Roger Spoelman helps senior leaders find true north, and helps mission-driven organizations understand the generations who will lead beside them next.
I believe people, and the generations coming up behind us, are made with purpose. That's true whether I'm sitting across from a CEO who has lost her bearings, or training a seventeen year old to run a focus group with his own peers.
For leaders and boards who already carry the weight, and who need a thinking partner who has actually sat in the chair.
Learn how this works →For organizations trying to understand Gen Z and Gen Alpha, researched by trained members of those generations, not adults guessing on their behalf.
Learn how this works →Most executives I meet aren't short on competence. They're short on clarity about where their energy actually comes from, and what is quietly draining it. The Bull's Eye, a three-ring exercise I built across nearly four decades of leadership, helps a client see that line clearly, and start protecting it.
I also use a seven life dimensions exercise with clients, a separate tool, to pinpoint the issues that are most pressing right now and to make sure coaching stays wholistic. Work is never the only dimension of a leader's life that matters, even when it's the loudest one.
Coaching runs on a monthly, all access retainer. There's no clock running and no sense that a hard conversation is costing you by the hour. You reach out when something is actually happening, a board meeting that didn't go the way you expected, a hire you're second guessing, a decision you can't quite see clearly yet. I'm there when it matters, not on a fixed schedule that has nothing to do with your actual week.
My own conviction, that people are created with purpose, shapes how I coach. I don't lead with it. It shows up in how I listen.
Most research about Gen Z and Gen Alpha is conducted by people who aren't in either generation. An adult with a discussion guide asks a sixteen year old to explain his own life, and the sixteen year old gives the adult the answer that ends the conversation fastest.
Spoelman Group Custom Research, SGCR, works differently. Every researcher we field, the person designing the questions, sitting across from the participants, and presenting the findings, is a trained member of the generation being studied.
We build the research instrument around your real question, then train peer researchers to carry it, rather than handing them a generic template.
Trained peer researchers run the interviews, focus groups, and fieldwork inside their own cohort, where people talk differently than they would to an adult holding a clipboard.
Findings come back from the same researchers who gathered them, presented directly to your leadership or board, in the room.
Roger Spoelman, DBA, spent nearly forty years in healthcare leadership, most of it as President and CEO across Trinity Health's regional systems, where he led 24 hospitals, more than 30,000 employees, and over five billion dollars in revenue. He later served as Interim CEO of CURE International, a global network of children's hospitals.
He stepped away from that role to make room for what came next, coaching, teaching, and board leadership, and founded Spoelman Group. Today he serves as Founding Board Chair of BAMF Health and Interim Dean of the School of Business and Innovation at Cornerstone University, alongside his coaching and research practice.
On the leadership habit of assuming you already know what someone else is thinking, and what it costs.
On paths, groups, and the decisions that define your direction, told through forty years on a bicycle.
A short essay on the line every board eventually has to hold, and what happens when it doesn't.
Whether you need a thinking partner in the chair, or a clear read on the generation coming up behind you, reach out directly.