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The Digital Executive · Yesterday · 17 min

Christopher Sprague: Leadership Dev Is Broken. AI Can Fix It. | Ep 1299

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Dr. Christopher Sprague, CEO and co-founder of Enluma Leadership Group, to make the case that one of the most valuable investments a company can make has been locked behind a velvet rope for decades. Chris opens with an unlikely origin story — a high school calculus teacher who created an environment where students worked harder than they thought possible and actually loved doing it — and traces how that memory followed him through a PhD in toxicology, twenty years of leading complex transformations across Fortune 100 pharma companies, and eventually to founding a leadership platform built for the people organizations consistently overlook. The middle. Not the high performers or the low performers, but the sixty-five to eighty percent of the workforce that keeps things running — and that a ten percent improvement in would transform an entire company's culture, productivity, and revenue. Chris breaks down why high-quality coaching has historically stayed at the top of the org chart: it has always been human-heavy, expensive, and unscalable. AI changes that equation, but not by replacing the human element. Enluma's approach uses AI for the spark — curiosity-based questions, nudges, action plans — while insisting that real behavior change only happens in an environment where people try, fail, get feedback, and learn alongside others. He closes with a sharp critique of how organizations measure leadership development today — counting completed workshops and training hours instead of behavior change and business impact — and argues that until companies measure what actually matters, they will keep getting what they have always gotten: notes that collect dust on a shelf and people who go right back to their old habits on Monday morning. If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a review - Apple or Spotify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Dr. Christopher Sprague, CEO and co-founder of Enluma Leadership Group, to make the case that one of the most valuable investments a company can make has been locked behind a velvet rope for decades. Chris opens with an unlikely origin story — a high school calculus teacher who created an environment where students worked harder than they thought possible and actually loved doing it — and traces how that memory followed him through a PhD in toxicology, twenty years of leading complex transformations across Fortune 100 pharma companies, and eventually to founding a leadership platform built for the people organizations consistently overlook. The middle. Not the high performers or the low performers, but the sixty-five to eighty percent of the workforce that keeps things running — and that a ten percent improvement in would transform an entire company's culture, productivity, and revenue. Chris breaks down why high-quality coaching has historically stayed at the top of the org chart: it has always been human-heavy, expensive, and unscalable. AI changes that equation, but not by replacing the human element. Enluma's approach uses AI for the spark — curiosity-based questions, nudges, action plans — while insisting that real behavior change only happens in an environment where people try, fail, get feedback, and learn alongside others. He closes with a sharp critique of how organizations measure leadership development today — counting completed workshops and training hours instead of behavior change and business impact — and argues that until companies measure what actually matters, they will keep getting what they have always gotten: notes that collect dust on a shelf and people who go right back to their old habits on Monday morning.

If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a review - Apple or Spotify. 


Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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