Chris revisits the key points made by Garry Ridge, adds his own insights and gives listeners some suggestions for practical actions they can take immediately to help them get where they want to go.
Welcome to every one of our Perspectives from the Top community of listeners around the world to “Reflections on the Top”. “Reflections” is to help you get the best from the series by me reviewing the key insights from our latest guest.
That was Garry Ridge - CEO WD40, author, coach, and Adjunct Professor of Leadership : Garry joined WD40 in Australia and in 1987 he became head of WD40 for Asia and Australia, in 1994 he took over International Development and in 1997 became CEO. He's been with WD40 for an amazing 34 years, 22 of them as CEO. That's an achievement but not only that - he's expanded the company globally not just in terms of WD40 itself but also in broadening the product range and in building an organisation that is still true to the founding values from 60 years ago. In addition he's written several books on leadership, one with the global leadership guru Ken Blanchard, he's Adjunct Professor of Leadership at San Diego University, an executive coach, and through his advice over the years has helped literally thousands of organisations and their leaders be more successful.
My discussion with Garry was really powerful with so many great points that came out, both really practical and big picture which all of you listening can take at least one action point away from. One of the first things that struck me was the comment by Ken Blanchard, the leadership guru that business is a force for good and that people want to be their best selves. Also Garry's perspective on the Great Resignation, confirmed by much of the data is that it was, and still is, in reality the great escape from toxic cultures. If you look at why people left organisations uncaring leaders is probably the greatest justification from nearly 40% of people who walked away.
This links back to my discussion with Marshall Goldsmith, Garry confirmed the same and my experience has been the same, and the evidence supports it simply that during COVID many people had felt that their leaders didn't care about them or didn't support them enough time when they really needed it. As Garry pointed out a recent news release by Larry Fink the CEO of BlackRock made quite clear that organisations with strong cultures performed significantly better during Covid than others. Certainly my evidence gathering for my articles absolutely confirms that. In organisations where the culture was sufficiently positive when the threat became obvious everybody pulled together with a common purpose and because of the trust built up within the organisations culture they were able to rapidly adapt, change and introduce really slick decision making to respond to the fast changing situation.
It's a testament to Garry's work and his “tribe” as he calls the team at WD40 the experience during Covid was extremely powerful. The figures say it all 98% of people in WD40 say they are proud to say they work for the company, 97% really like their coach. In WD40s is case that is what we would call their boss because in WD40 they don't have bosses they have coaches leading their teams. What's also amazing is that during double COVID WD40 had some of their best results. During that time when Garry asked people why they were inspired they simply said “if we can get through this together we can get through anything.” My point too all of you listening is that Garry and WD40 show that success during Covid was possible, that you can inspire everyone to give their best, that you can get to 90%+ employee engagement, it can be done that it is not just some unachievable idea that I talk about.
As an interesting fact for everybody listening as many of you who probably used WD40 was that WD stands for water displacement and the product was developed for the ensuring electrical connectivity in the Atlas space rocket. Garry first joined the company in Australia and soon developed the market out in Asia then subsequently took over as head of International Development to build the brand across the world and then as CEO which he has been for an amazing 25 years. Again to benchmark WD40 against other organisations most other organisations on average have employee engagement rates of about 20 to 25% max. What does that mean that means? That 20 to 25% of the employees in the organisation are potentially giving their best, which clearly means that 75 to 80% aren't, but it's worse than that. In the data there is also a figure for disengaged which is normally around 17 to 20%. These people are proactively not doing the best for the organisation, they really don't care and are therefore toxic to organisational success. Set against this WD40 has that amazing engagement rate of 93%.
How does Garry achieve this? In his view it's quite simply that business success is delivered by having great people, having a clear purpose, having passion and having good products. Further that the best strategy in the world is useless without the will of the people
It's very strange that both of us, when we speak to audiences of leaders, by chance we use the same quote by Aristotle. It's “pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work”. I ask the audience who they think said it, they often identify some forward thinking modern business leader such as Steve Jobs or Richard Branson and then are surprised when they discover that it is 2500 years old. But the key points that both Garry and I make is that 1. if this was true two and a half thousand years ago why has this message still not got through to some people who are leaders? And 2, it's true still because we are all human as much as people in Ancient Greece. That its our humanity which powers great leadership as Garry says.
That should be obvious to us all but as I said to Garry there is this contradiction between leaders who view things from their own perspective about what they would want from their boss in a different way to what they believe their people might want from them which is illogical and the source of many leadership problems which come up in organisations.
To which Garry made the point that out there are CEOs whose ego eats their empathy when in fact their empathy should be eating their ego. Where empathy eats ego they can become effective servant leaders to involve, show they care, be competent, get and give feedback. Plus Garry's beautiful point the micromanagement is never scalable.
But we returned to this fundamental point that there are a significant number of leaders out there who are not living up to their peoples expectations. In contrast Garry said that for 69 years WD40 had had a culture that was founded on everyone working together, as I have said before the “we not me culture” which works. And that culture needs to be put in place by servant leaders.
Garry set out a nice model for how you as a leader can think about how servant leadership works. Think of the organisation is a pyramid. At the start the senior leaders at the top develop the strategy, the purpose, engage people in the development of the values, and pull together the resource is to make it all happen. When everything is then in place then the pyramid flips over so that the point is at the bottom. This is when the servant leadership is the key to success - that the leaders in the organisation then enable the people, at the front line in particular, freedom to make the strategy and vision a reality, in other words they have servant leaders.
