The Compliance Trap: The Real Reason Employees Disengage Starts in School

Why are so many students disengaged in school? Why are employees doing the bare minimum at work? Why do organizations struggle to build initiative, innovation, and genuine commitment?

In this episode of Thinking 2 Think, Executive Director, leadership advisor, and former NYPD officer M.A. Aponte explores what he calls The Compliance Trap—the hidden system that rewards obedience, discourages intellectual risk-taking, and produces disengaged students, quiet quitting employees, and stagnant workplace cultures.

Drawing from research on intrinsic motivation, employee engagement, psychological safety, organizational culture, and modern education systems, this episode examines how schools and workplaces often reward compliance instead of critical thinking, initiative, creativity, and ownership.

You'll learn:

✅ Why rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation
✅ The unintended consequences of PBIS and behavior-based systems
✅ The real causes behind quiet quitting and workplace disengagement
✅ How compliance culture affects schools, businesses, and families
✅ The connection between student behavior and employee behavior
✅ Why psychological safety is essential for innovation and performance
✅ How CEOs, managers, principals, teachers, and parents can build cultures that encourage thinking instead of obedience
✅ Practical strategies for developing proactive students and engaged employees

Whether you're a parent, teacher, school administrator, CEO, entrepreneur, manager, or simply someone interested in leadership, psychology, education, and organizational culture, this episode will challenge how you think about motivation, performance, and human development.

Think Clearly. Lead Boldly. Stay Logical.

Transcript

The Compliance Trap

00:00:00 M Aponte: Let me paint you two pictures. Picture one a seventh grade classroom. A student sits perfectly still for fifty to ninety minutes or one hundred and twenty. Whatever classroom time it is, she or he does not talk. They does. They don't cause any problems. They follow every direction. And at the end of the class, the teacher marks the student present, attentive on task. That student has not turned in any assignments in three weeks, has not asked any questions in two months, just sits quietly because they learned that sitting quietly makes adults leave them alone. We call that success. And another picture, and this is for my corporate listeners. You're sitting you're in a corporate office. An employee shows up every day on time, never misses a deadline, never complains, never makes waves. Their manager loves them. Their performance review is clean. But that employee has not suggested a single new idea in two years. They do the exact job description. Nothing more, nothing less. The moment something goes wrong that is not in the job description. They freeze, they wait to be told what to do, and we still call that a good employee. Now, was either of those things actually good? And that's what we're going to dive into today. So welcome to Think and to Think. I'm Mike Aponte, also known as M a Aponte. I'm an executive director of a public charter school in Florida, a high stakes decision advisor and consultant, former Army officer, a former New York City police officer, and somebody who has worked on Wall Street and some of the biggest firms that you know of today. I have seen this pattern in every environment I have ever worked in. As a matter of fact, in the New York City Police Department, we jokingly used to say, you do fifty percent of the job and that twenty percent will do most of the will do eighty percent of the work. Um, it's, it's a run in a long running joke. But today we are talking about the compliance trap. And that's what that is. where it comes from, why it's getting worse and what every person listening can do about it, whether you're a parent, a teacher, a principal, a manager, a CEO, or just a leader. This is going to be a big one. So let's get into it.

