Mentors and sponsors are essential to career success, but these close relationships are not always free from trouble. This book shares advice and practical examples on how to survive and thrive throughout your career by differentiating between good and bad guidance you receive from mentors and sponsors. Real-life guidance is provided on how to manage troubled mentoring and sponsoring relationships at work.

Mentors and sponsors are essential to career success, but these close relationships are not always free from trouble. This book shares advice and practical examples on how to survive and thrive throughout your career by differentiating between good and bad guidance you receive from mentors and sponsors. Real-life guidance is provided on how to manage troubled mentoring and sponsoring relationships at work.

This book is a compilation of very personal approaches to mentoring and sponsoring, breaking the stereotypes of seniority, age or experience. The authors have provided a platform to understand that mentoring and especially sponsoring are in fact a win-win relation, in which both sides, mentors and mentees; and sponsors and sponsored individuals learn from each other, enhancing their career paths. How they managed to create a growth space for themselves and their teams through mentoring and sponsoring, is a story of professional leadership. They shared a privileged outlook to understand the root causes of barriers, as well as to envision plausible solutions for difficult career crossroads, in which mentorship or sponsoring was key to steer step changes. The authors propose not only their vision, but a remarkable collection of unfiltered interviews with young and renown professionals in many sectors, from photography to music, research, sports, energy, and more, completing a vision of what is key for both sides of the equation pertinent to mentoring and sponsoring: the givers and the receivers. They explain what is needed to gain the most out of the mentoring and sponsoring loops, with their own career stories. Success is supported by many factors, in which the most important are the technical competency and performance aligned with resilience. However, in the long path of a career, mentors and particularly sponsors play a foundational and frequently a changing-life role, improving our perspective or triggering reflections and actions that benefitted our journeys at work and in life. This book provides insights on what works for an effective mentoring and sponsoring process. It is useful for all professionals, especially those starting their career journeys.

This book discusses the major challenges facing dual-career couples—a substantial proportion of modern society—and suggests ways for both individuals to achieve career success by re-evaluating traditional styles of working and focusing on productivity, flexibility, and negotiating win-win solutions. Women are becoming increasingly influential in the workforce; the era of men being the primary or only income-earner in a partnership is all but gone. Today, people tend to meet their spouse or domestic partner at school or at work. High achievers tend to pair with other high achievers, often in similar fields. This leads to couples in which both individuals are strongly motivated to have successful careers. What happens when they become parents or when one—or both—individuals need to consider relocating for their job? Many mid-career, college-educated people, especially women as well as undergraduate and graduate students, are concerned about developing a plan to mesh their career with a partner and are seeking guidance. This book offers a gender-neutral guide for 21st-century couples that will benefit men as much as women. The author provides career-management guidance for people in dual-career relationships in which both parties are ambitiously attempting to pursue equally important, high-powered careers, presenting examples of alternative solutions and arguing that many "women's issues"—including parenting and limited geographic mobility—are more appropriately managed in a gender-neutral way as dual-career couple issues. Readers will understand how to make better decisions regarding difficult situations, such as whether to accept an opportunity that adversely impacts their personal lives, choosing to take a leave of absence or to quit, investing a large amount of one person's salary for domestic assistance and childcare, taking paternity leave, and leveraging flexible work arrangements—for example, telecommuting.