Changing the Face of Leadership in Higher Education: "Sponsorship" as a Strategy to Prepare Emerging Leaders of Color

The continued underrepresentation of people of color in senior-level leadership roles within higher education underscores the need for targeted leadership development programming. Building upon the well-documented benefits of mentoring, a recent focus on sponsorship has emerged in both popular and s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of ethnographic and qualitative research Vol. 15; no. 2; pp. 117 - 136
Main Authors Hernandez, Kathy-Ann C, Longman, Karen A
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cedarville University 2020
Subjects
Career Development
College Administration
College Faculty
Deans
Disproportionate Representation
Empowerment
Ethnography
Higher Education
Instructional Leadership
Language Role
Language Usage
Leadership Role
Leadership Training
Mentors
Minority Groups
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Summary:The continued underrepresentation of people of color in senior-level leadership roles within higher education underscores the need for targeted leadership development programming. Building upon the well-documented benefits of mentoring, a recent focus on sponsorship has emerged in both popular and scholarly literature. The present article reports the findings of a 10-month collaborative autoethnographic study that immersed 16 emerging leaders of color in a sponsorship program aimed at fostering their leadership development. Data analysis revealed the utility of sponsorship for leadership development in three major ways: (1) awakened awareness of the need for mentors and sponsors, with sponsorship viewed as augmenting mentorship; (2) recognition of the benefit of having clear-cut language specifying parameters for sponsorship as a distinctive leadership development tool; and (3) gaining a sense of enhanced empowerment for taking action in navigating career advancement. We discuss these findings and their implications for practice, note limitations of the present study, and offer recommendations for future research.
ISSN:1935-3308