Five Questions With: Helen Tubb, Leadership Advisor, Trainer & Speaker

Today, Helen is reshaping how companies think about leadership development through a practice most organizations still don’t understand: sponsorship. Not mentorship. Not coaching. Sponsorship. The deliberate use of power, reputation, and influence by senior leaders to open career-critical opportunities for women and other underrepresented groups. Her research at INSEAD business school, where she earned her Executive Master in Change with distinction, revealed a staggering gap: 85 per cent of women understand the concept, yet less than half have access to it.

What Helen uncovered through her research flips the script entirely. While most DEI initiatives frame sponsorship as a nice-to-have for employees, her work at INSEAD revealed something more powerful: sponsorship transforms the sponsors themselves. Men who actively sponsor women develop greater self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and collaborative decision-making. Companies that formalize sponsorship don’t just accelerate women’s careers. They build better leaders across the board and create cultures where belonging replaces burnout.

In this interview, Helen reflects on learning the hard way that results alone won’t get you to the top, why sponsorship is a core leadership competence rather than a diversity checkbox, and how investing in women through structured advocacy doesn’t just change who gets promoted. It changes who we all become as leaders.

1. What was the moment you realized there was a critical gap in how companies were approaching women in their sponsorship strategies?

The moment was a personal one before it became a company one. I was 12 or so years into my career, successfully managing a team in an international corporate and feeling confident about future opportunities. That’s when the Group Head of HR told me candidly my strong results were not enough – I needed to be known and valued as “leadership material” by those above me. Her words hurt at first, but they gave me the wake-up call to learn the ropes of being sponsored, so I could reach senior executive roles and become a more inclusive leader for others.

Let me briefly explain the term as not everyone is familiar:

Sponsorship is when a senior person uses their power, reputation and influence to enable career-critical exposure and opportunity to women and other under-represented groups. It is a three-way, not two-way interaction because the sponsor is advocating towards their own peers and seniors.

One of my frameworks, the Sponsorship CODE, explains four types of sponsor behavior:  Connect to out-of-reach people; Open career-critical opportunities; Defend against unfair bias and criticism; and Endorse in public and private spaces.

As for my realization in companies, I started to discover the scale of the gap when I embarked on distinction-awarded research for INSEAD business school and increasingly worked with HR professionals on strengthening their leadership and talent pipelines. A stark observation was that most companies do not have a sponsorship strategy – sponsoring others and being sponsored happens organically, which means women and other people who do not fit the “traditional mold” miss out. For example, Women of Influence report on the topic last year (which I peer-reviewed) showed 85 per cent of women understand the concept, yet less than half have access!

2. When you first started advocating for better representation in sponsorship, what was the pushback you encountered, and how did that shape your approach?

Pushback was not necessarily overt resistance to change, but simply a lack of foundational awareness and understanding. Although the sponsorship term has been around for over a decade, it still lacks attention and know-how in workplaces and is therefore confused with other practices. A typical scenario is where leaders say they are sponsoring when in fact they are mentoring or coaching – even in formal sponsorship programs because they are poorly designed.

I also faced a narrow view of who needs to be developed and who benefits from sponsorship. In business literature and discourse, it tends to be positioned as a nice-to-have career-development or DEI practice for employees, which undermines the essential value for future-ready leadership development and cultural transformation. For instance, emerging research shows careers, leadership skills and business outcomes are enhanced from leaders who actively sponsor across diversity.

Drawing on these and other experiences, I’ve shaped my approach to work in two complementary ways. Firstly, I concentrate on raising awareness about the scale, nature and consequences of the Sponsorship Gap for diverse talent, backed by the latest data, real-world examples and my own story. Secondly, I help companies formalize sponsorship through structured interventions, training and support, aligned with talent management, leadership development and succession planning strategies. The lasting impact of this work hinges on working deeply with human behavior, uncovering hidden drivers such as identity, authority and political tensions inherent in advocacy and gender dynamics of sponsor-sponsee relationships.

3. What’s the biggest opportunity companies are missing when they overlook or undervalue women in their sponsorship investments?

A classic answer would be that companies miss out on accelerating women’s advancement to leadership and other roles where their talents can be fully harnessed. There’s no doubt in the data: sponsorship is a career accelerator and gender-balanced executive teams outperform.

That said, I think we must look at future, evolving opportunities for companies that invest in sponsorship for women, particularly given today’s rapid workforce trends and pressures. One such opportunity relates to companies shifting towards harnessing the shared value of talent within “ecosystems”, covering supply chains, client relations, sectoral networks, even competitors. Many executive conversations I’ve had in recent months echo this expansive line of thinking: aside from improving advancement and retention rates for top women talent, sponsorship investment forges much stronger experiences and relations with women that generate value even if they eventually move on – commercial intelligence, stakeholder partnerships, employer referrals, to name a few of the returns.

Another missed opportunity for companies, which relates to my earlier point about the narrow view, is enhancing leaders’ own skills and capacity. My INSEAD research, for instance, revealed how men who sponsor upcoming women – even if not easy or successful every time – go through significant leadership growth. They develop greater self- and interpersonal awareness, emotional intelligence and informed decision-making. One senior executive in a global energy company comes to mind: he spoke about cross-pollination of ideas and collaborative thinking by sponsoring women across business units.

4. How has focusing on women-centred sponsorship changed not just the companies you work with, but the women and communities they reach?

Women I’ve researched and worked with over the years speak about multiple benefits. On the visible, tangible side, a leader believing in their talents and having their backs for the next promotion, key assignment or pay negotiation certainly generates positive outcomes. Let me counter skeptical views on this point though: sponsorship should never be a free ticket and requires investment from both sponsor and sponsee. Women also make such outcomes possible through their steadfast commitment and work in delivering results.

Beyond tangible metrics, a striking finding from my research was how women with a sponsor experience a greater sense of belonging. Working in a men-dominated industry or being one of only few women in executive teams can take a psychological and emotional toll, in some cases leading to exhaustion, burnout or resignation. Having a senior person who truly champions you – whether in the room or behind the scenes – makes a huge difference in reducing isolation and managing resistance from other senior figures.

It’s also worth saying these experiences, especially if formally structured and supported through the company, help women as much as men become better sponsors. Not every woman who reaches the proverbial top is inclined or finds it easy to sponsor. And of course, there are other talent barriers that go beyond gender. My view is that all leaders have a responsibility to develop the skills and actively sponsor one woman (or under-represented person) in their business at any one time.

5. If every company truly understood the value of investing in women through sponsorship, how would that transform the landscape for the next generation?

A central pillar of my work is that sponsorship is a core leadership competence. This enables sponsorship to be developed and supported through the pipeline – amongst existing and emerging leaders – and as such, helps build fairer and more inclusive cultures for future generations. This human-centred focus is even more crucial as we see existential tensions playing out geopolitically and technologically around the world.

Your question brings to me back to my opening story and something personal again. In many companies where I worked, there were few women executives – even fewer who were working mothers. It’s only in hindsight I notice how much that framed my images of leadership, the unspoken norms around what I should or should not achieve professionally and how to find my way in practice. That’s why I’m a firm believer in the power of role models – other women who push boundaries and show what’s possible.

So, the big transformation from sponsorship is where women not only take up higher roles and new fields of work, but are seen and celebrated in these milestones to give us inspiration and hope!