Ep. 97: Dave Sparkman on How To Spark Your Culture
In this episode, David sits down with Dave Sparkman, Former SVP of Culture at UnitedHealth Group, Founder of Spark Your Culture, and Executive Director for Crossroads Career, to discuss how to spark your culture.
Buy David’s NEWEST Book “Trusted Leader”: https://amzn.to/3luyqf1
Dave’s Bio:
Dave Sparkman is the former SVP, Culture at UnitedHealth Group, a Fortune 5 company. Over 9 years, he led efforts to infuse an over 300,000 person organization with a corporate mission and values that would improve corporate results.
Currently Dave serves as the Executive Director for Crossroads Career, a national non-profit career transition ministry. He’s also the founder of SPARK Your Culture, an advisory firm specializing in helping organizations transform and flourish through healthy, high performance cultures.
Dave’s Links:
Website: http://sparkyourculture.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsparkman/
Key Quotes:
1. “Culture is the thing or environment that permeates through an entire organization.”
2. “The more that you help an individual become grounded in who they are and what they believe, that will then translate to the organization.”
3. “People are looking at people more than they’re looking at memos.”
4. “Our behaviors are driven by what makes sense to us.”
5. “Community is so important.”
6. “You will never really get alignment unless you have clarity.”
7. “Leadership shadow is everything.”
8. “Wins often time come from where you least expect.”
9. “You’ve got to allow people the time to engage.”
10. “Integrity and trust are core to the core values of every organization in the world.”
11. “Most importantly, listen to your people.”
12. “Almost everything can be defined.”
13. “Very few people like to be micro-managed.”
14. “Unification doesn’t mean uniformity.”
Links Mentioned In The Episode:
Crossroads Career: https://crossroadscareer.org/
Spark Your Culture: http://sparkyourculture.com/
2023 Trusted Leader Summit: http://trustedleadersummit.com/
Trust Edge: https://trustedge.com/
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David’s Links:
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David Horsager:
Welcome to the trusted leader show it’s David Horsager and I’m thrilled about my next guest. He is a friend. We got to know each other when he was the chief culture officer at the massive United health group, fortune five company. He’s up to some interesting things today, and I’m just grateful to have you on Dave Sparkman. Welcome to the show.
Dave Sparkman:
Thank you, David. Pleasure to be here.
David Horsager:
Dave, give us a little quick little update, a couple things you’re doing now. You’re writing up a new book. You’re up to some cool ministry things. What’s the, what’s the two minute update.
Dave Sparkman:
Yeah, well, I’ll make a less than two minutes. I’m currently serving as the executive director for a faith based job transition ministry called crossroads career where we help those people who are unfulfilled or unemployed. And I’m also in the process of writing a book as you know called spark your culture lessons learned to ignite and fuel lasting results. So hopeful to have that out in circulation by next year.
David Horsager:
I love it. Well, this is some of the work we got to do together, and of course I’ve even employed you and, and asked for your advice multiple times and had consulting from you as we’ve tried to grow our company. And you worked with us on the trusted leaders summit most recently, but you know, we had some great years working together and partnering, I guess we are Institute partnered with United health group and all the great work you were doing, but let’s jump in on this culture piece right away. You know, what, what is culture?
Dave Sparkman:
You know, culture is defined by many, many different definitions depending on the person in the day. David, what I like to think of as culture is it really is the thing or environment that permeates through an entire organization. And that’s driven most of the time by behaviors because that’s what we can see. I believe it’s deeper than that though. I believe it is, is founded in the core beliefs that individuals bring to an organization and how an organization can create a culture of shared beliefs that then drive everything that that organization is doing. So it comes out of the core values.
