The research team, led by Mia F. Williams, MD, MS, and Rachel Schwartz, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco, together with Colleen A. McGourty, Crystal Liang, and Mitchell D. Feldman, conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with fifteen leaders within a large academic Department of Medicine. The participants ranged from division and section chiefs all the way up to the dean’s office, capturing perspectives from those who control access to many of the opportunities that determine advancement in medical academia. The researchers used an inductive thematic analysis approach, coding the interview data to identify patterns in how leaders described their sponsorship practices, their understanding of the sponsor role, the principles guiding their decisions, and their views on what institutions could do better.

Perhaps the study’s most striking finding is its universality: every single leader interviewed engaged in sponsorship. Yet their conceptions of what sponsorship meant varied widely. Some leaders saw it simply as an embedded part of their leadership responsibilities, something they did routinely without special reflection. Others described it as a passion and a core mission, framing sponsorship as central to their identity as leaders and to their obligation to cultivate the next generation of academic physicians. This variation matters, the authors argue, because sponsorship often occurs out of sight, without metrics or tracking mechanisms, which means the distribution of sponsored opportunities may depend heavily on each individual leader’s style, awareness, and priorities rather than on any consistent institutional standard.

What drives a leader to sponsor one faculty member over another? The interviews surfaced several recurring factors. Familiarity with potential sponsees loomed large, including their previous and potential performance and the clarity of their career goals. Leaders described watching for faculty who demonstrated excellence and ambition, then deliberately connecting them with opportunities such as leadership roles, high-profile projects, and introductions to influential colleagues. Another prominent theme was equity in the distribution of opportunities. Some leaders consciously worked to spread sponsored chances across their faculty rather than concentrating them on a favored few, while others acknowledged that sponsorship naturally flows through relationships and networks, raising questions about who gets noticed and who remains invisible.

That network dependence emerged as a double-edged sword in the findings. Leaders emphasized that effective sponsorship relies on robust professional networks and institutional influence, their own accumulated social capital being the raw material they spend when they vouch for someone. As one theme captured in the study’s title suggests, leaders described sponsorship in vivid terms of access: they can open doors that remain closed to others. But social capital is unevenly distributed, and prior research cited by the team, including a 2024 scoping review by Schwartz, Williams, and Feldman, has questioned whether sponsorship actually promotes equity in career advancement in academic medicine or instead amplifies existing disparities. Studies of gender differences in sponsorship, including work on National Institutes of Health grant recipients and on women in anesthesiology and emergency medicine, suggest that men are more likely to be sponsored into positions of influence, and that women and faculty from underrepresented groups often face narrower pathways to the networks that sponsorship requires.

The leaders themselves recognized this tension. Interviewees highlighted the inherent bias embedded in sponsorship practices, acknowledging that informal, relationship-driven advocacy tends to favor those who resemble the sponsors or who already move in the same professional circles. Several participants called for additional infrastructure to support equitable sponsorship, arguing that institutions cannot rely on individual goodwill alone to level the playing field. This aligns with a growing body of literature arguing that mentorship is not enough: as Ayyala and colleagues wrote in Academic Medicine in 2019, career advancement in academic medicine requires deliberate sponsorship structures, and Gottlieb and Travis argued in 2018 that the time for formal sponsorship models is now.

Even the most committed sponsors in the study faced significant barriers. Inadequate time was the most commonly cited obstacle; sponsorship is labor-intensive, requiring leaders to make introductions, advocate in meetings, and follow through on commitments, all on top of clinical, research, and administrative duties. Uncertainty about best practices compounded the problem, with leaders unsure whether they were sponsoring effectively or fairly. A lack of institutional support rounded out the barriers: because sponsorship is invisible and unmeasured, leaders receive little recognition for doing it well and no feedback when they fall short. The result is a system in which the engine of career advancement runs on personal initiative rather than institutional design.

