No such thing as a 'typical' day for this credit union executive

Kim Sponem

Age: 39

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Position: President of Great Wisconsin Credit Union, formerly CUNA Credit Union

Company at a glance: 150 employees, will grow to about 160 with new headquarters, which alone will have 70 employees

Sponem's background: Marketing assistant at Credit Union Executive Society; marketing manager at Summit Credit Union; joined CUNA Credit Union as vice president of marketing in 1995. Named president and chief executive officer in 2002.

Education: Graduated from LaFollete High School, bachelor of science in marketing from UW-Madison in 1990, MBA from Edgewood College in 1997.

Personal: Husband Mark Sponem is a civil engineer for the state. Three

children: Aspen 9, Mason 6, Ross 3.

Q. How did you get into the credit union business?

A. I fell into credit unions like a lot of graduates kind of fall into different industries, because I was like many other grads looking for a job and interviewing at a lot of different places. The same day I got three offers. First it was no offers and then three at once. I decided that I would go work for the Credit Union Executive Society and in a marketing assistant type of role and that was what introduced me to credit unions. I had no idea what credit unions did and what their purpose was and how they were different from a bank. I knew none of that before going to work for CUES.

Q. Was it difficult balancing your MBA studies and working as an executive at the same time?

A. Not really, because I had only been out of school for about a year and a half. And the reason why I started it was not necessarily to get my MBA but because I love to learn. And I love that school stimulus. I just took one class a semester for a while and then I started out with all the fun, easy courses -things I was really interested in and then I realized, "Oh geez, I'm almost done. I need to finish this thing." So I stepped it up and started taking a couple classes a semester but they were all the harder classes. I wouldn't recommend doing it that way ... It took me a while. I just took my time. The neat part of it was being able to apply the class to what I was doing. It was great.

Q. Is it hard balancing your busy schedule with family life?

A. When Mason was born, (Mark) decided to go part time and is home a couple of days a week with the kids. It's a neat situation. He enjoys it. It works great for me. The kids love it. But it's tough. You have very little down time. And you don't get a whole lot of sleep. You try to cram in as many things as you can. I think that work life and home life needs to be a balance. Not every day or not every week but at the end of the year hopefully you balance it out fairly well. One of the things that I love about my job is that I do put in a lot of hours and a lot of strange hours ... but I also have the flexibility to go to their school parties or visit them at lunch. There are times when I'll be in here at 4 in the morning but not always. And I'll grab e-mail when I'm at home. I feel like my home life and my work life are one. It kind of merges together.

Q. You've moved up quickly. Did it seem like a rapid progression and why do you think you moved up so quickly?

A. Yeah, I can say that I've yet to get bored. I like to take on a lot of things. And that is one of the things I think my previous bosses always liked about having me work for them. If I saw something that I thought needed to be done within the organization, I would do it. I didn't wait to be asked or even ask. I would do it and take it on ... So I think the initiative and the perseverance is something that has helped a lot. Also, I'm a continuous learner and I've had great mentors and I think that always helps. I do work hard, I do push myself quite a bit but it's also being in the right place at the right time.

I've always been pretty goal driven. The reason why I left Summit Credit Union to come to CUNA Credit Union was that I had a goal in mind that I wanted to be a vice president by the time I was 30. So in order to reach that goal, I had to leave even though I was very happy at Summit. And then I wanted to be the president of an organization or run my own business by the time I was 40. And I became president at 35. So I've always been kind of goal driven and had these kind of artificial time frames but it's worked for me.

Q. What is your typical day like?

A. There is no typical ... my day is kind of a combination of meetings with my senior staff. I have manager meetings. I have full staff meetings but not every day. Also my day consists of community involvement work. I usually take my lunch hour to do community involvement or in the morning. Board seats. I sit on quite a few between community and credit union boards. I like to do some reading in my day. E-mail has gotten to be overbearing. I get over a hundred e-mails a day...I get feedback from (credit union) members, which are always very high priority. I get e-mails from lots of people internally ... I'll get e-mails from different community stuff.

My favorite thing to do is really spend some time thinking about where we're going as an organization. How we communicate that. Keeping things on track from a strategic plan perspective. It's really what I do is lead the organization in moving forward in a number of different initiatives and delegating and holding people accountable and making sure everything is aligned and consistent. I feel like I am primarily a communicator of ideas and direction.

When my kids ask me what I do: A lot of meetings.

Q. Why do you think it's important to be a member of so many boards?

A. I think it's important to give back to the community that you serve and to help make Madison a good place to live. I also think a credit union's role is to educate so we try to get involved in some of those areas we can provide education to consumers.