David Horsager:
We can get into the how soon, but tell us just what was the progress you saw and you were with a big consultancy before this before United healthcare, but what was some of the progress you said? You know, it was pretty fun for me to watch some of the cultural change at a massive company. Many people think they can hardly turn around a little company or, or add to a small company. And yet there is a lot of great progress that happened at United health group. Just tell what does that look like when you see healthy culture, at least in parts of an organization
Dave Sparkman:
For, for us at United health group, what it looked like was becoming very clear with what we believed and what we valued and, and how should we behave. And you’ve seen our core values, David, and, and prior to the establishment of that there were some core values which no one knew what they were. Each of the different divisions of the business had their own core values, some of which overlapped, some of which didn’t and of course, no discussion ever took place around what those core values were or how they could be used. Once we made the decision. And in this case, our CEO, Steve Hemsley made the decision that we needed to become grounded and, and unified. That’s where the actions started to happen. And we saw a lot of good results coming out of that.
David Horsager:
And it seemed like one thing you did is, well, let’s just let me just ask, how do you cascade that, you know, this, this idea of unity and alignment and I guess a common language, how, how did you cascade that throughout an organization?
Dave Sparkman:
Well, we didn’t begin the way that societal culture begins today with a hashtag and a social media campaign. We did not go that route. Instead. We went directly into help helping people, person. What I call personally appropriating the values appropriate is a very strong word. I, I believe it’s it’s U and usually when you’re seizing something from someone else, and we wanted people to not just be accountable for the values and not just take ownership of the values, we wanted them to appropriate those values for themselves. And we did that through a workshop. And as you know, we also utilize the trusted edge leadership workshops to additionally fuel that because we feel that the more that you help an individual become grounded in who they are and what they believe that will then translate to the organization. So we started with the, with the individual and encouraged individuals to do things with their teams to cascade it. And then of course we employed all of the normal corporate communication vehicles. We could to get the word out. But people are looking at people more than they’re looking at memos and how those people show up is what I think helped cascade it even more.
David Horsager:
I’m gonna come back to a little bit more of the cascading and your role in culture, but let’s go to behavior, cuz we’ve had some fun discussions about this. How do you actually change a behavior? We see so many people say they want to change a behavior. They want to change a habit and they rarely do what does it actually take to help others? We say, we can’t really motivate anyone else. Right. But how do we do, how do we help actually, where you’ve seen behavior change happen what’s been present.
Dave Sparkman:
Yeah. Well I’ll just share my own example of me personally, David, the first step is awareness, right? Do you even, are you even aware you need to change because our behaviors are driven by what makes sense to us. We do what makes sense to us. Otherwise most sane individuals wouldn’t do it when I become aware that there could be a different way to behave and I’m shown what those alternatives could be. Then I make a decision, oh, if I use this, I’m gonna get better results. And that’s where the, the root starts. So I’m aware. And then I get an insight that I could change to something different. And then of course, forming new habits. And that’s where the, how, how, how coming out of trusted leadership was just huge for me and some of my own personal habits in changing because I then tied it to something that was meaningful and changed some habits. So awareness, insights. And then how, how, how to make that habit really stick is, was key.
David Horsager:
How did you keep it going, you know, for a decade or so? I mean, United health group had a tangible and maybe they do more now. I, I, I’m not touching there as much you’re have moved on to other things, but, but in those days, I mean, for someone to even see positive culture change for a decade is pretty significant in organizations. How did it get reinforced?
Dave Sparkman:
You know, we, we tried to reinforce it by telling stories of what others were doing to make significant improvements in their own operations, their own departments, their own teams. And whenever we would hear about that, this comes into the cascade. Then we tied into the communities that had been established through our culture work and community is so important to all of us as individuals generally associate with some group of people. And we formalized that to some extent by creating an outfit called culture ambassadors and culture ambassadors were simply someone that had been grounded in our United culture. And they voluntarily said, I want to continue in this. I want to know more. And that then gave us license to utilize that group of people and shepherd them if you will, but also receive from them many of the things that they were doing to then reshare it back out, basically broker that information back out to the community. And that just starts the wildfire burning because people get encouraged from what they see other people like themselves doing. So it’s not, you know, memos from Dave talking about something that maybe doesn’t really resonate with them. These are their teammates, their peers that are doing things in different ways that get different and better results. And when we share that, that starts to get that flywheel turning faster and faster.