The study’s conclusions point toward concrete reform. Williams and her colleagues call for explicit definitions of sponsorship, transparency about how sponsored opportunities are allocated, and institutional support structures that make sponsorship visible, accountable, and equitable. Practical implications could include tracking who receives sponsored opportunities, training leaders in sponsorship practices, building formal sponsorship programs that pair faculty with senior advocates, and embedding sponsorship expectations into leadership job descriptions. Such measures, the authors argue, are essential to promote equitable career advancement, particularly for women and underrepresented minority faculty who research shows are less likely to benefit from informal sponsorship networks. In a field where positions of power remain disproportionately concentrated, the difference between a mentor who advises and a sponsor who opens the door may be the difference between a stalled career and a leadership role.

For the broader scientific and medical community, the study is a reminder that career pipelines are not built on merit alone. The invisible labor of door-opening shapes who becomes a department chair, who sits on national panels, and whose research gets amplified. Making that labor visible is the first step toward ensuring it serves everyone. As academic medicine confronts persistent disparities in its leadership ranks, this research suggests that the question is no longer whether leaders should sponsor their faculty, since all of them already do, but whether institutions will finally build the scaffolding to make that sponsorship deliberate, transparent, and fair.

Subject of Research: Sponsorship roles and practices among leaders in academic medicine and their impact on equitable faculty career advancement

Article Title: “I Can Open the Door”: Sponsorship Roles and Practices in Academic Medicine

Article References: Williams, M. F., Schwartz, R., McGourty, C. A., Liang, C., & Feldman, M. D. (2026). “I Can Open the Door”: Sponsorship Roles and Practices in Academic Medicine. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10573-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10573-6

Keywords: sponsorship, academic medicine, mentoring, career advancement, faculty development, workforce diversity, gender equity, leadership, qualitative research, professional networks, Open, Door

The first study highlighted in the editorial tackles the mentoring half of that equation directly. Jones and colleagues describe the JUnior Faculty Mentoring Program, known as JUmp, a novel curriculum designed to teach early career faculty how to become effective mentors rather than simply assuming they will figure it out. The program consisted of three eight-hour mentor training sessions covering a deliberately practical set of topics: whether to take on a mentee in the first place, effective communication, goal setting, delivering feedback, and navigating the predictable stages of a mentoring relationship as it forms, matures, and sometimes ends. Between 2015 and 2023, 235 Department of Medicine faculty enrolled from an academic medical center along with its affiliated safety-net hospital and Veterans Affairs medical center, a breadth of settings that the editorial writers single out as unusual among mentor training programs.

The reach of the program is notable. Participants were nominated by their division heads or could self-nominate, and 43.1 percent were in their first three years on faculty while 85 percent were in their first six years. Crucially, the program was not restricted to a narrow research elite; the editorial notes that previous efforts to train junior faculty in mentoring skills had focused on clinician researchers, whereas JUmp deliberately included junior faculty who spent less than half of their time on research activities. That inclusiveness matters, the authors argue, because the mentoring burden in academic medicine falls across the entire faculty, not just on those with protected research time.

The evaluation combined pre- and post-intervention surveys with content analysis of written responses, and the response rates were strikingly high: 95.3 percent for the pre-program survey, representing 224 of 235 participants, and 76.6 percent for the post-program survey, with 151 of 197 responding. The post-survey was not administered in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the conclusion of JUmp, most participants reported greater mentoring confidence across the board. Fully 99.3 percent expressed confidence in whether to take on a mentee, 98 percent reported confidence in mentoring effectively, and 86.8 percent felt confident setting goals and expectations for the mentoring relationship. In addition, 87.4 percent agreed that JUmp gave them the mentoring skills they had hoped to gain.

The downstream attitudinal effects were equally striking. Almost three-quarters of participants, 74.8 percent, said they were more likely to mentor trainees and junior faculty after completing the program, 62.9 percent felt more connected to and supported by their Department of Medicine, and 96.7 percent said they would recommend JUmp to others. For the editorialists, these numbers demonstrate something the mentorship literature has often taken for granted: that mentoring competence in early faculty can be explicitly taught and is valued by the participants themselves. Most existing work on early faculty mentorship focuses on the importance of finding and developing effective mentor relationships from the mentee’s perspective, rather than on developing the mentee’s own skills once they cross over to the mentor’s side of the table.

