Welcome to episode 234 of The CUInsight Experience podcast with your hosts, Randy Smith, co-founder of CUInsight.com, and Jill Nowacki, President and CEO of Humanidei.
This episode is sponsored by Trellance. Trellance is a leading technology partner for credit unions, delivering innovative technology solutions to help credit unions achieve more. With a comprehensive suite of analytics, cloud and talent solutions, the Trellance team ensures credit unions increase efficiency, manage risk, and improve member experience. Learn more here!
In this new 2026 season, Jill and I will have conversations centered around leadership, credit unions, and living our best lives. We will have some of the most respected leaders from around credit unions who we are grateful to call friends join us in the discussion from time to time too.
This week on the podcast, we are happy to welcome back Brent W. Rempe, President and CEO of First Alliance Credit Union. He joins us to discuss the importance of having and modeling values as a leader. Together, we talk about how values are often easy to name but much harder to put into operation, especially when leaders are faced with difficult decisions such as having to have accountability conversations, enact organizational change, and/or balance mission with financial realities.
Listen in as Brent shares how his own values were shaped through early life experiences, Catholic social teaching, and years in the credit union movement, and how those influences continue to guide his leadership today as something that must be actively put into practice rather than just documented and/or stated. We also reflect on how values show up in real organizational work—how they are tested in moments of conflict, how they can be clarified via simple grounding questions, and how important it is to separate technical mistakes from deeper values misalignment.
Throughout our conversation, we also challenge the idea that values belong solely on a wall or in a strategic plan and instead explore how they become real via consistent behavior, honest reflection, and accountability at every level of leadership—with Brent also walking us through how First Alliance redefined its mission, vision, and values via a collaborative, employee-driven process.
Later, we talk about the very real tension between mission and margin, the importance of keeping things simple enough to remember, and why service must be more than a slogan if it’s going to be at all meaningful. By the end of our conversation, we land on a shared truth: values are not what an organization claims but are what it does when no one is watching and when decisions get hard. Enjoy our conversation with Brent Rempe!
