss during their work together. This gives the project team leaders and us ongoing, almost real-time insights into levels of support and sponsorship, and where there may be needs.
We also consider sponsorship during our review processes, including the level of sponsorship that colleagues are providing to others.
All these inputs give us a well-rounded picture of both organizational and individual sponsorship needs, enabling us to address them throughout the year.
Sponsorship plays a pivotal role in career progression, and people leaders are key to ensuring it is embedded within an organization’s culture. As Wendy and Wieske emphasized, it’s not just about mentorship but also about actively advocating for colleagues and opening doors to new opportunities. By facilitating diverse and tailored sponsorship , organizations can help their colleagues build experience capital, which ultimately drives both individual growth and organizational success. This holistic approach to career development creates a supportive ecosystem where talent can thrive.