The second study shifts the focus from giving guidance to receiving influence. Cioletti and colleagues offer a perspective with actionable tools and case examples designed to help sponsors and sponsees promote equitable career advancement for junior faculty. Their central framing is that sponsorship is not a two-way relationship but a three-way one, connecting a sponsee, a sponsor, and the sponsor’s professional network. A sponsor does more than advise; the sponsor promotes a junior colleague’s work, extends access to a professional network, and exerts institutional influence on that person’s behalf. It is a form of career capital that mentorship alone cannot provide, and it is disproportionately concentrated among senior leaders.

Cioletti and colleagues organize effective sponsorship around three themes, each illustrated through a case example: self-advocacy, aligning agendas, and finding a sponsor who can, in their phrase, spotlight and cover. Effective self-advocacy within a sponsor-sponsee relationship is bidirectional. Sponsees advocate for themselves by translating their accomplishments into specific, time-limited requests, while sponsors proactively offer their sponsees high-visibility opportunities, such as an invitation to present shared work to influential audiences. Aligning agendas means that sponsors recognize and champion a sponsee’s distinct goals and contributions rather than molding sponsees in their own image, while sponsees assess whether a sponsor’s agenda genuinely matches their own and bring a skill set that complements, rather than duplicates, the sponsor’s own strengths.

The third theme, spotlight and cover, describes the dual protective function of a good sponsor: increasing the visibility and recognition of a sponsee’s work while simultaneously shielding that person during periods of professional growth. In practice, sponsors may extend a sponsee’s responsibility incrementally, for example by offering to co-lead an initiative, while sponsees sustain the sponsor’s investment through transparency and reliability in their work. The authors argue that with deliberate practice, sponsorship can advance junior faculty while also raising a sponsor’s own prominence, making it a mutually reinforcing relationship rather than an act of institutional charity. They emphasize that intentional sponsorship holds particular promise for the equitable career advancement of women and faculty historically underrepresented in academic medicine.

The editorialists are careful, however, to flag real limitations in both studies. The JUmp evaluation did not collect data on sex, race, ethnicity, or faculty rank, a decision made to protect confidentiality, which means whether participation and benefit were distributed equitably could not be assessed. Pre-surveys gathered demographic information but not baseline confidence or attitude measurements, so the true magnitude of the curriculum’s impact on those measures remains unknown. The evaluation also lacks longer-term objective outcomes on participants’ mentoring activity and success, including grants, publications, promotion, and faculty retention, and the 23.3 percent non-response to the post-program survey may have introduced bias by excluding unmeasured dissatisfaction. On the sponsorship side, Cioletti and colleagues note that almost three-quarters of sponsor-sponsee pairs share the same gender or race, but the editorial raises an uncomfortable follow-up: this concordance may place a disproportionate burden on the relatively small number of women and underrepresented faculty already in leadership, whose limited time may be drawn on disproportionately to sponsor the next wave of early career faculty.

Together, the editorial concludes, these two articles illuminate an ongoing tension in academic medicine that becomes most acute at the transition from trainee to faculty. Early career faculty abruptly become both mentee and mentor at once, balancing competing departmental demands on their time while being expected to seek out sponsorship to advance their own careers. As the well-defined training pathways of residency and fellowship give way to a far less structured model of career advancement, the authors argue, institutions should not assume that early career faculty will spontaneously develop their own mentorship skills or find sponsors without distinct faculty development opportunities. Realizing the potential gains in career advancement, job satisfaction, and equity, they write, will require academic medical centers to invest deliberately in both formal mentor training for early career faculty and clear institutional expectations and support for sponsorship, so that the faculty being asked to mentor the next generation are not left to navigate their own career advancement alone.

Subject of Research: Mentorship training and sponsorship for early career faculty in academic medicine

Article Title: Learning to Mentor and in Need of Sponsorship: The Dual Demands on Early Career Faculty

Article References: Learning to Mentor and in Need of Sponsorship: The Dual Demands on Early Career Faculty. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10814-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10814-8

Keywords: academic medicine, mentorship, sponsorship, early career faculty, faculty development, Journal of General Internal Medicine, mentoring programs, career advancement, medical education, health equity, junior faculty, physician training