00:02:53 M Aponte: Before we get into the research and the strategies, I want to make sure everyone is on the same page about what we mean when we talk about compliance. So in plain English, compliance means doing what you are told because you have to, not because you want to or because you believe in it. Compliance is not a bad thing by itself. When your kid is three years old and you tell them not to touch the stove, you want compliance. When there is a fire drill at work and the evacuation protocol says go left. You want compliance rules exist for a reason. The trap is when compliance becomes the highest thing we reward. When we message an institution and send. Do what we tell you. Do not rock the boat. Do not ask questions that make things uncomfortable and you will be rewarded. Because when that message, when that is the message, I should say, when we get exactly what we reward people who do what they are told, people who do not rock the boat, people who have learned that asking questions is a risk, not a strength. And then we are confused when those same people as adults in the workforce do the minimum avoid initiative, and would rather take a mental health day than come in and try to solve a problem nobody has assigned them to. Here's a word you're going to hear a lot in this episode. Intrinsic motivation. Now I'm going to define that for you so that we're again on the same page. Means the drive that comes from inside you. You do something because it matters to you, because you enjoy it, because you believe in it, not because someone is watching or rewarding you. And then there's the opposite extrinsic motivation, which means the drive that comes from outside you. You do something for the reward, whether it's the grade, the bonus, the trophy, the applause. And when those things go away, the behavior often goes away with them. Research on this goes back fifty years. Edward Dickey or DC. I'm assuming it's Dickey. Let's go with that. And he's a psychologist who spent his career studying motivation, ran an experiment in nineteen seventy one. He gave two groups of people an interesting puzzle to solve. One group got paid to solve it. The other group did not. Then he left both groups alone with the puzzle and watched what they did. The group that was not paid kept playing with the puzzle on their own, out of pure interest. The group that had been paid stopped engaging with it the moment the payment stopped. The reward had replaced the natural interest. Once the reward was gone, so was the behavior. When you train people to do things for a reward, you are not building motivation. You are renting it. And the moment reward stops, so does the behavior. This was not a one time study. The findings have been replicated. That means repeated and confirmed hundreds of times and hundreds of different settings over the last fifty years. With children, with adults, with students, with employees. The conclusion is consistent heavy reliance on external rewards does not build lasting motivation. It replaces internal drive with external dependency. So for parents, I'm going to talk to the CEOs and my employers that are listening in a second. But for parents, think about your own child. When you reward every small behavior with a prize or a treat. You're not building self-discipline. You may be teaching them that effort only happens when something is on the line. The goal is to connect the behavior to pride and personal growth, not just to the reward. Now for you employers and CEOs that are listening, your bonus structure, your performance points, your recognition programs these are all extrinsic reward systems used. Well, they acknowledge good work. Used badly. They teach employees that work is only worth doing when it's being measured and rewarded. We will come back to this. So how schools built the compliance trap and y p b I s and I'll explain what that is in a second. Is not the villain we think it is. So let me talk about the school side first. Anyone that's in corporate or an adult, that's a emerging leader or a leader of an organization, don't worry. Stay tuned. Keep listening because this is where it starts. PBIs means positive behavioral intervention and supports school wide system used in thousands of schools across the country where students earn points, tickets or prizes for good behavior. The idea is to reward what you want to see instead of just punishing what you do not want to see. Now, and I want to be fair. PBIs is not a bad idea in schools where there is real chaos, where students are unsafe, where teachers cannot teach because of the constant disruption. Having a clear, consistent, positive system to establish expectations is genuinely helpful. The research supports that in specific contexts. The problem is what happened when the system went national without the nuance PBIs became in most schools, a ticket economy. Students earn Dragon dollars or Tiger Bucks or school specific reward currency for sitting correctly, walking in a straight line, raising their hand, being quiet in a hallway. They spend those tickets at a school store for prizes and privileges. On the surface, it looks great. Clean hallways, quiet cafeteria. Happy administrators during walkthroughs. Underneath, though, students have learned to perform good behavior for the reward not to value good behavior because it matters to the community not to be kind because they genuinely care about the people around them to perform. Because performance produces currency. And in case you're wondering, walkthrough means when a school administrator or outside visitor walks through the classroom to observe what is happening, often briefly and usually announced in advance or semi expected by experienced teachers. So here is what happens on a walkthrough day and a compliance trained school teachers and students shift their behavior in the moment. They sense an observer in the building. The energy changes. The volume drops. Questions get easier. Everyone is performing and the observer sees exactly what they want to see and leave satisfied. Here's what