Q. What do you do to unwind?

A. What my stress relievers are? They're typically exercise. Or to read or to take a hot bath or I also like to, about 11 o'clock at night, I'll pop a bowl of popcorn and I'll eat it very slowly. It sounds like a very weird thing but it does relax me. Just watching anything (on TV). I watch very little TV unless it's between 11 and 11:30. It's a small window.

Our kids are involved in quite a few things so we're usually taking them somewhere to do something. But I would say the best things (we do with our kids) are helping them with their homework and listening to them read. I do a lot of that. I'm the primary person that they read to. I stress reading a lot to our kids.

Q. Great Wisconsin Credit Union is going through some changes with the building of its new headquarters in the town of Madison. Why did you choose that location?

A. We chose that because part of our social mission is to make sure that we're serving folks of modest means. We picked that area for a number of reasons. When looking at where to put our administration site we could have gone far west or far east. That seems to be where financial bank mecca is ... But we wanted something that was centrally located and in a lower-income neighborhood.

Q. What's the advantage of your new location?

A. Since we're already far west here (at the Yellowstone Drive location) I didn't want to move us to the far east and lose a lot of our good folks that don't want to commute that far.

We feel very strongly that part of being a credit union is to make sure we educate a lot of moderate- and low-income folks too. Not exclusively but we wanted to make sure that we were being part of the solution in that area that needs development and needs a financial institution.

Q. What do you like about doing business in the Madison area?

A. I love this community. I think the people are fantastic. They're just really good folks to do business with, not just from the customer perspective but also business-partner wise. The community involvement is neat. There are so many people who are willing to do a lot for this community. There's definitely a level of education and professionalism in this market. People are smart. They know a lot. They're very knowledgeable consumers and they know what questions to ask. I think the university definitely has an influence on that.

Q. What don't you like about doing business in Madison?

A. I don't like some of the things that come out of city government. The one being discussed right now with the mandatory sick leave. The smoking ban. Although I'm a non-smoker ... I think it's a bit intrusive into the business world. It's not as pro-business as I would like it to be.

Q. What are some of the company's goals now?

A. On our bimonthly survey (of members) we have a scale of 1 to 10. And we consider world class - we've done a lot of research on this - to be at 9.4 consistently. We're at 9.2 consistently. We typically get a 23 or 24 percent response rate.

Q. What kind of information are you looking for with your member surveys?

A. Things like creative problem solving. Friendly, fast, efficient service. Convenience. Personalized experience. Did we look for ways to save them money? That's one of our goals.

Q. What do your members seem to be happy with?

A. In our yearly survey the two areas our members think we have a competitive advantage in is friendly, efficient, knowledgeable staff. It's number one. Number two is better rates and lower service fees.

Q. Is there anything they want you to work on?

A. Yeah. They want us to have more branches. Branches came up a lot.

We went for years with only two locations. Our west location and our east location. And in the last four and a half years we went from two to seven. Our members want more of it right now.

Q. What were some of your biggest triumphs?

A. Expansion of the business. Business lending. We do a wonderful job of serving small businesses. Our mortgage department is world class. They, by the way, get 9.8, 9.9 on surveys out of 10. Our branch deployment efforts. Our service levels. Our alignment as an organization. We consider ourselves an employer of choice. We use an outside firm to survey our employees.

Q. It sounds like you put an emphasis on feedback from your employees and customers. Why is that important?

A. I think service is a differentiating factor. We all experience service that is mediocre and we're actually sometimes surprised when we actually receive good service. I think that's important. I think that the only way you can do that is when you have employees that are happy coming to work. We all spend a lot of our lives at work. We really believe that if you're going to spend time at work you ought to spend it enjoying what you're doing, having some fun and making it count.

Q. How do you ensure your employees are happy?

A. We talk about it a lot in our managers meetings. We talk about it a lot in our full staff meetings. Our employees are very engaged in our organization. I have a lot of employees that will e-mail me or stop up in my office and talk. Our (human resources) area focuses in on that.

Q. What mistakes have you made as an executive?

A. After I became president, I jumped into a lot of community involvement things at once. It was just too much to juggle. It was far too much and it wasn't thoughtfully planned. Not really ever saying no. Every opportunity was a yes. I wasn't very thoughtful of how I was going to spend my time. So I got spread really thin and that was hard. I had to unbury myself.

Q. How did you unbury yourself?

A. Well, that was a process. I actually did it fairly analytically in that I listed all of the things that I was involved in...I put in the number of hours spent on those things each month and I found out that I had no time to prepare for anything. So no wonder I was spread so thin. So I looked at it and thought, "Oh, my gosh! What can I give up, what can I delegate?" and slowly crossed them off the list. You can't just drop everything so it took almost a year to get to the point that I'm at now, which is much different.