David Horsager:
And I think you got you, you also did a really great job of at back to the beginning of having a common language at the beginning, creating a common language in those, those values. And then you can, you know what, you’re reinforcing, you know, what you’re cascading. And I remember Steve also had really clear priorities. I think at the time it was quality and something. They could, everybody knew it right throughout the whole organization. So having clear suit over 300 and some thousand employees, but cl people know their priorities and think, can think about what that means to them here now and know this common language of how we do life. What, what these behaviors look like, mattered, speak to that.
Dave Sparkman:
Yeah. Clarity, of course, one of the eight pillar is huge. And alignment is huge and you will never really get alignment unless you have clarity. there, there is a pattern of the chicken and the egg here, and clarity does come first because unless you are able to, in our case specifically define what we’re looking for in our case, the, the core values and then start to attach things through those core values. And as we shared at the trusted leader, some of the values lens that people can look through you will see life differently when you’re given a filter and you start to, you know, make a point of looking through it and you start to see things you didn’t see before. And then with the workshops starting to make people aware of their own behavior, letting them personally appropriate it, letting them tell the stories of what they did, sharing that. And then also recognizing it, we created a recognition platform around our core values and used a technology tool through another company to enable people all the time share what’s going on. So it no longer became necessary to be brokered. So there was no bottleneck of me or anyone else. It was just out there and basically taking the social media internal to United health group did a lot to help us progress.
David Horsager:
You’ve had all these years of the chief culture officer you’ve had years and consulting at one of the biggest consulting firms in the country. You’ve had years leading a ministry. And a lot of other things, what do you’re, you’re writing this book, let’s jump in and here just a little bit about where that came from and the heartbeat of it. And then I wanna get into a couple of the lessons at least that you’re writing about these days.
Dave Sparkman:
So I I don’t consider myself an author David, as, as you and I have talked about words I can usually verbally process fairly well, but getting them onto paper and articulating that has been a challenge. So it’s not something that I was really eager about doing. I do feel compelled that that’s something that I should do and I’m doing it because it helps my life purpose fulfill my life purpose, which motivates me which is to glorify Christ by helping people and organizations achieve their aspirations and his purpose. So the book is a vehicle to help that happen. And I feel like those nine years that I spent in that role, I certainly learned a lot. I made a lot of mistakes. How could I help other people benefit from some of the mistakes and the lessons learned? And that’s something that I feel we’re all supposed to do in serving others. So if there’s somebody that can benefit from that, that’s the purpose of the, of the book.
David Horsager:
Tell me about your biggest mistake. If you’re up for it, what’s one of your biggest mistakes.
Dave Sparkman:
Oh, how many can we count?
David Horsager:
Dave Sparkman:
Oh, I I’ll two immediately come to mind. One, which I think is common to a lot of people is we always think when we wanna change the culture, it’s about George needs to change. It’s not me. Our culture would be great if it were full of Dave Sparkman’s it’s about George. And if George were only getting it, if George, so the first mistake I made was looking to point to somebody else instead of pointing at myself, I needed to make changes. So that was the first mistake. And thankfully I got through that one and then continued to learn over the nine years. But then programmatically, there was a mistake we made. We, I made a, a decision that we wanted to try to Institute a, another role, another community of called values coaches. And it was trying to get, trying to get after the natural intact teams, because we saw the leaders of those teams. Many times, weren’t really taking full advantage of our United culture, the way we thought they could. Oh, so let’s create a role where someone can come alongside them and help from their team, their natural work team and help guide and influence that. And that just didn’t work. It didn’t take which goes back to a host of other things where personal appropriation and not fully happened. And you can’t substitute for that. People need to get it or they don’t get it. And you’ve gotta work around that. You can’t substitute.
David Horsager:
How did you get buy-in from leaders cuz many leaders, senior leaders, even at United did buy in. And that’s a big challenge for a lot of people when they can’t really do anything about it, but they need the buy in of their senior leaders. How do you get that?
