Garry Ridge
Garry Ridge is CEO of WD-40 Company. He joined WD-40 Company in 1987, and held various leadership positions there before being appointed CEO in 1997. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of San Diego where he teaches leadership development, talent management, and succession planning. He believes that in the long term, values are arguably the most important aspect of working at WD-40 Company. In 2009, he coauthored a book with Ken Blanchard titled Helping People Win at Work: A Business Philosophy Called “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A.” A native of Sydney, Mr. Ridge holds a certificate in modern retailing and wholesale distribution and a Master of Science in Executive Leadership from the University of San Diego.
■ ■ ■
Leadership – truly inspiring, transformative leadership – requires the wisdom to understand that the overarching role of business is to serve people. To give them what they need to do their jobs and smooth the edges of their days. To bring them joy. To relieve their suffering. To give them the essential tools and hope that will empower them to step into the best versions of themselves. To even ease their loneliness and isolation. While achieving an officially conferred leadership role may take decades of diligent career building, the getting of wisdom can commence at any time in our lives. In my particular case, I have Mrs. Peel and Mr. Knox, 1960s residents of the west Sydney suburb of Five Dock, to thank for opening my eyes to the true purpose of business – to lift people up in the spirit of belonging and connection.
I was just a kid, but these two kind and caring adults taught me well. Mrs. Peel was a lonely, elderly shut-in, and I was her 12-year-old newspaper boy. Every day I paused at her house as I made my rounds to exchange a friendly word or two. Every Friday she would greet me at the door with a bag of my favorite candy; we call them lollies in that part of the world. Naturally, I was young enough to appreciate the sweets, but I was also old enough to comprehend what that weekly present really meant. She had to go through a tremendous amount of effort to procure that candy for me; these were the days before Amazon. I learned from our weekly tradition how powerful it can be to sincerely care about someone and pay attention to her; in return, she made me feel noticed and cared about, as well. Our relationship took a mundane newspaper subscription to a new level of authentic, human connection.
When I grew a little older, I began doing odd jobs at Mr. Knox’s hardware store. I wasn’t there for more than a few months when his phone rang with the tragic news that his father had unexpectedly died. As he rushed out the door, he swept up the store keys, tossed them in my direction, and said, “Here. Take care of the store while I’m gone. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” It couldn’t have been more than a week; it’s hard to remember that far back. But what I do remember is this: His faith in me inspired me to go the extra mile for Mr. Knox and his store. Because he trusted me, without a second thought, in his time of greatest need, he endowed me with the self-esteem and pride in my work that translated into an intensified dedication on my part. I was determined to take such good care of his store that it would be in even better condition by the time he got back.
Two simple stories from an ordinary Australian boyhood. Why have they stayed with me all these years as I ultimately became the CEO of WD-40 Company, one of the world’s most recognized and beloved brands? I learned through these two friendships that our work life is one critical area of our short journeys in this world where we find meaning, belonging, welcome, and identity. While other boys my age were finding their identity through sports and, well, let’s face it, girls, I was discovering myself through my earliest of jobs. They weren’t much, as jobs go. But they taught me one of my life’s most valuable early lessons: I belonged, because I was valued, because I cared about the people I did business with. And because of all that, I had a place in the world.
In short, I discovered how good it felt to be needed, in a context outside my immediate family, and this inspired me to be even more valuable to the people who needed me.
This is a principle I carry with me to this day (one never outgrows the need to be valued). And this is the gift I am committed to extending to my team – my tribe – at WD-40 Company.
Ah, I see where this is going, you might be thinking right now. We’re about to talk about employee engagement, aren’t we? That would be a reasonable anticipation. For decades, we’ve repeatedly proven the linkage between employees who are emotionally connected to their work and better business performance. The more adept we have become in making that argument, especially being able to quantify it (as the employee engagement line of inquiry has allowed us to do), the more we enjoy talking about it.
But today I would like to invite you to consider the other side of the employee/enterprise relationship: how emotionally healthy workplaces move the individual along his or her own personal path to self-esteem, personal purpose, and, in many cases, some level of emotional healing. Does this path also result in improved business performance? Undoubtedly. That linkage is why employee engagement is a more natural and obvious conversation for CEOs to have. But for the moment, let’s set aside that focus, and simply look at the thing least talked about, consequently rarely seen, even though it’s all around us: the workplace gift to individuals as they seek the personally restorative, healing, growing benefits of simply showing up every day to rejoin their tribe in the mission of getting the job done. This is the gift of belonging.
Why Belonging? Why Now?
It is from this foundation of belonging that all good things begin to happen to a person, their family, their job, and the business they are associated with. This is the platform that enables the good feelings – the positivity, if you will – that activate trust, collaboration, improved physical health profiles, resilience, focus, bonding, even innovation, according to Barbara Fredrickson, psychologist, professor, and principal investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab (PEPLab) at the University of North Carolina.
