TRAVELEX

SPONSORSHIP PROGRAM FOR HIGH POTENTIAL DIVERSE TALENT

At Travelex, we wanted to accelerate the careers of our high potential ethnically and gender diverse talent, helping to improve the diversity of our leadership pipeline. Through the Travelex Sponsorship program, our diverse leaders of the future, "the sponsees", are matched with a member of the Travelex Exec, “the sponsors”, who then support their development over a 12 month period.

Ingroup and outgroup theory shows us that we gravitate towards people who are similar to ourselves from an identity or background perspective. This in turn leads to informal sponsorship of colleagues, inviting them to participate in career development opportunities or change projects. This can lead to white men informally sponsoring the development of other white men in their organisations, meaning that the diversity within the higher echelons of organisations never changes.

Through succession planning, we have identified our gender and ethnically diverse colleagues that have the personal will and technical skill to be the leaders of the future. This programme is about providing them with enhanced opportunity to grow, by facilitating their exposure to critical learning experiences to take the next step in their career.

Similarly, we recognise that to foster a culture in which colleagues can openly discuss topics related to equality, our senior leaders need to have an understanding of the lived experience of our ethnically and gender diverse colleagues. By discussing topics such as microaggressions or intersectional identity, our sponsees will be reverse mentoring their sponsor to optimize the equality literacy of senior leaders in our business.

Our motivations for the creation of a sponsorship as opposed to a mentorship programme is reflected in the etymology of the words. While mentoring comes from the Latin “to teach”, to sponsor comes from the Latin “to pledge”, reflecting the personal accountability for our senior leaders to accelerate the careers of our high potential diverse talent.

Our measures of success in the short term will be the critical learning experiences that the sponsees will be exposed to through their sponsor, with the longer term measures being the impact on gender and ethnic diversity at our executive level. Should this pilot of the programme prove to be successful, we will expand future sponsee cohorts to encompass other strands of diversity.