By: Kate Sarmiento
Where do the answers to “how much money is enough” and “how many hours should work take” actually come from? For Dr. Sharon Spano, founder of Spano & Company, that question sits at the center of her work with high-impact leaders, who are CEOs, coaches, consultants, and online entrepreneurs. By her account, almost all of her clients are unclear of their focus or purpose. Many have already tried therapy, mastermind groups, and expensive programs, and they still arrive feeling empty and wondering what went wrong. A leader can hit the revenue target, build the team, and collect the wins, and still end up asking that same question.
Dr. Spano has built her career around answering it. Her work points to the beliefs people hold about time and money, which she says can work against a person’s own success without that person noticing. Those beliefs can sit behind decisions that look like plain practicality or healthy ambition. This article covers how she came to study them, the questions she asks the leaders she works with, and why a choice that looks sensible deserves a closer look before it gets repeated.
Advocate, Consultant, Researcher, and the One Question That Ties Them Together
Dr. Spano’s route into this work started well before she studied business. At 29 she became a mother, and her son Michael, who was born with a disability, changed her life. She says she became strong because of him, and she spent years advocating at the state and federal levels for people with disabilities. That period taught her how much it matters to see and hear other people, and it also left her with a lesson she would carry into her consulting work, which is that a broken system is impossible to fix when nobody can see it.
She put that lesson to use in 1997, when she founded Spano & Company, Inc. and began consulting with leaders at major corporations who were burned out by the broken systems around them. Her focus with those leaders was giving them tools to see differently. Her formal training includes a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems, earned in 2013, where she studied the relationships between wisdom, leadership, and adult development. She is also a Certified Integral Professional Coach with certifications from the Institute for Integrative System Dynamics and the European Institute for Systemic Education and Coaching.
After decades of advocacy, corporate work, and research, she has concluded that the family system is the primary system that sets everything else in motion, including how people think about and lead themselves. Her book, The Pursuit of Time and Money: Step into Radical Abundance and Discover the Secret to a Meaningful and Prosperous Life, takes up the beliefs that cause people to undermine their own success. It draws on human development research, and she writes that prosperity has little to do with how much time or money a person actually has.
The income data lines up with part of that picture. Income keeps adding to the well-being of people who are already happy, and the least happy group reaches a point where more pay stops helping (Source: PNAS, 2023). Dr. Spano describes a version of that gap in her own client work, where she says accomplished leaders come to her unable to find happiness.
A Short List of Questions With Long Answers
Those beliefs are what her questions are built to bring out. Her one-on-one work starts with what a leader wants to accomplish and why it matters to them. From there she asks leaders to look at how they move through the world around that topic, using three questions about what they see, what they do, and how they make meaning. Her systemic mapping sessions look at where a leader wants to go in the context of the larger systems they work and live in. As Sharon puts it, “the system never lies,” and the process helps clients see which patterns are working for them, which are working against them, and how their view of themselves as a leader fits into the picture. The book also talks about internal storylines that drive behavior, and that fits the kind of questions she asks.
Behind those questions sits a framework of twelve stages of human development, and she says a person’s stage affects how they experience time, money, and success. She also teaches a concept she calls the 4 Hidden Loyalties, which she says keeps leaders stuck in what she calls the Emptiness of Success. She traces that emptiness to a lack of awareness in the moment, which is why her work includes a process called witnessing, meant to give leaders the awareness and freedom to make healthier choices.
Time is one of the two resources in her book’s title, and the numbers on it are hard to ignore. Global wealth has risen over the last two decades without a matching rise in free time, and feeling constantly short on time is linked to lower well-being, worse physical health, and lower productivity (Source: Nature Human Behaviour, 2020).
Family Comes First, Even in a Conversation About Revenue
All of this circles back to a conviction she puts at the center of her work. Among her stated core values is that family matters most, since the family is the first place people understand and inherit a sense of belonging. She says leading ourselves and others well calls for investing in preserving, protecting, healing, and restoring the family system.
That belief shows up in the tools she uses. One is a genogram, which works like a family tree that shows ancestral patterns at work in a person’s life and where those patterns help or hurt. Another is systemic mapping, which takes hard-to-understand challenges, from difficult relationships to stalled revenue, and turns them into something a person can actually see. She also says the leaders she works with already know how to achieve goals, so her work centers on shifting perspective. By her description, the aim of that shift is greater confidence, clarity, and passion for the work and the life a leader is already living.
A Question Worth Carrying Into Next Week
For anyone who wants to go further, Dr. Spano’s book, The Pursuit of Time and Money, is the place to start, and leaders who want to work with her directly can reach her through Spano & Company. The book asks readers to consider what happens if the beliefs they hold about time and money are working against them, which is a good question to test on your own life this week.
Pick one commitment on your calendar or one number in your plan, and trace where the belief behind it came from. If you can name who taught it to you, or the moment you started treating it as fact, you will have a clearer sense of whether you chose it or inherited it.