that cost us. The student who learned to earn the ticket for sitting quietly also learned that sitting quietly is the goal. Not thinking, not questioning, not engaging with hard material, sitting quietly. And then that student becomes an employee who sits quietly at their desk and does their job and never once raises their hand to say, I think we're doing this wrong. Because raising your hand to say this is wrong was never rewarded. It was, in many cases, the fastest way to lose your tickets. We spent twelve years, if not more, teaching children that their value in an institution is measured by how little trouble they cause. And then we wonder why they become adults who do the minimum and call it a good day. I want to name something that does not get talked about enough. The students who push back the hardest and. Compliance heavy schools are often the students with the highest intellectual potential. They argue because the material is not challenging enough. They disrupt because they are not being engaged. They act out because they have energy that has nowhere to go. And we respond to that by escalating the compliance on them more behavior plans, more interventions, more documentation of the problem. By the time those students are eighteen, many of them have spent their entire school career being told that they that their way of engaging with the world is a problem, that their question are inconvenience, that their energy is dangerous. Those students do not become proactive employees. They become the employees who do the bare minimum and dare you to say something, because that is the relationship with authority that school built for them. Now. Don't worry. Stay with me. Executives and emerging leaders and employers. I'm going to get to you in a second, but I still need to focus on my teachers and school admin teachers. This is directly to you. And if you're a parent that is homeschooling also for you, this is not your fault. You were handed a system and told to implement it, but you can make choices inside those systems. The teacher who genuinely recognizes intellectual risk taking, who says in front of the class, I love that you challenge me on that. That teacher is doing something that the ticket economy cannot do. The teacher is connecting behavior to internal value. You have more power than the system lets you think. For school admin leaders and principals, your PBIs data shows compliance. Your discipline data shows order. But ask yourself, what is the last time a teacher in your building told you about a student who gave a brilliant wrong answer? When is the last time you celebrated a student for asking a question that stumped the teacher? If your recognition culture only rewards visible compliance, that is the only culture you are building now. Workplace versions of PBIs. And I know for my executives that are listening. In my business owners and emerging leaders, this is for you and why your employees are doing the bare minimum. So honestly, anybody who has ever been an employee, which is all of us, um, please pay attention also, because what I just described in the schools is happening in your office, in your buildings right now. It just has different names. This phenomenon is called quiet quitting. It means a term that became popular in twenty twenty two, describing employees who do not actually quit their jobs, but just stop going above and beyond. They do exactly what the job description requires. Nothing more, nothing less, and disengage from any extra effort or investment in the company's success. The coverage of quiet quitting treated it like a moral failure of employees, like workers had suddenly become lazy or uncommitted. But here's the question nobody was asked loudly enough. What did those organizations do to produce the those responses? Because the behavior does not come out of nowhere. Compliance behavior in adults, just like the compliance behavior in children, is a response to an environment that made sense of it. Now let me walk you through the workplace version of the compliance trap. I'm going to describe a pattern, and I want you to see if you recognize it from somewhere you have worked. Step one the company builds a recognition system based on visible measurable output. Employee of the month. Plaques. Quarterly bonuses tied to the specific metrics. Performance reviews that measure things that are easy to count. Attendance bonuses. Star ratings. Point systems. Sound familiar? This is the workplace version of PBIs tickets. Step two employees learn to optimize for what gets measured. They figured out quickly what generates rewards. They produce those outputs. They ignore what does not generate rewards. Even if those things matter to the actual health of the organization. The sales rep who hits their number by selling to clients who are wrong for the product, but because the measures are sales closed or not. Client retention. the teacher who teaches to the test because the evaluation measures test scores, not critical thinking development. The employees who copies the manager on every email, not because it's necessary, but because visibility generates positive attention. Step three the people who go beyond the systems are not reliably rewarded for it. The employee who spots a systemic problem and raises it raises it to to management. The manager is busy. The report does not fit the quarterly reviews cycle. The suggestion gets acknowledged, but nothing happens. Next time that employee does not raise it, they learned. The teacher, who tries a new challenging approach and has a noisy, productive class gets told to manage their room better. The teacher who runs a quiet, orderly class that is producing mediocre learning outcomes gets praised on the walkthrough. Both people learned you do not have lazy employee problem. You have a system that taught smart people. That effort beyond the minimum is not worth the risk. Now let us talk about something that has become a major conversation in workplaces, and it connects directly to this employees taking mental health days, calling out for