Breakthrough Sponsorship: How to Be the Sponsor You've Always Wanted by Belinda Runkle
One of biggest career secrets for reaching the top levels of executive leadership is the power of sponsorship, particularly for women and URMs in technical organizations. While mentorship and allyship are necessary components of leadership development and inclusion programs, they are insufficient for putting women and URMs into the C-suite and the board room. Every single executive leader has the power to be a sponsor in accelerating the careers of others, but there are few playbooks on how to be a great sponsor for your highest potential employees. In this talk I'll cover the ins and outs of how to achieve breakthrough sponsorship while building a lasting legacy of leadership growth, fueled by a culture of sponsorship.
Belinda Runkle
Belinda leads Google Cloud's monetization infrastructure, a collection of massive telemetry systems as well customer product experiences for enabling customers to manage their cloud costs. Belinda is a seasoned product engineering leader who brings enterprise cloud experience to Google after having served as a VP of Engineering at New Relic where she led their flagship cloud monitoring and observability product line. Prior to joining Google, Belinda served as a VP of Engineering at Fastly where she was responsible for the control plane for Fastly's CDN and edge compute offerings. Belinda's passion for building awe-inspiring and useful products for developers highlights the past decade of her career. She has been an unsinkable advocate for diversity and inclusion at work. As a non-traditional tech careerist, Belinda's college work was in studio art and anthropology, and she continues to bring insights from both areas to the craft of software engineering and product design. Belinda lives in Seattle with her partner and two dogs.
