Northern Kentucky University management professor Dr. Sandra Spataro spent more than seven years working in Silicon Valley at Oracle before answering her true calling.
“I knew that working there wasn’t my career, but I was learning so much about business and people and figuring out what I wanted to know more about,” she said. “At one point, I was working in the legal department and applied to law school — that’s what everybody did there.
“Through that process, I realized I really wanted to be a professor. I said, ‘If I want to be a professor, why am I doing law school? Why don’t I do something that actually interests me?’ My path to becoming a management professor unfolded organically.”
After graduating with a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000, she embarked on her teaching career in the Ivy League. She taught at Yale and Cornell before coming to NKU nine and a half years ago.
“Organizational behavior is a broad field where I get to pursue all the business and people questions that interest me, from different perspectives,” she said. “I am so grateful for that time I spent in industry because it grounded my research, thinking and now my teaching.”
Dr. Spataro knew that she had found the teaching home she had been looking for when she came to Highland Heights for the first time.
“I had been working at great schools where research was the top priority,” she said. “But success was only measured by the last paper you published. I actually like teaching more than research. When I interviewed at NKU, there was this great balance. They said, ‘Yes, you’ve got to publish because we are an academically important school, but, boy, is teaching important here.’
“NKU is really a special place, which was obvious to me from my first set of interviews. It was so clear that the priority was on teaching and the connections that faculty made with students. The importance of making a difference in the students’ lives was so inspiring.”
Dr. Spataro has seen the Haile College of Business at NKU expand and grow over the years. She believes in the importance of always bettering the degree programs.
“Our assistant program director who counsels just about everybody through the program, Kari Wright Perkins, is in close touch with the students,” she said. “Any time they have praise to sing or critiques to offer, we hear from them, which is great. We encourage them to do that, so we are able to learn and improve all of the time.
“We are also expanding the offerings. We have MBA focus areas that we call stacks. Recently, we have gone from offering seven options to 11. There are more in the hopper. We are always looking for ways to let students tailor the content of the program to where they want their career to go.”
Broadening Horizons
Dr. Spataro grew up in Livermore, California, about 40 miles east of Berkeley. She always knew that she wanted to be an educator someday.
“It was my dream,” she said. “From the time I was a little girl, I was thinking about leading workshops with grown-ups, not school-age kids. Teaching adults has always drawn me. I was involved in training at Oracle.
“Teaching has been a pull through my professional career. I have quite a few family members who are educators — it’s in our blood. I would take those tests to see what I should be when I grow up. Mine said, ‘Be a teacher, be a teacher or be a teacher.’ I was getting some clear messages.”
After graduating from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s in sociology in 1988, Dr. Spataro went straight to the corporate world before becoming a teacher 20 years ago.
She served as a visiting associate professor at the University of Utah for one year before starting at NKU as an associate professor. She teaches MGT 620: Leading Organizational Change and MGT 621: Negotiation and Conflict Resolution in the online Master of Business Administration program.
“I was not one of those running to online teaching — I had to go kicking and screaming,” she said. “I have found it to be much more rewarding than I expected. I really do get to connect to my students.
“I teach leadership courses, which are pretty personal. They do a lot of personal reflection, so I kind of make them let me get to know them. I get to give a lot of personal feedback outside of the coursework. I got convinced about online teaching, and I am a pretty tough customer. I am a believer now.”
Another aspect of online education that Dr. Spataro enjoys is the students’ full participation in each course.
“When we have a discussion in a classroom, you can hide in the back,” she said. “When it’s online, every single person speaks to every single topic and gets feedback from the professor every single time. I miss being in the classroom, but I like the mix.
“The way online has opened up the opportunity for more people to take on graduate school is great. They can do it at crazy times of the day. People are heroic the way they do it while working full time. It makes it totally worth it.”
Full Trunk
Teaching is just one of Dr. Spataro’s many passions. She is the co-founder of a consulting firm, InspireCorps, and has co-authored two books: Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World (2004) and Dare to Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration in Work and Life (2019).
“We launched the company about eight years ago,” she said. “We do leader and team development and culture change. We make a difference in work by finding inspiration in it.
“We have done the research and written a book [Dare to Inspire] on how to engineer inspiration into what you’re doing in your life and your work. We are running around preaching that good stuff.”
Dr. Spataro also enjoys attending live theatre, which has made staying home because of COVID-19 especially difficult. She used to sing in the Northern Kentucky Community Chorus.
“I just got my message from the Cincinnati theatre series,” she said. “They have rescheduled dates, so we have dates in place for when we might be able to go back inside of a theatre. I am dying for that. Cincinnati has a rich theatre landscape. I have baked a lot of bread during the pandemic when I would have rather been watching musicals.”
Although most of Dr. Spataro’s family now resides in the Midwest, she loves going back home to California and visiting the Redwood Forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
“We grew up there and went every single summer,” she said, recalling trips as a tot with her mom and dad. “We go back and visit our sweet trees. They got burned a bit in the fires, but they are resilient.”
Like those botanical giants, the enormous potential to enrich students’ lives on their educational journey continues to inspire Dr. Spataro.
“I could feel the impact more at NKU than at the Ivy League schools, and I get to work with a much more diverse array of students — not just in race and ethnicity, but in age, background and socioeconomic status,” she said. “It’s a whole lot more rewarding for me. That’s what makes me stay. I found my home. I found my tribe.”
Learn more about NKU’s online MBA program.
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