stress, opting out for high effort moments. Now, I don't I don't think I need to describe this, but I'm going to describe it anyway. What is a mental health day? This is all for my older listeners. It means a day off of work or school taken specifically to recover from emotional or psychological stress rather than physical illness, increasingly recognized as a legitimate form of self-care. Here's what gets missed in the conversation about mental health days and, being, presenting. And that word means showing up. I think it's called presentism. and I could be butchering that, but what is that? And it means the opposite of absenteeism. So it's presenteeism. I think that's the way it's pronounced. And now that I think about it being physically at work, but mentally checked out, not engaged, not productive, going through the motions When employees choose to lose pay rather than show up, or when they come in, but are completely disengaged, that is not a character flaw. In most cases, it is a rational response to an environment that has consistently communicated that their full investment is not valued. The effort above the minimum is not rewarded, and that the emotional cost of the work is not acknowledged. I'm not saying every absence is justified. I'm saying that the pattern of disengagement we are seeing in the modern workforce has a structural cause, and that cause is the same cause that produces the quiet student who sits in the back of the class and does nothing. We built compliance systems. We got compliance, and then compliance maxed out because compliance is a transaction, not a commitment. When people feel like the transaction is not worth it. They opt out. And let me give you a specific data point on this. Gallup state of the Global Workplace report. They survey millions of employees every year, consistently finds that only around twenty three percent of employees, twenty three percent of employees worldwide describe themselves as engaged at work. That means roughly three out of four employees in the world are either doing the minimum or actively detached from their work. This is not a coincidence. It's not laziness that is a predictable outcome of building workplaces that reward compliance and do not develop genuine commitment. For CEOs and business owners and my emerging leaders listening, the cost of disengagement is not philosophical, Gallup estimates that low employee engagement cost the global economy roughly eight point nine trillion dollars a year in lost productivity. If your retention is high but your performance is flat, you do not have a loyalty problem. You have a compliance culture problem. Your people are staying, but they are not invested. That distinction matters enormously for managers and team leads. Think about the last team meeting you've had. Who spoke, who stayed quiet. If the same two of the three are the only ones consistently offering ideas and everyone else is nodding along, that is not a team with nothing to say. That is a team that has learned it is safer to stay quiet. That culture was built over time by what you rewarded and what you ignored. It can also be rebuilt, but that starts with you. So the deeper problem, what are we actually training? And I want to slow down here and go a little deeper because I think there is something underneath the behavior pattern that we miss when we only talk about the surface, when we build compliance cultures in schools or in the workplace. We are not just shaping behavior. We are shaping the story people tell themselves about their own value. And I want to define this so that we're on the same page. What identity means. It's a story a person tells themselves about who they are, what they are capable of, and what they deserve, and what they are worth. That, in my English, is identity. The student who spent twelve years being rewarded for compliance and managed for disruption does not just arrive in the workplace with behavior pattern. They arrive with a belief about themselves, a belief that says, my job is to fit in, not stand out. My job is to give people what they expect, not challenge what they are doing. My job is to manage my environment, to avoid conflict, not not to engage with it, to produce something better. That belief is not laziness. It is surgical survival logic. It is what twelve years of compliance culture produces. When we talk about how compliance shapes identity. But if you are a leader asking yourself right now, how do I actually change this identity in my school or my organization? You have to look at the math of what you are building because there is a formula for this, and once you hear it, you will not be able to unhear it. The formula is culture equals values plus behaviors. Say it again. Culture equals values plus behaviors. And this comes from the leadership thinker Simon Sinek, who credits it to his friend, retired Lieutenant General George Flynn. And it is one of the most useful frameworks I have ever encountered for diagnosing why a school or a company is not what it says it is. Here's what it means in plain terms. Culture is not the poster on the wall. It is the mission statement. It is not what the CEO says at all. Hands meeting culture is what actually happens inside your building in every single day, especially when no one with authority is watching. The formula says culture is the sum of two things your values and the behaviors those values actually produce. Both have to be true for your culture to be real. Values are verbs, not nouns. Here is the first place most schools and companies get the formula wrong. They write their values as nouns. Integrity. Innovation. Excellence. Respect. These words look great on the wall. They mean almost nothing in practice. A noun is static. It just sits there. It does not tell anyone what to do on Tuesday afternoon when the situation gets complicated. But verb gives you direction. A verb tells you what to do. Integrity becomes tell the truth even when it costs you. Innovation becomes. Take intellectual risk and do not punish people when those risks fail. Respect