Dave Sparkman:
Oh, it, it is a key essential thing. David’s leader leadership shadow as we call it is everything which is walking the talk. If our CEO, Steve Hemsley didn’t want this to happen, it would not have happened. But what Steve did do was show extraordinary commitment and continuity of the longevity of what he wanted to see happen with our United culture. The other thing I be, I am grateful for is he empowered myself and the communities to do work that maybe he would not have done himself. And that enabled us to try some new things without it necessarily being his. And so he, of course, as the CEO always had the prerogative to overrule something, but he gave us a lot, lot of leeway to try new things, many of which happened to work. And so that, that leadership buy-in is one that I explore a little bit in the book and it comes back to a belief system and a faith of taking action upon those beliefs that the core values are truly what will drive the end game of people’s behaviors. If all you do is focus on behaviors. In my opinion, you just have compliance and compliance. Ultimately doesn’t motivate people the way a, an insight or a belief in the conviction that goes with those beliefs can do
David Horsager:
That’s so true. Wow. What we saw and I was privileged to watch you and your team make some immense change and have a great impact and just come alongside in a few ways. Over that time, what a, what a, what a treat it was. Let’s get to this book, spark your culture. What are a couple of the key lessons you especially come top of mind, I guess for sparking a high performing healthy, I would say high trust culture.
Dave Sparkman:
Well, you, you hit one of them, Dave, and that’s a common language. If, if you don’t have a common language it’s just as silly as if you were speaking in Spanish or another language. And I was speaking in a different tongue, we would not understand each other. We would not be able to move quickly. We would not be aligned. We would never get clarity. So a common language is something I expand upon and closely related to that is to be very specific with what you’re talking about many times leaders will say, well, you know, we’ve got the core values written out and that’s what we should do. I, I was talking to a leader of another company just recently last week and he is a manufacturing facility CEO, and they were having some safety issues, nothing significant, no one passed away was killed, but people were injured and he goes, Dave, we’ve got safety as one of our values, but it doesn’t seem to be taken seriously by our workers.
Well, let’s back up the train a little bit and let’s start to describe what does safety mean to you? and what is articulated already. And then how does that resonate with the people to whom it’s being said, and you and I have both been around the block enough, Dave, to know that we can all hear the same message and interpret it very differently. And so unless you allow some time for that to settle and, and get more specific and granular then you won’t have that clarity in that alignment. To me that are key to a hugely successful transformative, transformative culture.
David Horsager:
What does it mean here? What does it look like to you? I, I remember that even about your values. It correct me if I’m wrong, but the values had attached behaviors so they could see what does that value look like? A lot of people have core values, they have values, but that’s like, what does this look like here?
Dave Sparkman:
True, correct. Correct. Yeah. We, we had a paragraph about the behaviors and then of course, once we established that then in our learning and development department was able to more fully blow that out into more specificity for a call center agent, for example, versus a nurse and versus a doctor for example. And that’s what we encourage our senior leaders to do is take these values and now get very specific with your group of people. What does that look like every day? And let’s go to some of your pain points, apply the values lens, get specific with what you expect. Because most of the time when, when peop a supervisor and a supervisee are in conflict, or there’s a lack of performance, David, it’s simply a, a mismanaged expectations. You know, the boss is thinking they, they were clear and the, the person doesn’t show up intentionally there to not do a good job. They’re trying, they just don’t seem to connect. And that’s what we’re trying to be more
David Horsager:
Clear. Even we, we take the pillars we go through and exercise, especially with character. You know, and we say, what define, what does character look like here? Because it turns out some people incentivize their sales teams in ways we never would, as far as character or people have argued with me, you know, oh, Hitler had more character than Churchill. And what they mean is if integrity is being the same, in thoughts, words, and actions, of course you know, Hitler would get up at a certain time go to bed. So he wouldn’t even drink coffee. I mean, he was very congruent, I guess you could say in a, in a way, and yet you know, Churchill had moral character that was different. That really probably saved us all at the darkest out of the 20th century. And so we have to put integrity with moral character in some way, if we’re gonna get what we mean by character, right? Because just integrity being same. You can be the same and thoughts, words, and actions in ways that I wouldn’t agree with it all
Dave Sparkman:
Correct. Absolutely
Anne Engstrom:
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David Horsager:
So there’s a CEO out there or, or VP or a C H R O listing right now. And they’re thinking, you know, I think culture’s important. I can see how we could be higher. Our, our culture’s dying, there’s poison, there’s all these issues. And I could see how you know, in our company, we part of our mission is dev, you know, creating high performing cultures built on trust, but, but they, they see the need, but they’re like, where do I start? What, what, what would you encourage them to, to even do, to think about, to, to move forward and to even care, or even, you know, get buy in from others in senior leadership to take culture seriously, as a real goal. In fact, I was just thinking about our research. I think I have it right here. I, I, this was not set up.
