Newton Cheng is a husband and father, champion powerlifter, and is Director of Health + Performance at Google. He models and teaches a unique performance-oriented approach to vulnerable leadership that he’s developed throughout his career. His goal is to break the stigma around mental health in the workplace and beyond so that we can achieve our most ambitious goals without sacrificing our ability to take care of ourselves and each other.
Drawing on his unique background at Google as well as his journey to becoming a world champion athlete, he has unique expertise in the intersections of health & wellbeing, and performance of individuals and teams. Despite still working as an executive at Google, Newton has openly shared about his struggles with mental health and burnout in order to model what it looks like to pierce the stigma around mental health.
Exclusively represented by BrightSight Speakers, Newton has spent his 16-year career at Google developing, launching and scaling global programs aimed at helping Googlers to thrive. Today he oversees a global portfolio of Google’s physical and digital health & wellbeing amenities. He spends much of his time exploring how Google can leverage spaces and services, community, culture and technology to support the physical, mental, social, and spiritual health of Googlers, their families, and our neighbors.
As a powerlifter, he has set multiple world, US, and California state records, and is a world and 8-time US national champion.
Newton was born and raised in Macomb, IL. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from University of California, Berkeley.
Speech topics
Real Talk on Vulnerable Leadership
Newton Cheng went on mental health leave on Jan 18, 2022. Despite working in the field of health & wellbeing for 20+ years, being a world champion competitive athlete, and having access to world class experts and robust mental health support services, he still burned out.
In this keynote he will share the story of his journey to burnout and back, and what he’s learned about how we’re hampering innovation by not practicing vulnerable leadership… so many of us leaders get it wrong when we do try to demonstrate vulnerability, and how we can practice it effectively via a skills-based approach.
True leadership requires risk taking and failure. However, our culture tells us to “fake it until we make it” and to “never let them see us sweat”. What might we be able to achieve if we could actually share our struggles so that we could take better care of ourselves and each other while pursuing our most daring ambitions?