becomes. Disagree with the idea, never with the person. When you turn values into verbs. When you give people something to actually do and give yourself something to actually measure. Now the question is not do we have integrity? It is. Did we tell the truth in that meeting Or did we manage the message? Integrity is not a value. Your organization has. It is either a behavior your people demonstrate today or it is not. There is no storage tank for it. The behavior gap. And this is where the compliance trap lives. The behavior gap is the space between what an organization says it values and the behaviors it actually rewards. So in plain English, behavior gap means when what you say you stand for and what you actually reward are two different things. There's The gap, a school that says it values critical thinking but only gives recognition to students for sitting quietly has a behavior gap. The stated value is thinking. The reward behavior is compliance. The poster on the wall means nothing when the behavior in the room contradicts it. A company that says it values innovation but never promotes the people who challenge the process has a behavior gap. The stated value is new thinking. The reward is do not rock the boat. Every organization has values written somewhere. Very few have closed the behavior gap between what they claim and what they reward. The compliance trap is literally the behavior gap made visible when you see quiet quitting in your workplace or in your workforce. When you see a student who has checked out but never acts up. When you see an employee who does exactly enough and nothing more. You are watching the behavior gap in motion. Their behavior is not the problem. Their behavior is the diagnosis. It is telling you exactly what your culture is actually rewarding. Regardless of what your mission statement says. Behavior as a diagnostic, not a character flaw. When a behavior does not match your stated values, the instinct is to blame the individual. That student has a bad attitude. That employee is lazy. The teacher does not care. The formula pushes back on that instinct hard. Because if culture equals values plus behavior, and the behavior you are seeing is widespread and consistent, you do not have an individual problem. You have a system problem. The system is producing that behavior because it is rewarding it or failing to reward anything better. When the employees are quietly quitting across multiple teams, that is not a coincidence of bad attitudes. That is the environment producing a rational response to an irrational reward structure. When the students across multiple classrooms are compliant but disengaged, that is not a generation of apathetic kids. That is the system that trained apathy for twelve years and is now surprised by the results. You do not fix a culture by correcting individuals. You fix it by closing the gap between what you say you value and what you actually reward. Now, what leaders tolerate defines the real culture culture. And this is going to be a hard one for some of you leaders out there that are listening. Culture is not only defined by what leaders reward, it is also defined by what leaders tolerate. Everyone has worked in the office, knows the scenario, the high performer on the team, maybe the top sales person, maybe the teacher who hits every data target. Everyone also knows this person is toxic. They are condescending. They cut corners. They take credit for others work. They make the environment worse for everyone around them. And leadership keeps them because the metrics looks good. Here's what everyone else learned from watching that decision. The stated values respect, integrity, teamwork are secondary. Performance numbers are primary. You can violate the values as long as you hit the targets. That is a culture communication not sent through a memo sent through a decision. What you tolerate is a behavior and the behaviors are half the formula. So I'm going to break this down for school admins and principals and leaders, for the CEOs and the executives out there in corporate America and across the world and to my parents. So I'm going to start with the school leaders. Walk through your building with this formula in hand. Your values are posted somewhere. Now ask, what behaviors are we consistently rewarding, ignoring, and tolerating? Write those lists separately. Where they do not match. That is your behavior gap. That is where you actual the actual culture lives. Regardless of what the poster says. So have it in two separate notepads where they do not match. That's your behavior gap for CEOs and managers. Your most powerful culture communication this year was not the mission statement. It is the decision you made about a person who did you promote, tolerate, protect or remove? Every one of those decisions sent a message about what actually matters here. The question is whether that message was the one you intended to send. For parents, this formula applies at home to your family has values, whether you have it named them or not. The question is whether the behaviors you reward and tolerate in your household match the values you say matter to you. Children do not learn values from what we tell them. They learn from what they watch us do. Reward and allow. So before we get into the specific strategies and for schools and workplaces, I want to hold this formula in your mind because every strategy I am about to give you is a way to close the behavior gap. A way to make you reward match what you say you value. A way to make culture actually equal what you put on the left side of that equation. And here where it gets complicated for employers who genuinely want to change it. You cannot fix a twelve year belief structure with a Friday pizza party. You cannot undo compliance conditioning with a mission statement on the wall or a town hall where the CEO says, our people are our most important asset. Those things are the corporate version of the PBIs poster in the hallway. They communicate what you want people to feel. They do not change what people actually