“Positive emotions change the boundaries of our minds and hearts and change our outlook on our environment. [They] widen the scope of what people are scanning for,” she said in a presentation before the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. “We see more possibilities. People come up with more ideas of what they might do next.”1
Over her three decades of research, she has definitively linked positive emotions to an individual’s (and therefore the employer’s) capacity to ideate and innovate. Her phrase for this phenomenon, broaden and build, is now a well-accepted concept that behavioral psychologists, organizational psychologists, and consultants specializing in appreciative inquiry almost universally embrace.2
And yet, understanding the ROI of meeting the positive emotional needs inside the corporate community, outside the confines of the formal employee engagement conversation, is still somewhat in its nascent stages. If you consider Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Belonging is the first positive emotion, appearing in the middle layer of the hierarchy after the fundamental survival requirements are met. Above Belonging you will see Self-Esteem and Self-Actualization. All three of these emotional realms are where an individual has the emotional luxury to tap into those positive mindsets that ultimately generate innovation and contribution. Those are the realms from which any company can draw the new ideas and discoveries that will drive its future prospects. So it stands to reason that the company that exerts the effort to breathe life into that feeling of belonging among its employees – creating a tribal culture, if you will – will be the company that sets itself apart from its competitors, especially those who believe that simply meeting employees’ needs on Maslow’s lowest levels (physiological and safety/security) should suffice.
It could be that your workplace is their only source of structure, calm, solace, rewarding creativity, and feeling at home among colleagues who excite and challenge their intellectual capacity. It could be that your workplace is the one place where your employees can learn to discover their best selves, build the skills the
y need to navigate other aspects of their lives, and find their place in the world.
When we stop to think about modern day-to-day life, we are all beset with opportunities to feel like devalued, isolated outsiders for one reason or another. Simple, routine courtesies that provide common ground among strangers are rapidly disappearing. People interrupt each other routinely. Political differences alienate friends and family. Just keeping up with current events floods our brains with negativity and hopelessness that disempower us in other areas of our lives. As individuals change employers every three to five years, they are perpetually repositioned as outsiders and newcomers. Then, behind closed (isolating, secret-keeping) home doors, modern families are suffering devastating domestic dysfunction, such as divorce and addictions. Is it any wonder that any individual who comes to work every day is likely carrying a toxic load of isolation, loneliness, and hits on their self-esteem?
The workplace provides psychological safety, posits Amy C. Edmondson,3 Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, through providing employees with a tribe – maybe not the only one in their lives, but an incredibly valuable and rewarding one all the same. Her research has shown that working teams with a high degree of psychological safety – where employees can comfortably take risks and learn new things without fear of shame, embarrassment, separation, or other isolating negative feedback – show a higher likelihood for innovation and individual accountability for performance standards.
Given all the obvious benefits of living and working in the higher realms of Maslow’s hierarchy, if you could create a culture that supports employees’ emotional health, starting with Belonging, why wouldn’t you?
Tribal Belonging Ignites Innovation at WD-40 Company
Like anyone in today’s world, I have my own story of what it feels like to be a stranger in a strange land. I had already been with WD-40 Company for seven years when it transferred me from Australia to the United States. By that time, I had already worked in many countries in Asia while moving up the ranks at WD-40. Still, even though English is my first language, I had trouble feeling at home in a country of such unexpectedly different ways and customs.
By the time I assumed leadership as CEO in 1997, I was at home in the United States. But the concept of belonging was still top of mind as I considered the company’s destiny. At that time, WD-40 was a great, successful company; yet, our culture could be best described as traditional, conservative, authoritarian, and somewhat insular.
Great was no longer good enough. We wanted to make this an even better company, on a global scale (one that would eventually touch lives in 176 countries). If we were to take our signature blue-and-yellow can with the red top to the world, we needed to give all our people not only a new focus on the product but also a new, expansive way to look at themselves (and each other). As a community, we needed to broaden our points of view, our array of possibility thinking. We all needed to see ourselves as part of something larger than our discrete roles in our current jobs. And we needed to feel free to bring forward fresh ideas without fear of being shut down for stretching beyond our prescribed confines of formal job descriptions.
In those days, companies fashionably called their cadres teams. But that wasn’t quite right for what I was trying to create inside WD-40 Company. When I thought of team, I naturally returned my mind to my Australian home to the rough-and-tumble, aggressive, take-no-prisoners game of rugby. If I was looking to create a culture of performance without fear, I’d have to find a better metaphor.
Tribe ticked all the boxes. The performance emphasis is on contributing in the context of mutual support and cooperation – not on winning and losing at all costs. Any role you can think of within an indigenous tribe has a counterpart in the corporate community – warriors, teachers, nurturers, learners, scouts, hunters – they can all be found inside a company structure.