Actually I had this from the last interview. I did. I wonder if I can find it very quickly basically if I can pull it out right. What people are ask. Yeah. If you, you know, most people are listening instead of watching, but the, by far in organizations when people were asked, where did they want their executives to spend their attention or focus on, you know, from not finance, not technology and equipment, not strategy, not the product or service, not this, but culture was by far number one, people in culture. And so what, what would you just encourage the, the executives to do, to just start thinking about how to create, how to start this process toward a high performing culture?
Dave Sparkman:
I think a lot of companies, Dave rely on what I call the five PS to drive their business and the culture. They rely on the platforms, the programs, the processes, the projects, and in some cases, the personalities to drive what they’re doing. And those are all very useful and necessary for a, a company to execute. But for culture, one of the lessons learned was wins often time come from where you least expect it. And if you’re not allowing every person to be empowered to execute the culture, if instead, you’re relying on the five PS, you will never get that fulfilled or never sustain it as well as it could. And I, there are countless examples to go through, but if I were a C H O or a CEO or a COO, trying to say, how can I start to transfer my co culture first?
I’d say, have you, are you specifically defining what you want that culture to be? You’ve been around enough people where leaders that talk to you, Dave saying, we need a culture of innovation, or we want a culture of trust, or we want a culture of integrity fill in the blank, but how well can they articulate it? So one specifically defined two. You need a personally appropriate, allow people to take ownership and seize what the values are. Three, you need to actively apply. And that’s where these communities come into effect. And so to think that you are going to do it through a senior leadership team and then send memos out. That to me is just save, save your time and breath and paper. You’ve got to allow people the time to engage and encourage them to engage and re recognize them and foam that activity.
And then you’ve gotta reinforce it all the time. And then last is, and this was a lesson learned. We had to keep it fresh. And, and that’s where you and trusted Le edge leadership came in because we had already established the values. We were well in our way, but yet how do we get, and I’ve said this at the trusted leader, summit integrity and trust are core to the core values of every organization in the world, in my opinion. So how do you do trust? Well, tell, has it trusted leadership has a methodology, has a platform to use that. So we were able to augment supplement, compliment trust edge within what we were already doing. And that helped people say, oh, there’s another angle at which I could look at this. And as you know, we, we used other organizations to continual continually keep it fresh. So senior leaders listening today, when was the last time you tried something new, it may not work, but bring in some fresh voices, some fresh eyes and, and allow your people to see that this is earnestly, what you want to have happen. And if you’re listening to them and empowering them, you’ll get some great answers that you haven’t gotten before.
David Horsager:
What I think is brilliant about what you did is, you know, many organizations go in and they create AFL, have a flavor of the month. And that’s a lot of times when people even bring in us or others, and they just do that flavor of the month, just do the, a keynote or a workshop or something. Right. And on the other hand, you have people have something that might be kind of good, but get stale. And what you did is you have this core that kept getting fed in fresh ways. And so this core kept true and yet there was a freshness to it. And I think that was that’s in all my work on culture, in all the big fortune 100 companies and universities and everything we work with. I think there was a uniqueness that I saw at United health group that I was really proud to be a part of.
