Sponsorship - Part 1

I alluded to Sponsorship in my LinkedIn post about leaving Google. Giving and receiving sponsorship was certainly a big highlight of my 15 years career at Google. My accelerated growth from internship to directorship in a decade (that’s 5 promotions in 10 years!) would not be possible without sponsorship.

However I’ve often found in my mentoring/coaching sessions that this is a misunderstood word. It is also hard to understand sponsorship unless you have experienced it - either by giving or receiving it. In this post I hope to demystify this word by sharing more on the topic including some personal stories.

What is Sponsorship?

Carla Harris defines this word better than me in this TED talk. Her quote from the talk that defines a sponsor strongly resonates with me.

This person that is carrying your interest, or as I like to say, carrying your paper into the room, this person who is spending their valuable political and social capital on you, this person who is going to pound the table on your behalf, this is a sponsor.

Sponsors, Mentors and Coaches

If you watched Carla’s talk and are still wondering what is the difference between sponsors, mentors and coaches, let’s break that down a bit.

A mentor is someone who gives you advice. You may find this advice useful perhaps because they have walked the career path you intend to walk. But the mentor doesn’t necessarily have much skin in your career game. Giving advice is easy so the only cost to your mentor for doing this activity is probably the time they spend meeting you and giving you advice.

A coach is someone who helps you discover answers by asking powerful questions. Coaches practice active listening a lot. I have found that some of the best coaches I’ve had did not have any expertise in my domain. More about why this made them excellent coaches in another post! Back to today’s topic - coaches also don’t have an active stake in your career in the sense that it is upto you what you do with the insights from coaching - you are free to use them or not and they may or may not help you in your career depending on whether/when/how you use these insights.

A sponsor is different from all of the above in 2 important ways:

• Like Carla says, a sponsor puts their own reputation and credibility at stake for you. They take a risk for you. They make the choice to support you by risking their valuable political and social capital vs spending it on something else.

• Another way a sponsorship is different is that it is a two-way relationship. Mentorship and Coaching are one-way relationships where the mentor/coach gives and you receive. Perhaps you pay your coach. Or you “compensate” your mentor with a lunch, coffee or a thank-you card. But sponsorship differs from both of these in that just like you have an expectation of getting something from your sponsor, they also have an expectation of you. My stories below will illustrate this further.

Here is my favorite quote that sums up these three professional relationships.

A coach talks to you.

A mentor talks with you.

A sponsor talks about you.

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Receiving Sponsorship

As I mentioned before, Sponsorship is best understood by experiencing it so here are a few of my own stories. In this post I will focus on stories of how I received sponsorship.

Working remotely as a junior engineer

My first story about receiving sponsorship in when I got married in 2010. It was about 8 months after I had joined Google in Seattle, WA. My husband was still working in the bay area in California at the time with plans to relocate to Seattle by end of year. We wanted to spend time together after marriage until he relocated to Seattle. I was a recent grad junior engineer at the time and asking for accommodation to work ~3-4 months by myself in a different office where none of my team was located was a big deal. Given my personal circumstances, I still decided to ask my manager. She agreed to this request and even introduced me to a few folks in a sister team + helped me find a desk in the Mountain View office in California.

This was sponsorship because it was a risk for her to allow a fairly new junior engineer to work on her own in a different office. What if I dropped in performance? What if I failed to respond to emails/chats? What if her manager was annoyed at her for setting an unwanted precedence of allowing someone so new and junior to work elsewhere? Remember this was years before the remote/hybrid work debate started and also years before video-conferencing tech was ubiquitous and mature enough. She still decided to spend her social capital on helping me which made this a sponsorship.

This was also a sponsorship because she had expectations of me. I also had to uphold my end of this two-way relationship and continue doing good work even in my time away. In fact one way I was able to help “pay back” the social capital she spent on me was to go above and beyond in my work during this time.

Building a new team in India during the pandemic

In December 2019 I took a proposal to my then manager about starting a new team in Bangalore, India. At the time I was managing ~40 full-time engineers all mostly based in and around Seattle, US. This new team would add ~30 more engineers to my organization and would support an entirely new area. At the time my VP’s organization did not have presence in India so this would be a new team for the broader organization as well. My manager showed me double sponsorship at the time. First by approving this proposal and championing me as the person to implement it. Then by continuing to support me even when work-from-home started during the pandemic in March 2020 cutting off travel though we still had the bulk of our hiring to do in Bangalore.

This was sponsorship because it was a huge risk for my manager at the time. I had never managed a team outside my timezone before this. I had never hired and ramped up a brand new team in India. And I had certainly never done all this while working from home in the middle of a global pandemic with no travel possible! My manager still spent his social capital to support me as the best candidate for this.

This was also sponsorship because from my side I had to figure out how to make it all work and build a successful team in India. It took some long days and nights, a lot of creative thinking and I learnt a lot along the way (yep that’s all coming in another post!) but had it not been for the sponsorship my manager showed, I wouldn’t have been able to start on this journey.

All Team presentation during MBA block

In September 2022 I stepped up into a bigger role - leading the Engineering Productivity organization for all Google Workspace apps (this is Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Meet, and more!). At the same time Workspace leadership changed with a new GM and a new VP of engineering who became my manager. My new manager planned to host his first all-team meeting for his organization of 3000+ full-timers and invited me to present a segment on engineering productivity.

Giving space to a report in such a large forum to present their work at the very first instance of this event was sponsorship by itself. It was a big opportunity for me personally and for my organization to gain visibility and some well-deserved praise for our recent accomplishments. But there was a small (big for me!) problem - I had an MBA final exam on the same day and couldn’t miss class! 😱

After a restless night wondering how to tackle this, I confessed to my manager in 1:1 that I’d have to pass on this opportunity because missing my MBA final would have more consequences for me including delayed graduation in an already long program that was taking a toll on my family time. What my manager said next really showed strong sponsorship! His comment - “record a video and we will play it during the meeting”!

This was sponsorship. I was a new report for my manager. A large all-team like this is valuable limited air-time, especially since this was the very first one in a new organization for my manager. To spend some of that time playing a recorded video was a risk. What if the video was badly recorded and didn’t engage the audience? What if the org didn’t like it? What if the playback had technical problems?

This was also sponsorship because it was upto me to make sure the video was every bit as clear, complete and engaging as a live presentation would have been. I later heard this went well and received compliments for starting a new trend that helped presenters in different timezones (you guessed it, more coming up on that in another post!) but again this wouldn’t be possible without my manager’s sponsorship.

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More stories of receiving sponsorship in my notes!

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I want to point out a couple of differences in my stories from Carla’s talk:

• None of my stories are about sponsorship at the actual calibration or promotion session. I certainly received a lot of that type of sponsorship as evidenced by my accelerated career growth at Google. However, I wanted to show by example that sponsorship is an everyday phenomenon, not just something that happens during calibrations and promotions.

• I also wanted to illustrate that a career growth is built out of multiple sponsorship moments, not just the advocacy in calibrations and promotions. Each of the stories I mentioned here helped propel my career forward. In fact successfully growing a new team in India during the pandemic was a large part of my director promotion.

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Readers, do you have a sponsorship story to share?

Drop me a comment or a note here! Let’s exchange stories and increase awareness of what sponsorship looks like in real corporate life!