Own Your Moment: Rock the Power of Connection, Collaboration, and Commitment

Why do good people check out, and what does it actually take to bring them back? In this Corporate Compliance & Ethics Week edition of The Ethicsverse, Brant Menswar, bestselling author, keynote speaker, and Founder of Black Sheep Foundry, joined host Nick Gallo, Chief Servant & Co-CEO of Ethico, to argue that disengagement is far more than a productivity cost. It erodes the risk intelligence a compliance program depends on, weakens a culture of integrity, and drives turnover.

Black Sheep Foundry is a leadership development consultancy that connects personal values to organizational priorities, and Brant has brought that work to organizations including Netflix, NASA, and Microsoft. Drawing on two decades as the frontman of a touring rock band, hard-won lessons on authenticity and vulnerability, and more than half a million data points on what people value, Brant made the case that most engagement problems are really belief problems in disguise. Here are the key takeaways.

Key Takeaways

"It's Just Business" Is a Dangerous Phrase

Brant called "it's just business" one of the most dangerous phrases the workplace has ever normalized, because business decisions don't happen to businesses. They happen to people.
In healthcare especially, a decision made in a conference room can change what happens in an examination room, and a concern that goes unreported can become somebody else's crisis.
The moment we convince ourselves something is impersonal, we make it easier to disconnect from the consequences. The opposite of taking something personally isn't professionalism; it is indifference.
Nick noted how easy it is to dehumanize an organization when you are looking at a census spreadsheet. Every line is a person with a family, anxieties, and a mortgage.

Engagement Is Personal

Engagement is not whether someone enjoys their job. It is whether they believe their work matters enough to bring their full attention, judgment, and integrity to it.
We ask people to show extraordinary courage in ordinary moments, like asking an uncomfortable question when everyone wants the meeting to end or reporting something that makes the department look bad, yet we rarely ask whether we have given them something meaningful to believe in.
Compliance tells people what they are required to do. Engagement determines whether they care enough to do it when it is difficult.
For compliance teams who often get cast as "the bad guy," the key is showing a relationship between the work and something human: that you care about the person, the results, and the organization's purpose.

Belief Requires Proof

You can't simply declare a safe space and expect people to believe it. Belief is the amalgamation of all the proof available to someone at any given moment.
Values on the wall and an employee handbook don't define culture. Culture is formed by what you tolerate, what you reward, and what you repeat.
When people see questionable behavior rewarded because the result was achieved, the organization is slowly destroying its culture.
Compliance teams can supply proof by explaining the reason behind a requirement and putting a human face on it: the patient, colleague, or customer at the end of the process.

Track Values, Not Just Behavior

Most assessment tools track behavior, but by the time you are measuring behavior it has already happened, which forces you into a reactive posture.
Brant's research shows that values are largely set by our early twenties, shaped by how we were raised and the people around us. Outside of a catastrophic life event, they remain stable.
Because values are static, they are a powerful tool for predicting behavior. Understanding them lets you raise red flags early and lead "values to values," which produces more authentic conversations and better results.
What does change over time is how we honor our values. Brant pointed to his father, a high school English teacher for 35 years, who at 83 now honors those same values by holding ten-minute conversations with the grocery bagger.

Sometimes You Have to Borrow Someone Else's Belief

Everyone carries experiences that shape how they show up at work, and the strongest connections often form when people are willing to share part of that story honestly.
Showing vulnerability isn't a weakness in a professional setting. When leaders and colleagues let others see the person behind the title, it signals that it is safe for everyone else to bring their authentic selves, too.
That openness builds trust, and trust is what makes people willing to raise a concern, ask for help, or admit a mistake, in the workplace and beyond it.
When difficult moments shake someone's belief, the people around them matter. Staying present and engaging one moment at a time creates the openings to reconnect.
His lesson: sometimes you have to borrow somebody else's belief until you have enough proof to rebuild your own. For compliance professionals willing to be vulnerable and human, that is an opportunity to bridge the gap between compliance and engagement, because belief turns "have to" into "want to."