Dave Sparkman:
And you benefited us quite a bit, Dave, and that provided you at another lens to look at life through a trust lens, which helped make our values even more secure in being our values. A lot of organizations have the word integrity as a value. Well, that was the value for us. But when you start to put together, all the people that contributed to what integrity meant at United health group trust edge leadership was part of that as was a host of other organizations and individuals who helped us see it more broadly. And that’s where I think a leader who’s looking and maybe frustrated with something, not working, get some fresh eyes on it, get some fresh voices and see what they come up with. And also most importantly, listen to your people. They know what work is gonna work, and isn’t gonna work, but most companies are, are really into control , which is necessary for good UCA, good execution. But how does that make the employee feel? And that’s why I think we have the great resignation because companies are trying to make good decisions on hybrid work environment, remote work, all these other things, very difficult to navigate through, but are they really talking and listening to their people versus, well, I’m looking at a number and I think I can do some math. And that’s where I get there. Well, anyone can do math,
David Horsager:
So I’m gonna jump here. We gotta land the plane and I want to get personal. But before I do, you brought something up and I’ve gotta go there. Sure. How in this work environment, this virtual work environment, I mean, I’ve got both sides. I feel both sides. You’ve got the workforce seemingly wanting more. I want this, I want that. I can get, you know, I, I was just talking to someone yesterday, this, this person was interviewing at this place. And they said, yeah, they have two free meals a day and there’s a climbing wall. And I said, is that what makes culture right? Is that what is gonna make it might get them there. But I don’t know if that on its own makes culture, although it might bring in better people. And so you, you, you’ve got this thing of I’ve been doing interviews lately of new people and I’ve noticed several have been like, well, this is what I want.
I want this, this, this not what I’m gonna give. Right. Well, I actually need some people that are actually going to further the mission, right. That are gonna give too. So where we’ve become much more flexible in everything. And, and I was talking to a senior leader about this also where, where the more, the less uniform you are, I’m not saying it’s right. We have all different people, but the more, the less uniform. So you want this flexibility, you want that flexibility you want that is takes a lot, another level of management. It is difficult. So you have people that want more in certain ways and motivated, and there’s different things. And you have leaders that are called to quarterly earnings and driving results and, and, and, and furthering missions too. You know? So how do we in this more virtual work environment in some cases forever how do we balance basically this honoring the unique human and helping them be their best while having an aligned unified culture while having accountability, because Bo you know, there’s an article today.
It’s either in the wall street journal or the times that talked about the whole new industry of basically policing right. Of, of surveillance of your people, right? Checking the key strokes. How much are you working? How much are you, not even people that are coming in, like checking this. And it kind of, for me, it kind of, you know, grates against trust, right? It feels like, Ugh, on the other hand, we also do know employees are, you know, checking social media and websites and buying stuff on company time. So, you know, this is, this, isn’t so easy of a problem to solve. How, how, how should we, we just, you got two minutes just solve it for me.
Dave Sparkman:
So it’s a, it’s a, a long conversation, but here here’s an illustration. Dave, when we had COVID 19 hit companies had to make a lot of decisions very quickly with what to do. And I’ll just pick on call centers, for example. Well, you can’t, can’t put 300 people in the same, big room, all on phones next to each other, three feet from each other in a COVID 19 environment. So what did they do well at United health group? In a matter of a couple days, this is what I was told by a couple guys in their operations. They got those entire 300 force purse, people to work from home. They could do that. Well, why weren’t those people allowed to work at home before? Well, because they didn’t want them to work at home before. So desperation caused something to happen. And I believe people saw their organizations.
That’s just one example, do amazing things to stay afloat and to be, and to actually thrive. I mean, earnings continued for many companies. I mean, obviously hospitality, leisure got pounded as did travel, but a lot of companies did very well. Now what’s happening. Organizations are saying, well, we wanna go back to the way things were. And I believe the employee is saying not so fast. You guys, it wasn’t that you couldn’t do it. It’s just that you didn’t want to do it. Give us some rationale for why it needs to change. And I believe it’s harder and harder as a senior leader to thoughtfully understand and articulate why something needs to happen. So employee would go, oh, okay. I, I understand it. And I’m going to do it because as you said, David, there’s a, there’s an exchange of an employment arrangement. I give you money for the value you contribute.
