Like a Well-Oiled Machine

At WD-40, a unique corporate culture promoting learning and the freedom to fail yields off-the-chart levels of employee engagement.

It’s estimated that roughly 70 percent of American workers go to work every day and feel disengaged and dispassionate about their jobs. That’s not the case at San Diego-based WD-40 — and it never will be if Garry Ridge, chief executive officer, has anything to say about it.

At WD-40, a whopping 93 percent of employees say they’re engaged at work, according to the latest annual employee survey (the company has been polling employees for the last 19 years). Moreover, nearly 100 percent of employees feel their opinions and values are a good fit for the WD-40 culture, and 96 percent respect their coaches, which is what managers are known as at the company.

How did this business — known globally for it 65-year-old signature product, WD-40 penetrating oil — become such an outlier? By focusing on forging a corporate culture centered on what Ridge calls the four P’s: people, purpose, passion and products. The primary emphasis? People and purpose, Ridge says.

“People want to have a purpose in life and a purpose to what they do,” he explains. “Our job as leaders is to create an environment where our tribe members wake up each day and feel inspired about going to work … and return home at the end of the day fulfilled by the work they’ve done. They want to feel like they learned something new and contributed to something bigger than themselves. If you can create this world, they’ll take care of your customers and, in turn, take care of your stakeholders.

“My philosophy about leadership isn’t about being in charge,” he adds. “Leadership is about taking care of the people in your charge. It’s sad that so many leaders suck the souls out of organizations simply by not allowing people to be their best.”

A conversation with Ridge, filled with references to purpose and corporate values and tribes, makes him sound like a guru from some sort of workplace utopia. But if it all seems too good to be true, guess again; there’s serious data that clearly documents the success of his approach, which he started to implement a few years after he became CEO of WD-40 in 1997.

Since 2000, WD-40s market capitalization has grown from about $305 million to more than $1.6 billion, which Ridge says is a testament to the power of engaged employees. (For the record, WD-40 was originally developed as a rust-prevention solvent for the aerospace industry. The WD is an acronym for water displacement, and the 40 reflects how many tries it took company engineers to develop the product, first used to protect the outer skin of Atlas missiles from corrosion.)

“There’s a direct correlation between value created and employee engagement,” Ridge points out. “I don’t think making a commitment to making people better every day is a bunch of hooey. It’s part of our employee development program. We talk to our people at least every 90 days about how to get an A, and I don’t mean a mark on their paper.

“Part of getting an A is helping them become better stewards of our values and living those values every day,” he says.

In addition, corporate values must discourage micromanaging and instead give employees the freedom to make decisions on their own. This is especially critical for WD-40, a far-flung global company. How do employees make the right decisions? It’s easy if they make those decisions based on the corporate values, Ridge says.

“These values aren’t something framed and hung in the lobbies of our buildings around the world,” he notes. “They’re embedded in the conversations we have with our tribe members on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Our values set our people free.”

A central tenet of the WD-40 culture is creating a learning environment. And within that environment, failure doesn’t exist in the company’s vocabulary. “We don’t make mistakes here; we have learning moments,” Ridge explains. “We’re a learning organization that encourages people to share what’s working and what’s not working in an open, honest and freedom-based way.”

This is important because in too many organizations, employees are afraid to make a mistake for fear that they’ll be punished. This results in employees trying to hide failures for as long as possible. The end result? A lost opportunity for a teachable moment that can benefit many other employees. And the problem continues to fester until it becomes a much bigger issue that’s more difficult to resolve than if it would’ve been revealed earlier on in the process, Ridge notes.

There is a learning curve for employees to adapt to this new culture. “It was hard,” he concedes. “But leadership is hard work. There are too many people out there who want to lead but don’t want to do the work.”

Another central facet of Ridge’s leadership principles is based on three simple words: I don’t know. And the ability to stop and say those words requires what he calls “conscious incompetence” — a willingness to admit you don’t have all the answers. “When you say, ‘I don’t know,’ then you get the benefit of answers from all the people who know more about something that you do,” he explains.

Ridge calls himself the chief of a tribe. Some leaders like to call their organizations teams, but he prefers tribes because he feels it’s more suited to businesses. “I prefer to call our employees a tribe because people want to belong to something, and a tribe is something people belong to,” he says. “Teams are something people play on situationally to win a game. But business is much more than a series of games — it’s about building a company over time.”

Can the same principles that built such a positive culture at WD-40 be applied to other workplaces, such as the water and sewer utilities? “Absolutely,” Ridge says. “Isn’t the core principle of life about helping people become better than they are today? So many leaders out there are all about themselves. But we’re here to serve people — that’s what servant leadership is all about.”



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