experience. What changes the belief is consistent experience that contradicts it. I'm going to say that again. What changes the belief is consistent experience that contradicts it. When an employee takes a risk, raises a concern, challenges a decision, and the response from leadership is genuine curiosity rather than defensive or punishment. That story starts to shift when a teacher takes a risk on a harder lesson, has a messy, productive class, and the principal walks in and says, I can see the thinking happening in here. Rather than why is the room so loud? The story starts to shift when a student gets a problem wrong, but the reasons brilliantly, and the teacher stops the class and says lets us look at this because the logic here is excellent. The story starts to shift. The culture does not change through announcements. It changes through repeated Experiences that build a new story. The most powerful thing a leader can do is respond to risk taking in a way that makes the next risk feel worth taking. I want to address something specifically here for anyone listening who feels personally called out by this conversation, because I know it can be triggering. If you are an employee who does the minimum. If you take every mental health day, you can. If you have completely disengaged from the idea that your job is supposed to matter to you. I'm not judging you. I'm saying your response to your environment makes complete sense. The question is not whether you are doing something wrong. The question is whether the environment you are in is capable of giving you something worth investing in. And if the answer is yes, but only if something changes. The rest of this episode is about what changes can look like for parents. Your home is is an environment to. When your child brings home less than a perfect grade and your first response is about the grade, rather than about what they learned or what they tried. You are sending a signal about what matters when you ask what happened, instead of what did you think about when you got that wrong? You are shaping the story that tell about effort and failure. These conversations are not small. They are the foundation of everything. So let me give some strategies. Strategies for schools. What actual builds intrinsic motivation? Don't worry workers, please stand by. And employers and CEOs. I'll get to that in a second. All right. Let's get practical. I'm going to give you a concrete strategy for each audience. Again we're going to start with schools for teachers. Strategy one. Make intellectual risk visible and valued at least once per week. Publicly recognize a student for a brilliant wrong answer, not consolation prize recognition. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about genuine recognition of the quality of their thinking. Say out loud. The answer was not right, but the reasoning was excellent. Let me show the class why this signal act, repeated over time, teaches every student in the room that thinking is what matters here, not just getting it right. Strategy two ask questions that do not have a single correct answer. If every question you ask in a day has one right answer, you are running a recall exercise, not a thinking class. At least one question per lesson should be a question students can disagree about. What do you think caused this? If and if you were in charge, what would you have done differently? Which argument is stronger and why? Disagreement is not a classroom management problem. It is evidence that students are thinking now. Strategy three separate behavior expectations from intellectual expectations. You can hold high behavioral standards and high intellectual standards simultaneously. They are not in conflict, but they need to be communicated as separate things. I need you to treat each other Respectfully. Also, I need you to challenge each other's ideas. Both of those things matter. Neither cancel the other out. School administrators, I'm going to give you some strategies. Strategy one audit what your recognition system actually celebrates. Pull up the last three months of a student's recognition at your school. What percentage of it was for behavior compliance? What percentage was for intellectual risk taking, creative academic growth or asking a hard question? If the balance is overwhelming toward behavior, your recognition culture is telling students what kind of performance the school values. Strategy two change what a successful classroom observation looks like. If a quiet on task orderly class is automatically your definition of a successful classroom, you are unintentionally signaling to teachers that managing behavior is more important than generating thinking. A class where students are engaged actively engaged in a genuine debate where the teacher is facilitating rather than controlling, where product of Productive energy is high. That should be celebrated. Observation even if the room is louder than you prefer. Strategy three build teacher recognition into your culture. The teacher who tries something hard and fails is giving you information. The teacher who always stays safe gives you nothing. Celebrate teachers who take instructional risks. Ask them to share what they tried and what they learned. Make professional risk taking part of your culture rather than something teachers do despite the environment and for school admins. One more thing if you want your teachers to develop student thinking, your teachers need to experience what that development feels like in their professional lives. You cannot ask a teacher to build intellectual cultures they have never experienced themselves. Your staff meetings. your professional development, your leadership team conversation. Are those environments where people think, disagree, and challenge, or environments where everyone agrees and you can check the boxes and move on. Strategies for employers and CEOs. Breaking the corporate compliance trap. Now for the organizational leaders, emerging leaders, and CEOs and other executives. This is where my personal advisory work lives. The link