But if I don’t feel valued and add valued, then the exchange is not going to work. And I believe that a lot of employees don’t feel very valued because their opinions are not being asked their overridden. They feel like they’re being controlled. And, and a lot of this will come into the word feel. Now feelings don’t make earnings per share. Every quarter show up that’s execution, that’s accountability. And there has to be a blend as you well know, people will remember how they feel much longer. So unless leaders get that emotional quotient to work that in which to me gets into some core elements of, of good culture, healthy culture.
David Horsager:
How can you hold accountability there? Just one more jump here. Just how, how have you seen healthy accountability work virtually because call centers make sense, cuz you get this many calls and you can see they went through this many calls, but I’m just like a, a people manager, a, a role that doesn’t have defined number of sales.
Dave Sparkman:
Well, I believe almost everything can be defined David, but we just haven’t taken the time to do it. Most job descriptions that are out there are cut and pasted from the previous job description, the leader doesn’t thoughtfully go through and think about, well, what do I need this person to do? What outcomes am I trying to achieve? What can be empowered? What do I need to stay on top of and, and look over their shoulder. Very few people like to be micromanaged. So I think there is a yearning for employees to say, look, tell me what you want to have done, articulate that, be clear. And then I’ll be accountable to that. That’s hard work for a senior leader, very hard work, particularly when you get into scale of tens, hundreds, thousands of people. So I think I’m not saying David, there’s an easy answer as you well know. But it does take some time and some focus for senior leaders to get back to the drawing, drawing board on clarity and alignment, recognizing, and also to be unified Dave, because unification doesn’t mean uniformity. You can still have huge diversity while being unified around the core values and mission of what you’re trying to achieve.
David Horsager:
Totally well, there’s a lot here on culture and more let’s get personal just for a few moments. How you know, I think people that lead well tend to lead themselves at least in some way. Well, and we’re all imperfect certainly. But what are some things you do habitually to lead yourself? Well, health wise, fitness wise, Lifewise relationally, is there a couple habits that come to mind that help you be better so you can be better for others?
Dave Sparkman:
Well, the, the first habit is one that you helped me achieve on November 8th, 2014, where I went through the workshop of trust edge. And we got into the how, how, how, which gets into my own personal fueling up time in the morning. And when I was able to recognize that I needed to attach that priority, I had said it was a priority for years, but I didn’t execute, but I never missed breakfast. When I said, I want that priority to be, to be before my physical food breakfast, Dave, I haven’t missed many times since November 8th, the 2014. So the how, how, how to go after habits has been very, very useful. The other thing is a lot of people talk about work, life balance and, and, and the boundaries that we may have. And for a lot of years, I thought that I could blame the organization for my own lack of boundaries while the organization needs this, the needs that no, they don’t, no organization needs any one person. So to have the elasticity versus I’m not gonna quit work at six every day, but I’m gonna have thoughtful boundaries and blend what that looks like. That has been, he helpful to me because my priorities do change and the urgency of those for real deadlines versus just made up deadlines to keep me moving, to discern what that is, has been very, very useful.
David Horsager:
Well, we’ve got a lot here and a lot more to go tell us where they can find out and we’re, we’re, we’re gonna have to close it down for now. I’d love to have everybody meet you in person. I am so love the way you work, what you’ve done for work and how you’ve made me better along the way. And so let’s go. Where, where can people find out more about spark your culture and the future, the upcoming book and so forth.
Dave Sparkman:
So I have a, a website spark your culture.com. It’s undergoing some changes right now, but you can reach me at my email address at Dave Sparkman, 16, gmail.com. And
David Horsager:
I’d be all right, and that’ll all be, that’ll all be in the show notes, trust leader, show.com. It’ll all be there and you’ll be able to find out more. It is the trusted leader. Show one last questions for question for you, Dave, who is a leader you trust and why?
Dave Sparkman:
You know, there are several former leaders at United health group that I trust that are leading other organizations now. And I, I trust them because I’ve gotten to know them and I know what their values are personally and how they attach to the organizational values. So the reason I trust people is I see the personal character flowing into the organizational character. That’s when I that’s when I trust.
David Horsager:
Hmm. Great. Lots of those Dave Sparkman. Thank you so much. And thanks, especially for being my friend, this has been the trusted leader show until next time stay trusted.