Christopher Sprague Podcast Transcript
Christopher Sprague joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Dr. Christopher Sprague. Dr. Christopher Sprague is a transformation executive, entrepreneur, and leadership researcher with more than 20 years of experience leading large-scale business, digital, and organizational transformations across Fortune 100 healthcare companies.
Throughout his career, he has led global teams, modernized complex operations, and helped organizations navigate change in highly regulated environments spanning supply chain, quality, IT, regulatory affairs, and human resources. Today, Chris is the CEO and Co-Founder of Enluma Leadership Group, where he is focused on a challenge he believes has been overlooked for decades: making high-quality leadership development accessible to every leader, not just executives.
After researching leadership behaviors across hundreds of professionals, Chris and his team have developed a practical leadership framework that combines behavioral science, AI-powered coaching, stakeholder feedback, microlearning, and real-world application into an affordable platform designed for everyday managers.
Well, good afternoon, Chris. Welcome to the show.
Christopher Sprague: Well, thank you, Brian. Really appreciate you having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it as well. You’re hailing in Chicago. I’m in Kansas City, so luckily we’re in the same time zone. A lot of times I’ve got to navigate some time zones to get to the guest, vice versa, but I appreciate you. So, Chris, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna jump into your first question.
Christopher Sprague: Sure.
Brian Thomas: Your background is unusual for a leadership expert. You’ve got a PhD in toxicology- Yeah … and more than two decades leading complex organizational changes across the pharmaceutical industry- Yeah … from operational turnaround to enterprise-wide technology rollouts across global manufacturing sites.
You’ve said your earliest experience with inspirational leadership wasn’t in the business at all, but during your senior year of high school.
Christopher Sprague: Yeah.
Brian Thomas: How did that early moment and career in hard science and regulated operations lead you to found a leadership company?
Christopher Sprague: Yeah, no worries, Brian. It’s, it’s a great question.
So my senior year of, of high school and this illustrates my degree of nerditude my favorite class was calculus, and not because… I mean, the, the, the content was interesting, but it was primarily the teacher. So Mr. Michael Gersh. Mr. Gersh was phenomenal, in, in calculus, a lot of times the answers are zero and one, but not in his class.
It was either our Spanish friend Juan or the number of Ms. Sandstrom’s friends. Now, and I don’t know how he got away with that, with zero being the number of Ms. Sandstrom’s friends. And I am… was and am still friends with Karen. She’s fantastic. But he created this environment where we happily came to class every day and, sometimes you don’t understand the magnitude of a great situation until after it’s over So we go through senior year of calculus.
I then go on to University of Delaware for undergraduate, and I decide to take calculus my fall semester. I didn’t have to take calculus. I could have taken a lower math. But what I found very quickly was for the other courses I was taking, high school content was done in about two to three weeks, then you move on to other stuff.
But for calculus, we covered more than a college semester of calculus in Mr. Gerrish’s class. And what I thought was, we worked our tails off, but yet we willingly and happily worked hard. And I thought, why isn’t the business world like that? Why don’t we have environments where people are supported and engaged?
And, and it’s not just hanging out, but you work really hard. And then through background in sciences and regulatory environment, I, I would actually say what I realized was you can get promotions, you can get awards, you’ll remember the title for your promotions, you’ll remember the name of the award, but you won’t remember what you spent the money on.
But if you have an opportunity to help someone grow and become more than they thought possible, that is something you’ll never forget. You’ll carry that on for years. So then what I thought was, how can we create an environment like Mr. Gerrish’s classroom, but then also help those leaders at scale?
And so that really was, I think, the spark that led to Inluma Leadership Group and what we’re trying to do at scale with technology and with AI
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Love the backstory. And you’re absolutely right. There’s always that one teacher, maybe two, that- Yeah … leave an indelible mark on you. And you learned, even though you talked about calculus not being your thing, but you probably learned a lot about calculus that you probably wouldn’t have remembered if you didn’t have that same teacher. Totally. And we’re have- we learn the most when we’re having the most fun, and, and that’s just an amazing story.
And I love what you’re doing. You’re bringing this to the business world, which we all need. We’re just kinda thrown into our career sometimes and-
Christopher Sprague: Yeah …
Brian Thomas: it’s, it’s happenstance and, and really we need to find where we fit best, so thank you. Chris, your central premise is that leadership development has historically been reserved for executive and senior managers.
Christopher Sprague: Yeah.
Brian Thomas: And Enluma… Enluma, I’m sorry, was founded to change that. Why was… Why has high quality coaching stayed locked at the top for the org chart for so long, and what does it actually cost companies to leave everyday managers without it?
Christopher Sprague: Absolutely, Brian. So we’ve really relied on traditional approaches that lean in heavily to humans. Coaching workshops, they really require human intervention. But now with the advent of AI, and really the growth of AI, but also different approaches with technology, we have an opportunity to consider things that before we didn’t even think were possible. And when you think the cost to companies, we’re really focused in on the middle, not your low performers, not your high performers, but the middle, and how can we transform the middle?
