Our keynote speaker, Gina Marescia, author of Impactful Leadership: Unlock Your Power with CABI™, brought a four-step framework to the room that evening — Confidence and Courage, Articulating with Impact, Branding, and Inquiry — built from her own two decades of coaching leaders across three continents. Moderating the discussion that followed, what struck me most was how naturally her framing connected to sponsorship, the actual topic on the table: confidence and courage are what it takes to ask someone to advocate for you in a room you're not in, and articulating your impact clearly is what makes that advocacy possible in the first place. A sponsor can only vouch for something they can see and describe — vague competence doesn't travel through a room the way a clear, well-told account of what you've actually delivered does.

That's a conviction I hold independently of Gina's model, but her framework gave the room a shared language for it. The panel that followed — senior leaders from two major global banks — each spoke to how they'd turned informal support into genuine sponsorship over their own careers, and the thread running through all their accounts was the same one I've seen play out in my own mentoring relationships: sponsorship isn't given to the most capable person in the room, it's given to the person whose capability someone else can articulate on their behalf, with confidence, when it matters. That's not a soft skill. It's a specific, learnable discipline — and one I've spent a good part of my career practising and helping others build.