is in the description. for my services. If you are interested, I do private one on one and organizational advisory and consulting. And I want to go deep here because I think this is a conversation most leadership content completely avoids. The first thing to accept is that your compliance culture was not an accident. You built it. Your predecessors built it, and you built it by consistently rewarding, safe, predictable, measurable outputs and underreacting or ignoring the outputs that are harder to measure, but more valuable. You did not intend to do it, but you did it. This is not an indictment. It's a starting point. So strategy one build psychological safe environments. And what do I mean by psychological safety? It means the belief built through repeated experience that you can speak up, admit mistakes, challenge ideas and take risks at work without being punished or embarrassed. Research by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson shows it is the single strongest predictor of high performing teams. Psychological safety is not a feeling, it's a track record. It is built by how you respond over and over to the moment when people take risks. When someone admits a mistake in a team meeting, do you respond with curiosity or with frustration? When someone challenges your assessment. Do you engage with their argument or do you signal that the topic is closed? When an employee raises a concern that is inconvenient to hear, do you thank them or do you manage them? Every one of those responses either building or destroying psychological safety. there is no neutral response. People are watching everything. Practical implementations. Here's something you can do within twenty four hours. It's a I call it the twenty four hour response rule. And it's something that I coach every single leader. Even I practice it as part of my practice as a school leader. When an employee brings you something uncomfortable, your first response in the next twenty four hours determines what they bring you next. If you dismiss, get defensive or table it without acknowledgement, they will not bring you the next thing. Make it a practice to respond with a question before you respond with a conclusion. Tell me more about what you are seeing. Walk me through your thinking. What do you think should happen? Those questions cost you nothing. The information they unlock can save your organization from decisions you would otherwise never have known were wrong. So strategy two stop measuring only what is easy to count. Every performance management system has a bias toward what is easy to measure, and that could be sales numbers. Attendance Response time. Task completed. These are measurable. So we measure them and then we reward them. And then people optimize for them. Meanwhile the things that actually drive long term organizational health, quality of thinking, initiative, cross team collaboration, creative problem solving are harder to measure, so they often go unrecognized. The employees who do exactly one hundred tasks per week look better on the metrics than those that do eighty tasks, and spends the other time identifying a workflow problem that, if fixed, would allow the the whole team to do one hundred and fifty tasks. Your measurement system is telling your employees what to optimize for. Make sure what you are measuring is what you actually want. And here's some practical implementation. Qualitative recognition publicly in your next all hands on meeting. Recognize an employee not for a metric they hit, but for a quality they demonstrated. The employee who raised an uncomfortable question in the planning meeting. The team member who brought a concern to leadership instead of venting about it externally. The person who took ownership of a failure and proposed a solution rather than deflecting. Do that once and it is a nice moment. Do it every month and you are reshaping your culture. Signal about what matters here. Strategy three address the mental health day pattern without punishing it. This is sensitive and I want to handle it carefully because it can lead to an HR issue. If your employees are regularly taking mental health days, calling out for stress or choosing to lose pay rather than come in, the answer is not better attendance policies. The answer is understanding the why. In most cases, it is one of three things. The work environment is producing more stress than. The. Compensation justifies a lot of. Depending on the environment, not much you can do to the employees does not feel that their presence and effort are genuinely valued or three the employee is dealing with something personal that has spilled over to their work life. First two causes are organizational. They are things you can change. Policies that penalize mental health days. Tell your employees. One thing that company cares more about your presence than your well-being. That is compliance message. Show up because we require it, Not because we have given you a reason to want to be here. The alternative is harder and more expensive in the short run. It requires genuine investment in understanding what is producing the disengagement. It requires managers who have real conversations with their people rather than managing performance data. It requires building environments where people feel that their full selves, not just their compliance with the job description, are welcomed. The employees who take every possible mental health day is not your absenteeism problem. They are your cultural diagnostic. They are showing you exactly where your environment has failed to build genuine investment and practical implementation is stay interviews. So what's a stay interview? Stay interview is a conversation usually with the manager and the current employee, not someone who is leaving, but someone who is still there to understand what keeps them engaged, what fits them, and what would make their work more meaningful. Unlike exit interviews, which happens too late, stay interviews, surface problems while you're well, you can still fix them. Implement quarterly stay