And the opportunity with companies is the middle represents typically about 65 to 80% of your company, but yet they’re the ones, they’re consistent, they’re reliable, that we don’t focus on. But if you can have even 10% improvement in the middle, you are talking about a transformed company, not just from a culture perspective and engagement perspective, but also productivity and revenue.
It, it’ll have a huge effect. And, and we’re talking about huge business impact with the people that you already have, but have historically overlooked because we’ve relied on those human heavy processes and approaches in the past
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I– that’s where I like to say it gets messy in the middle, right?
Christopher Sprague: Mm-hmm.
Brian Thomas: You’re absolutely right. Spending just, gosh, you can move the needle probably seventy percent by spending a little bit of focused time in that area, and I really appreciate you highlighting that and, and helping us understand why that’s so important. So, thank you. Chris, you’re passionate about the responsible use of AI to augment rather than replace human development.
Christopher Sprague: Yeah.
Brian Thomas: And, Enluma’s AI, a patent-pending platform grounded in your leadership model, where does AI coaching generally add value in someone’s growth, and where do you draw the line and insist- Yeah …a human has to be in the loop?
Christopher Sprague: Yeah. Our ultimate goal is to enable behavior change that has business impact.
So to do that, there’s really, at a high level, two steps. First is providing a spark or a nudge for people, and this is where AI can come in really handy. It’s using curiosity-based questions to understand what do you wanna do, how can do you have action plans related to that? But the second piece, you may spark someone and you’re really kind of uncovering their motivation or their desires.
But just because someone has a desire to do something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. The second piece is the environment. An environment where people get to try, they get to fail, they get to learn. And while AI can help there a little bit with reminders and nudges, that’s where actually working with other people is so beneficial.
It’s getting feedback from other people. So I, I– to us, it’s really a hybrid approach where you provide that spark and that nudge and, and we see that AI can help with that. It’s not gonna be the end-all solution, but really help with that. But then it’s how do you create that environment? And it’s gonna be a hybrid approach with people, with insights, with feedback and, and likely to a lesser extent, AI, ’cause then that’ll help us to ultimately get to that business impact through behavior change.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. You highlighted a few things. Obviously desire and environment is a big part of that, but AI is absolutely a tool that can help do some of that nudging or documentation or providing feedback. But as always, and we talk about here on the podcast just about every episode has some sort of layer of AI in it there has to be that human in the loop.
And as much as people are saying AI is gonna take every job that’s never gonna happen. There will be some jobs obviously that will be more impacted than others, but I really appreciate what you’re doing with your platform. So, Chris, the last question of the day, you believe technology can democratize coaching and create organizations where great leadership is the norm rather than the exception.
As AI power development scales, where do you see leadership growth heading over the next three to five years? And what has to be true for us to actually build stronger leaders at scale rather than just adding more tools?
Christopher Sprague: Yeah, you know what’s, what’s really interesting is what we measure clarifies what we truly expect.
So, and Brian, you’ve probably been in these situations too, where a organization will say, “We need to upskill our leadership on X, Y, and Z behavior, so let’s put them through this training, let’s put them through the workshop.” But what do we measure? We measure how many people completed the workshop, how many hours were change– or are trained, but you don’t actually measure the business impact.
So, and, and there’s, there’s a lot of groups– There’s multiple groups that are working on that. But what we really see is if you measure business impact, if you measure behavior change, then your expectations change. And so what I would say over the next two to three years, we’re really pushing a change in expectations around the impact that we could have.
And we’re even thinking beyond leadership development. We’re thinking about other trainings or skills that people could acquire, like sales, marketing, project management, that are traditionally expensive but not accessible. So where we’re going is we wanna see for different areas, including leadership development, that change in what we measure will truly tie to our expectations and because ultimately, we do wanna see business impact.
‘Cause if, if people are just doing workshops and coaching and you don’t have business impact, it’s just entertainment. And that’s where we see the shift, and that’s what we’re really pushing to change in, in the next few years
Brian Thomas: Thank you. You’re, you’re absolutely right. It goes beyond checking the box. You have to have some s- sort of engagement, some sort of growth some sort of exercise, whatever that is, to continue to engage folks. Changing that expectation it takes a little bit of work. Obviously, we, you talked about that and then the engagement. But the measurement, you said measurement brings that clarity, and I think that’s where you’re gonna really determine where you need to, to focus in on that work.
‘Cause you’re right. I’ve done that. I’ve been in many leadership, different training formations, whatever it is, evaluations. It’s, it’s, it’s the same everywhere. Check the box. Okay, we’re compliant. But that’s, that’s… It, it takes a lot more than that, so I appreciate your insights for sure.
Christopher Sprague: And then Brian, what happens after you go to those workshops and those courses?
Brian Thomas: You, you take all that, all those notes you’ve taken collect dust in your, in your shelf there- Correct … as in your office. Correct. Yeah.
Christopher Sprague: 100%. 100%. You, you go back to your regular life. You don’t integrate, so there’s no measurement later. There’s no expectation that, okay, did Brian go to this course, and did he change, did he improve, and what was the business impact?
Yeah, so it really speaks to our expectations around you going to that course.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Thank you again. And Chris, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Christopher Sprague: Yeah. Thanks a lot, Brian. Really appreciate it.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Christopher Sprague Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
