Professional Sponsorship: What Happens When Your Sponsor Leaves?

If you are with TD today, I want you to hear this clearly: you are in one of the most powerful professional development environments in this country.

The breadth of roles. The complexity of the organization. The caliber of the people around you. Every move you make within that institution is building something in you - sales, product, strategy, operations, technology, regulatory compliance, distribution, leadership at scale... Most professionals in Canada will never have access to that range of experience inside a single organization. Each role you take on, each new expertise you build, your professional capability is growing in ways you may not yet fully appreciate. It is a genuine privilege, and I say that having lived it for decades.

But here is what I want to talk about today. And it is something I wish someone had said to me much earlier in my career.

Your career is a profession. Not just a job. And your network belongs to your profession, not to the employer you happen to be with right now.

Your network, and what happens when your sponsor leaves

I spent years watching something happen inside large organizations. A talented person would build real momentum - visibility, sponsorship, a leader genuinely in their corner, saying their name in rooms they weren't in, pulling them toward stretch assignments and high-visibility opportunities.

And then that leader would move on.

And suddenly the person felt like they had lost something fundamental. Like their support had disappeared along with their sponsor.

Research backs up what I observed firsthand. Industry data shows that sponsorship can effectively double your promotion speed. But here is the part that doesn't get discussed enough: because executive tenures are shortening (the average tenure for a C-suite leader in North American financial services is now approximately 4.9 years) that acceleration is often temporary. When a sponsor moves on, their protégés can face a sponsorship vacuum, spending 18 to 24 months longer in a single role, working to re-establish their reputation and visibility with a new leadership set.

That is a significant pause in a career that had been moving, and it doesn't have to be.

A new vantage point, not a lost relationship

Here is the reframe I want to offer, and it comes from what I have learned being on the other side of that transition.

The day your sponsor leaves the bank, they do not lose their opinion of your talent. They only lose their seat at the internal table. They have simply moved to a new vantage point. And from that vantage point, connected across industries, across organizations, across networks you may not yet have access to, they can often do more for your career than they could from inside the building.

The most effective professionals I have known on both sides of that transition understand this instinctively. They stay connected. They keep investing in each other. The support doesn't end. It expands.

I want to say this directly to two groups of people.

To those inside any large organization: when a leader you respect moves to a new vantage point, do not treat that as the end of the relationship. That person still knows you. They still believe in you. Your sponsorship should last for your career, not just for your shared tenure inside the same organization.

To hiring managers and leaders: someone with sponsors and advocates across organizations is not less supported. They may, in fact, have the most resilient and developed professional foundation in the room. There is real value in a professional who has been expanding their footprint & perspective beyond the walls of one organization.

The data point that should change how you think about your network

According to Statistics Canada, only about 12.3% of the Canadian workforce has been with the same employer for 20 years or more. When you consider that most careers span 35 to 40 years, the data tells a clear story: the overwhelming majority of professionals, including the people sitting beside you today, will not spend their entire career inside one organization.

This is not a cautionary note about TD. TD is an extraordinary place to build a career, and for many people it will be home for a very long time. This is simply the reality of how modern careers unfold. And it means that the question is not whether your professional world will eventually extend beyond your current employer. It is whether you will be ready, and well-connected, when it does.

Treat your career as a profession & build your network like a professional...not narrowly, not only within your immediate organization, but across the full span of people you are drawn to, who challenge you, who are genuinely for you. Stay connected to those people. Invest in those relationships the way you would invest in any other part of your career. Before you know it, you have something that no restructuring, no leadership change, no organizational shift can take from you: a community of people who will say your name in rooms you are not in....for your whole career.

That is how careers become resilient.

A personal note to close

When I left TD after decades in that organization, something struck me. People can feel like they disappear after they leave. But we don't. We are still the same professionals, with the same values, the same instincts, and in many ways a broader and more developed perspective than we had inside the building. We are still here. And we are hoping to stay connected to the remarkable people we had the privilege of working with and for.

I'll be honest - I haven't always done this as well as I should have. I am on the other side of that now, reaching out to colleagues and leaders I deeply respect, and I have been met with nothing but generosity. People who showed up exactly the way they always did.

That network, the one I am most grateful for today, was built across decades of experiences at TD. It has always been mine to manage and to grow. I am paying much closer attention to that now. And I am so glad to be expanding my professional footprint alongside the people who built it with me.

If you are reading this and we have crossed paths, at any point, in any role, I would genuinely love to reconnect.

Send me a message. I mean it.

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Cori Harding is the Founder of Compass Performance Group: a leadership and performance consultancy helping organizations and individuals perform at their best.