Engagement Problems Are Belief Problems in Disguise

When most people hear "engagement," they jump straight to behavior. But behavior is too far down the line. Behavior flows from beliefs, and beliefs flow from values.
Fixing engagement requires being human enough to find out what matters most to someone, so they can use those things to achieve the organizational priorities you are asking them to uphold.
Responding to an attendee who felt like a lone ranger in an organization that wasn't a reliable partner, Brant used a music-industry analogy: hit songs rarely break everywhere at once. One station plays a track, it climbs to number one, and neighboring stations get curious. Lead through values and belief in your own corner, and the results will prompt others to ask what you are doing differently.

Hope, Confidence, Conviction

Caring about something is never enough. You need belief to turn caring into action, and Brant's research identifies three stages of belief.
Hope comes from a little bit of proof and sounds like "maybe." Add more proof and people move to confidence, which sounds like "I think." Add more still and they reach conviction, which sounds like "I know," and that is where real change happens.
It is not a one-way journey. Life and work deliver difficult proof that can knock people from conviction back to hope.
When people lose enough hope, they don't quit. They stop engaging and stay, which is worse. Brant cited an estimated $2 trillion in costs to U.S. companies last year from disengagement.
Nick connected this to the value of a compliance program: organizations pay 100% of every paycheck, yet engagement hovers around 70%. Even a one- or two-point lift falls straight to the bottom line. Just because that value is hard to quantify doesn't mean it isn't real.

What People Value Most

Brant shared data from 55 healthcare organizations. Across all ages, the five most shared values were connection, authenticity, freedom, trust, and integrity, with connection leading the next closest value by a factor of three.
Connection held the top spot in nearly every age band, while other values shifted with life stage: gratitude emerged for those 55 to 64, creativity for those 35 to 44 juggling family life, and spirituality, independence, and respect led for those 25 to 34.
Younger employees, especially Gen Z, have something important to contribute. They are asking for the respect to share it.
Fewer than 1% of people know their five non-negotiable values. "Really important" and "non-negotiable" are miles apart: if a value moves under pressure, it is a preference, not a value.
Clarity on your non-negotiables simplifies decisions. You can't control outcomes, only the deliberate intention behind a decision, so judge yourself on whether you honored what matters most. For a function full of self-described control freaks, that is freeing.

Three Warning Signs: Silence, Cynicism, and Shortcuts

Silence is when people stop asking questions, especially the uncomfortable ones. Organizations often mistake silence for alignment, but it can mean people are afraid or have learned that raising their hand isn't worth the trouble.
Cynicism sounds like "that's just the way it's always done here."
Shortcuts appear when the organization rewards the result without questioning how it was achieved.
When you see these signs, ask the real question: what have people stopped believing in?

Ethical Decisions Hide in Ordinary Moments

Some of the most important ethical decisions in an organization are never labeled as ethical decisions. A manager dismisses a concern. A team member notices something wrong but doesn't want to make waves. Someone cuts a corner and is publicly recognized for the result.
None of these moments seems significant on its own, but repeated often enough, they teach people exactly what the organization values, and it is rarely what hangs on the wall.
Your culture isn't what you say you value. It is what your people see you reward, tolerate, and repeat.

Closing Thoughts

For anyone whose team feels checked out, Brant suggested starting with yourself: understand your own non-negotiable values, what they mean to you, how they shape your decisions and leadership style, and why certain things trigger you. As part of the episode, he offered attendees free access to the Black Sheep Foundry values assessment, which takes about ten minutes.

He closed with a single thought. Somewhere in your organization right now, someone sees something that doesn't feel right, whether in a meeting, reviewing a report, or standing beside a patient's bed. Whether they speak up won't be determined by how well they remember their last training. It will be shaped by what they believe: that their voice matters, that their leaders will support them, and that doing the right thing is worth the risk. That is why engagement has to be personal. Someone is counting on a person they have never met to make the right decision, and that person is counting on us to give them a reason to believe they can.