interviews with every direct report, not performance reviews. Those are compliance adjacent stay interviews. The questions are simple what keeps you here? What would make you consider leaving? What do you feel most energized at work? When do you feel like your effort does not matter? The answers will be uncomfortable. They will also be the most valuable information your management layer can have. So don't be prideful. Strategy for reward. Proactive behavior explicitly and consistently. So just to make sure we're on the same page now because this is a long one. Proactive. What does that mean? Means taking initiative before being asked. Acting on what you see coming rather than waiting until someone tells you there is a problem. The opposite of reactive, which means responding after the fact. if you want to have proactive employees, you have to build a track record of rewarding, proactive behavior, not just acknowledging it once, rewarding it consistently enough that employees update their mental model of what success looks like in this organization. The employee who spot a client issue before the client complains and handles it should be publicly recognized. The team member who sees a gap in the process and drafts a proposed solution without being asked should be celebrated. The manager who brings bad news early, rather than waiting for it to become a crisis, should be thanked, not shot. Every team you respond to proactive behavior with genuine appreciation. You are teaching everyone who witnesses it that the place rewards initiative over time. This is how you rebuild the expectation that went dormant in compliance culture. Now for CEOs and senior leaders, one more structural point. Look at your middle management layer. Middle managers are often the place where cultural intentions die. A CEO can have every right intention about building an initiative, rewarding culture. But if the manager between them and the front line are compliance enforcers, people who want clean metrics and no surprises, those intentions never reach the employee level. Culture change requires aligning the middle, not just the top. So, parents, I'm back to you. What can you do right now? And I want to close with parents because I think parents are the most underestimated variable in all of this. Everything we have talked about today, the compliance culture in schools, the disengagement in the workplace, the behavior of adults who do the minimum and call it a day. It all begins somewhere. And for most people, the earliest and the most powerful environment that shapes their relationship with effort, risk and authority is their home. So what to do at home? One change the first question you ask after school instead of what did you learn today? Try. What did you get wrong today? Or what was hard today? Oh, what did you disagree with? You are signaling that struggle and the disagreement are normal and valuable, not signs of failure. Two when your child is punished at school for behavior, ask the full question. Not just what did you do, but what were you trying to accomplish and what could you have done differently to get that outcome without the conflict? This is not excusing the behavior. It is developing the thinking. Three. Talk about your own work. Tell your children about a time you took a risk at work and what happened. Tell them about a time you spoke up when it was uncomfortable and why it mattered. Tell them about a time you failed and what you did next. You are the most influential model they have. At what adult life and work actually looks like. Four. Celebrate effort and reasoning, not just results. When your child tries something genuinely difficult and fails, your response in that moment is either teaching them that effort is worth it or that the outcomes are all that counts. Choose the message you want them to carry into every challenge for the rest of their lives. You do not have to be the perfect parent to do this. You just have to be intentional enough to ask better questions than the ones you were asked growing up. That is enough to change the direction. So let me bring this home. The compliance trap is not a school problem or a workplace problem or a parenting problem. It is a human institution problem that shows up everywhere. We build systems to manage people's behavior rather than invest in their development. We built PBIs in schools and taught children that good behavior is a transaction. We built performance management systems and workplaces and taught adults. That effort is only worth it when it is being measured. We train People from the age of five to the age sixty five to manage their environment for reward. Rather than engage it for growth. And then we stood over the results and wondered why nobody brings their full self to work or school anymore. The answer is not more rules is not better. Consequences is not tighter monitoring. The answer is building environments where the full investment of human being is genuinely valued, consistently recognized, and honestly protected. This is hard work. It is slow work. It does not produce immediate metrics you can put into the presentations of your board or next week. But it's the only work that actually changes anything. If this episode landed for you, share it with a teacher, with the manager, with the CEO, with a parent who is trying to figure out why their kid has checked out of school with a boss who cannot figure out why their team has checked out of work. The full written version of this argument is in my stub Substack at m a aponte dot substack dot com. Its link is in the description. And if you are a leader, a school administrator, or an organizational decision maker, if you are a leader, a school administrator, or an organizational decision maker, and you want to work through this in your specific context, I do that work through Aponte Strategic Advisory. You can find me on LinkedIn at M a Aponte, and the link in the advisory is in the show notes and descriptions. Until next time, always think clearly, lead boldly, and stay logical. Have an amazing day, guys.