Equally importantly, tribe also spoke to me of belonging. Naturally, in a corporate setting, the possibility of termination is always an option. But in a culture that is built on a tribal philosophy, dismissing employees (we call it “sharing them with our competitors”) is a last resort of such extreme circumstance; it would be almost as unnatural as it would if a tribe were to banish one of its members.
Once employees are psychologically safe in the knowledge that they truly belong to the group, they can invest their emotional energies in the tribe’s mission.
The Four Keys to Creating a Tribal Culture
One of the advantages that companies have over indigenous tribes is that we can intentionally create our tribal culture – very often out of whole cloth. Because of that opportunity to be specific in our intentions, we need a framework on which to hang the characteristics of that experience we call our tribe.
1. Purpose: In the earliest days of tribal culture, its purpose was pretty straightforward: survival and proliferation of its members. Activities were basic, without much nuance, and there wasn’t much choice in the matter of tribal membership: If you were born into the tribe, there you stayed, unless you were captured and enslaved by a neighboring tribe. There wasn’t any need for a resume. And where time might not have been money, time was definitely calories. Wasted motion was not indulged. The range of choice was, at most, “This watering hole? Or that one?”
Now the essential thought among modern tribe members is, “Do I like the way my life feels among these people? Or maybe I should look over there?” Individuals, including individual members of corporate tribes, yearn for an experience that appeals to the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. They have choice everywhere. If they don’t like their role within the tribe, they can lay down a plan to move into another function. If they don’t like the tribe itself, or its reason for being, they can choose to change tribes at any time.
Today’s tribal leaders (business executives) have to work harder at retaining members. A critical tool for rallying and retaining commitment and shared focus on a common goal is the company’s purpose. It’s up to the tribal leadership to find the most relevant, most inspiring, most uplifting and energizing focus to re-recruit their employees every day.
A purpose gives all conversation within a company a positive point of focus. Purpose is the hook on which you hang the entire experience of your workplace. As I was moving up the ranks at WD-40 Company, our focus was on removing the world’s squeaks and smells. As long as we had no aspirations to grow or transform any further, that purpose would have sufficed. But we wanted more. So we came up with this:
We exist to create positive, lasting memories in everything we do. We solve problems. We make things work smoothly. We create opportunities.
With this single, simple purpose, we become more than stuff in a can. Anyone can make stuff in a can. Now we’re about making positive, lasting memories. Now we still might be talking about a spray can and a random squeak. But now, when an idea is brought forward, we ask, “How does that create positive, lasting memories?” We’re folding in the entire human experience: “How can we improve our customers’ lives? How can we improve each others’ lives within the corporate tribe context?”
A well-crafted purpose gives us a place in our world. It’s a great tool for helping us focus on the single destination point of our shared, desired result.
It is also the most effective tool for recruiting and retaining the commitment of our tribe members. We can say to each other, “You belong to us because you’re as passionate about our purpose as we are.”
2. Values: Values are commonly regarded as thou shalt nots encased in happy face wrappers. But we at WD-40 Company consider our values to be providing the framework within which our people can express their freedom and do what they think is best. Our values are designed to set people free between guardrails that provide for the safety of the individual and the company.
Values, when they are well designed and thoroughly articulated, also serve as a global company’s Esperanto, a language that unifies all the company’s locatio
ns through a common understanding that is embraced across global cultures. As a WD-40 Company employee from, say, Shanghai, walks into a company location in Bologna, our well-defined and thoroughly articulated values eliminate the time- and energy-wasting friction so commonly experienced when strangers struggle to discover common ground.
Our six values are real to our tribe members because we have taken the time to fully describe what each one means.
We value doing the right thing.
We value creating positive lasting memories in all our relationships.
We value making it better than it is today.
We value succeeding as a tribe while excelling as individuals.
We value owning it and passionately acting on it.
We value sustaining the WD-40 Company economy.
Of the six values, number 4 speaks to our commitment to make sure that everyone feels individually supported and that they belong:
We value succeeding as a tribe while excelling as individuals.
We recognize that our collective success comes first. Our organization is a global company with many different locations and tribe members spread far and wide. But everything we do is toward the success of the entire company. Though we believe the individual can’t win at the expense of, or apart from, the team or tribe, individual excellence is the means by which our organization succeeds, and excellence is defined as outstanding contribution to the whole.
3. An Innovation-Friendly Culture: Recall Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build concept: When individuals operate from a perspective of positivity, their frame of mind expands their capacity to see a bigger-picture perspective and bring forward new ideas and creative solutions. Likewise, that same positivity bolsters their resilience and overall sense of well-being, regardless of the challenges immediately confronting them. This, in turn, makes them more willing to take the risks required to expose their ideas to the scrutiny of their fellow tribe members.
Work is Love Made Visible Page 18
