Garry Ridge on Helping People Get an A

[podcast] https://s3.amazonaws.com/pmstories-podcast/2018/ridge_garry_WD40/WD40_Garry_Ridge.mp3 

Garry Ridge is the CEO of the WD-40 Company, as well as the co-author (with Ken Blanchard) of a terrific book, Helping People Win at Work. In this first episode of PM Stories, Garry shares:

• The difference between teams and tribes.
• Why WD-40 Company shifted its focus from ratings to development.
• How to encourage people to be more coach-like.
• Why technology isn't always the answer.

Or bookmark it here to listen to later. And don’t forget to rate it on iTunes.

Resources

Also mentioned in this podcast:

• Helping People Win at Work: A Business Philosophy Called "Don't Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A", by Ken Blanchard and Garry Ridge
• Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching

Full Transcript

Michael: I'm Michael Bungay Stanier, the founder and CEO of Box of Crayons, and this is Performance Management Stories, where we get to talk to senior folks from different organizations, getting the lowdown, getting the skinny on how they've thought about, tackled, wrestled with the performance management issue. I'm pretty excited to be speaking to my friend, Garry Ridge, today. Garry is the CEO of the WD-40 Company, so he's probably heard as many get unrusty, get unstuck jokes as there are in the universe to hear.

He is the co-author of a terrific book and this will definitely be part of our conversation. He co-authored it with Ken Blanchard, Helping People Win At Work. Finally, and this is how I got to know Garry, he's a Marshall Goldsmith Certified Stakeholder Centered Coach. Garry was, in fact, chosen along with me to be in the first cadre of Marshall's Top 100 Coaches, so we got to hang out about a year ago for the first time.

Of course, and you'll hear this, Garry is an Australian like I am. You can't see him because it's a podcast, but he is as equally good looking and charming and intelligent and just generally charismatic as I am. Take that as a blessing or a curse, I'm not sure, but Garry, welcome to this conversation.

Garry Ridge: Good day, Michael. There would be one thing you said was true in all of that, we're both Australians. The charismatic, good looking ... I have a great face for radio. That's why I really appreciate the podcast opportunity.

Michael: Perfect. I'm excited to be talking to you. You're the CEO, and honestly most of the conversations we have with people around performance management, we're not talking to the CEO, but I know that you have got a particular passion for this sort of work, for being champions of the people who work in your organization. But before we get into some of that detail, just tell me a little bit about WD-40 as a company. How big are you? Are you global or are you just local? Give us a sense of what type of organization we're dealing with here.

Garry Ridge: Thank you. Thanks Michael. We're a NASDAQ listed public company. We're on the NASDAQ stock exchange. We've got a market cap of about 1.5-1.6 billion, it depends when you look. We're a global organization. WD-40, the brand, is sold and marketed in 176 countries around the world.

Our purpose or our why is we're in the memories business. We wake up every day to create positive, lasting memories, solving problems in factories, homes and workshops of the world. We solve problems and we create opportunities. As I said, about 65% of our revenue is outside of the United States. Our total revenue is close to $400 million. So yeah, this is a great company.

The product itself was invented in San Diego back in 1953 to stop corrosion in the umbilical cord of the Atlas space rockets, so the product actually came out of the space era. It's called WD-40 because there were 39 formulas that didn't work and the 40th one did, so that's why it's called water displacing 40 formula. It's a wonderful, wonderful company. It's really wonderful because we have so many great tribe members that get up every day and enjoy what they do.

Michael: That's already interesting language. You talk about the people at work at WD-40 as members of a tribe. Why is that important as language?

Garry Ridge: One of the biggest desires we have as human beings is to belong, and when we looked at forming our cultural, if you will, landscape a lot of people talked about teams. A team is something that you play on situationally to win an event or to solve a problem. A tribe is enduring over time. I did some study, in fact, around the Australian Aborigines and I wanted to work out what kept them in place many thousands of years ago in the middle of the sun burned country.

Interestingly enough, the number one attribute of a tribal leader or responsibility of a tribal leader is to be a learner and a teacher. If you weren't taught how to throw a boomerang thousands of years ago you died. So we saw that tribes were something that people could belong to. It's the third attribute as you climb up the scale on Maslow's hierarchy, but most organizations don't ... Really forget about this need that we have as humans to belong.

Michael: Garry, remind me, how long have you been the CEO at WD-40? I mean even how long have you worked at WD-40?

Garry Ridge: I've been a tribe member since July 4, 1987 and I've been CEO since October 7, 1997, so I've just celebrated 20 years.

Michael: Congratulations.

Garry Ridge: Thank you.

Michael: You've got a real drive. I mean you don't end up writing a book with Ken Blanchard unless you've got a real drive to champion the people, to build the tribe. My bet is that you've been thinking about this performance management process longer than the last two or three years or five years, because the last five years there's been this kind of earthquake or up-swelling of we've got to change things, but my bet is you've been thinking about it longer than that. When did you start tackling this issue of how do we encourage performance, how do we manage and rate our people?

Garry Ridge: November 1999. I was in a class. Ken Blanchard was my professor. I did a Master's degree in leadership at the University of San Diego and Ken was one of my professors. Ken made a comment and he was sharing a learning he had. When he was a professor, I think it was at Cornell, he used to give out the final paper of the class at the beginning of the class.