The problem that we discussed is that some people get this naturally and some people just don't. Garry's view was that there are a majority leaders who want to be the best they can but need to be guided into an effective servant leadership role. He quoted the Dalai Lama as someone who had made him truly understand what this was all about in a quote “our purpose in life is to make people happy and if you can't do that you shouldn't hurt them.”
Garry and I agreed that to help leaders be better, and you listening I know want to be, it's about knowing the benefits of being a servant leader and the steps that you can take to achieve it. You being the person that you aspire to be and enabling others to be the same. However as Garry noted constant self-awareness is needed. We both admitted that work pressures can bit by bit make you slip backwards into the old self focused command and control type mindset. The danger is that then this starts to destroy the credibility that you have built up as a servant leader with your people.
But Garry's point was that with servant leadership there was also a greater moral imperative. Its not just about the organisation, its that whilst happy people will help you be successful in the organisation we should never forget that it's also that those happy people will have happy families which will create happy communities which then create happy societies and, as Garry said, if there is anything we need in this world now it is happy societies.
But perhaps for any of you listening who are skeptical about why leaders need to step up now post Covid and be true servant leaders its this, and if you are Generation Z you will really understand personally. Gen Z is anyone born after 1997.
Generation Z now makes up 20% of the working population in most countries and they are not prepared to tolerate poor leadership. They will walk away even if they don't have a job to go to. By 2030 Gen Z will be 40% of the workforce. This is an impending an on going great resignation time bomb for any leader or organisation who does not step up to what people want and need from leaders.
Garry had an interesting view on how you can interpret the impact of employee engagement on success. If I paraphrase him if you have 20% employee engagement you have 20% chance of your organisation or team delivering real success and reaching its full potential, if you have 93% like WD40 you have a 93% chance of success and reaching full potential. Yes, I know that's somewhat simplistic but I think if you look at employee engagement all the evidence is that’s pretty much the outcome. Just to emphasise again the employee engagement figure for you non HR listeners is simply the % of people in the organisation who are giving their best. So what leaders need to do is just maximise it, that simple.
But as Garry repeatedly emphasised this is not complicated, leaders just need to take care of people who are in their charge, it's about really simple things like genuinely asking if people are OK, not just employees either, asking suppliers and others who you interact with if what we are doing is helping you if it's going well. That's a really interesting reflection as that’s also exactly what Mathias Imbach, CEO of Sygnum, the first digital bank in the world does regularly with his employees and other stakeholders.
But in being a really effective leader I know many of you listening share the fear many leaders in organisations have. Thats if I make a mistake am I going to be in big trouble. That’s often where a blame culture exists. Blame cultures slowly kill the organisation eating away at any desire for anyone to try to improve or to optimise risk to make things happen. In WD40 Garry said they describe mistakes as “learning moments,” either a positive or a negative outcomes that can be shared for the benefit of all to learn. Its simply a fact of life that you need to take risk to grow your organisation and that sometimes things will go wrong. But the upside is that creates a learning moment that then enables both the organisation and its people to grow. I’m sure everyone listening can recall a time where something went wrong but that learning moment ended up being a really positive insight longer term.
As well as running WD40 Garry does a lot of mentoring of senior executives and one of the interesting comments he made was that he is not prepared to mentor executives who are not committed to proactively enable their people to be their best and all the things that we have already discussed in the interview. To be honest I take the same view. When there are so many people out there who genuinely want to be better leaders, as you listening do, to enable their people to be better why should Garry or I waste our time on other people who just don't care, because in due course the world will show them the error of their own ways might change their minds. The problem is that in the meantime these toxic leaders are damaging both people and organisations. But that’s an imperative for you listening in C suite, to identify these people and get them out if they won’t change. In fairness to this group within it are people who don’t realise the damage they are doing, they are just following the example of their previous own bosses. But once someone makes them aware they can, and do, transform. I’ve helped a few senior executives do just that.
We returned to this fundamental point that both Garry, I and indeed all of our other guests believe is so important, that to be your best as a leader you must genuinely have a belief that your role as a leader is to enable your people to be their best, to send them home having grown and being happy after their time at work, to take a holistic perspective of your people, not just the person that is at work but the whole person. Covid confirmed above all else that if people do not feel valued, if people do not feel respected, if people are treated badly and overworked they will now leave. I know many of you listening will have experienced just that and how much it impacted you. So the rules of the game have changed and many people will now leave even if they don't have a job to go to.
In Garry's view a real leader is a human being who recognises they can't get it all right himself, they need their people to give their best, they want to send people home happy. What were those four beautiful points that Garry concluded with :
Finally back to the words of the Dalai Lama
“Our purpose in life should be to make people happy and if we can't do that at least we should not hurt them.”
As with the previous guests and now Garry hopefully you are seeing a pattern of simple actions you can take to be more successful. Share these interviews colleagues who would benefit so they can grow and develop with you. Certainly I will be using these powerful points in my speaking and Masterclasses in the future.
If you have any thoughts or questions connect with me on LinkedIn or via email as detailed on the Perspectives website. Don't forget to sign up to Perspectives from the Top. It's free, so you don't miss any of the great episodes in the future.
That’s it for now, so from me its onwards and upwards until our next episode.