Some leaders learn about culture from books. Bruce and Roger Spoelman learned it in the pool and the gym of the Muskegon YMCA, where they spent so much of their childhood that it felt like a second home. Decades later, both brothers were running a Y of their own. Roger went on to lead hospitals through some of the hardest cultural work an organization can face.
Bruce Spoelman served as CEO of the Muskegon YMCA and Executive Director of YMCA Camp Pendalouan. Along the way, he worked at an engineering company in Toledo, built and sold businesses of his own, and spent a couple of years as a boarding parent at a school in the Himalayan Mountains. Roger Spoelman became CEO of a Y at 27. He then spent several decades in healthcare, most notably as President and CEO in the Trinity Health system. Today he advises organizations and boards through critical leadership transitions. In this episode of The Winning Cultures Podcast, host Jason Piasecki, who has known both brothers for nearly 20 years, talks with them about where their leadership began and what a lifetime of building cultures has taught them.
The Coach and the Competitor
Their dad was a hardworking small business owner with little free time. Family night at the Y on Fridays and the Saturday dad-and-son swims became some of the brothers’ favorite memories. Bruce started swim lessons at two or three and was on the swim team by five.
Roger is four and a half years older, and for a while he was Bruce’s swim coach. Bruce made Roger’s times his target. “If I could beat Roger at his time, then I felt like I’d really accomplished something,” Bruce says. Roger saw early that his little brother was the more determined competitor. Years later, the two were running side by side in a race when Bruce said, “Well, I’ve got to go,” and pulled away. Bruce kept excelling, and Roger realized he’d always been more interested in coaching.
The Guardian of the Spirit
Bruce’s first stint at YMCA Camp Pendalouan, on Big Blue Lake in Montague, was only supposed to last a summer. The Y was considering selling the property to meet its financial obligations, and his job was to protect the asset so it would bring the best price. He decided to do more than that. “I felt like I was the guardian of the spirit of Pendalouan,” he says.
He dropped traditions that had crept in over the previous few years and went back to the camp’s roots, asking what made its alumni so fiercely loyal. Part of the answer was the mix. Pendalouan had always brought kids from every background together, including families of means who chose it for exactly that reason. Bruce brought that back, and the camp is thriving today.
Years later, he did it again at the Muskegon YMCA. People locally and nationally had all but given up on the organization. The building where the brothers grew up was sold, and it’s condos now. What survived was the mission: “We wanted to build a healthy future for Muskegon.” Today the Y is healthy fiscally and in its programs, and it’s a national model for what it does.
Bringing Proud Cultures Together
Roger knows how deep loyalty to an institution can run. In Muskegon, osteopathic physicians couldn’t practice at Mercy or Hackley, so they started their own hospital, Muskegon General, and built a proud, close-knit culture around it. In 2008, Mercy Health and Hackley Hospital merged. Each hospital had generations of loyal families. “We’re Hackley people, and we’ve always been Hackley people,” Roger says, describing how many in the community felt.
Roger and his team didn’t treat that loyalty lightly. They held ceremonies honoring each hospital’s founders: the Sisters of Mercy, Charles Hackley, and the founding physicians of Muskegon General. Then they asked a simple question. If those founders were here today, would they want to sacrifice the good of the whole community just so their own part could survive? “No. That isn’t why they founded these hospitals,” Roger says. What came out of it was a new culture, and one community hospital system with more resources for the lakeshore than three competing hospitals could have offered.
What You Tolerate, You Endorse
Roger says every organization has a culture. The real question is whether it’s healthy or toxic, and if it’s toxic, there’s only one person to blame: the CEO. Slogans and vision statements don’t tell you what a culture is. “If you want to see what the culture is of an organization, look at the leader. What do they tolerate?”
He also warns that culture leaks. Saying what matters once isn’t enough. At Trinity, he talked about the organization’s pillars every time he spoke to employees and every time he reported to the board. “You have to be sick and tired of talking about it,” he says. Bruce adds that leaders need to hire people who are different from them, welcome board members they don’t always agree with, and be secure enough to remember it’s about the organization, not about them.
Listen, Watch, and Subscribe
Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or watch the full conversation on YouTube. Every episode is on The Winning Cultures Podcast page. If you know a leader who’s working to bring a culture back to life, send this one their way.