He used to get into a lot of trouble from the academics, saying, "What the hell are you doing Blanchard, giving out the final paper," and he said, "Not only am I giving out the final paper, I'm going to help people get an A along the way, so they're going to learn the answers." This is exactly what's wrong with this review process that was really a process of little thought, little collaboration, and created enormous fear instead of what it should do, which is create collaboration, encouragement, and an opportunity for people to step into the best version of their personal self.

Michael: How do you think about performance management at WD-40? It tends to have two elements. One is about encouraging performance. The other is about this kind of ratings and measurements side of it. Maybe there are two questions here, but I'm curious to know where you've got to, knowing that you've spent at least 18 years having had your head turned upside down by Ken Blanchard.

Garry Ridge: Well, the first thing to determine was the biggest flaw in performance management was a clear and ... A real clear uncertainty about what the expectations were between the two people. Normally what would happen in a performance management scenario is it's the 364th day of the fiscal year, HR calls down to Micheal, the manager, and says, "Hey, Michael, it's Garry from HR." You say, "Hi Garry, good to talk to you." "Don't forget that tomorrow your annual reviews are due, and if you don't get them in on time compensation changes won't be in the system."

Michael says, "Sure. I've got this under control," hangs up and goes, "Holy Dooley! Where's that form," or, "I have a form, but wait a minute. My company has been really good to me. Not only did they give me a form, they've given me this data package that I could just tick boxes and do things and I can work out grades." So you get into that and you do all that, and then you walk out to find Holly, one of your tribe members or teammates. You say, "Holly, I've just done your review and you got a three here out of a five and this why, and this is what your end result will be."

Instead of it being at the beginning of the year, what do we agree the desired outcomes are? How are we going to measure them, i.e. what does good success look like, and then how am I as the coach going to get alongside you from day one to insure that by the time the end of the year comes you've actually either achieved the goal and hopefully learned along the way, or if you haven't achieved the goal we've understood what's blown you off course, what's got in your way, and what we need to do about it.

But more importantly, my role is to be coaching you on a conversation on an ongoing and meaningful basis. I need to be able to say to you, "I mean you no harm. I want you to step into the best version of your personal self and my responsibility as your leader and coach is to help you get there."

Michael: One of the things that you've done there is shift from a process where people are being rate to where people are being coached and supported on performance.

Garry Ridge: Right.

Michael: Do you do anything around ratings? How do you make that work, because this is part of the tension. The dark tension at the heart of performance management is we pretend it's about performance, but it's really about ratings or maybe vice versa. How do you manage that tension?

Garry Ridge: We don't have ratings, but we have grades. We have an A, a B, a C, or an L. The key is that we actually describe ... We have our tribe members describe what an A looks like. An A is basically a description of what the desired outcome is, so you don't get into this tension about you graded me wrongly. You only do one performance review at WD-40 Company, and it's your own. It's the responsibility of the tribe member. The coach's responsibility is to coach them through it.

Then we have an L. An L is a beautiful rating, which is called a learner. If you've got someone who is performing ... He's new in the job and needs a deeper learning opportunity, you not going to give them a D and tell them ... Or an F because they failed. You're going to say you're a learner and we respect a learner and we want to help you get from an L to wherever you need to go.

Michael: One of the challenges that I see coming up is when people are like okay, if I can just set my own standard ... I'd love to get an A because I've been encouraged to get As all my life, so I'm going to set my performance bar lower so that I know I'm going to get the A. How do you manage that as a tension?

Garry Ridge: The A is an agreement between the coach and the tribe member. It all starts basically with a well-written and clear description of what the job is. Our system is pretty simple. We have a job specification and we say this is the job. We say to the tribe member, "Does this resemble your job?"

Michael: "Is this your job?" Yeah, exactly.

Garry Ridge: "Does this resemble your job?" Yes. Okay. What are the three to five essential functions that we need to insure that we have a high degree of competency and a high degree of performance around, and you'll pick those. Then you'll describe what an A look likes.

Then the second part is a goal section, which these goals are more short term. They may be something that I and the tribe member, the coach and the tribe member agree we want to achieve in this year, in the next two months, or whenever. Those are either you achieve them or you don't achieve them.

The third part, which is really important, this is where some very rich and beautiful conversation happens Michael, you'd love it, is around our values. We list all of our values in this section, and we only have two measures of values. You either live our values or you visit them, and we don't want a lot of visitors.

We ask our tribe members to describe in ... Formally as a coach you must sit down and have a conversation with your tribe member at least every 90 days, so we ask them to write and share with us in the last 90 days give us examples, real examples, of how you've lived our values.

Those three elements then play into what might be a final grade which there will be no surprises. By the mid part of the year you know what your grade is going to be for the year and you have the opportunity to either influence it more or not, but there's no surprises.

Michael: You talked a lot about the role of being a coach. I mean you're trained as a coach in Marshall Goldsmith's work and coaching is obviously a central piece of a framework as being a tribe member at WD-40, how have you helped your people be successful coaches? Lots of organizations talk about it and what they find is a lot of people who are kind of going yeah, I'm just re-labeling my old behavior as coaching because that's the thing I need to do to survive. How are you helping your people shift their behavior to be more coach-like?

Garry Ridge: What's on your mind? Anything else?

Michael: I see what you're doing there Garry.

Garry Ridge: Before we got your wonderful book ... I think I shared with you sometime back, I think we bought 500 or 600 copies. I gave them to everybody. We actually held a class, and in my class at USD now I use your framework in teaching the elements of coaching, but you made coaching so damn simple. A lot of people get it confused, and as you know better than I do there's different types of coaching.

But as far as our tribe members are concerned, as part of our leadership laboratory, which is a training program we have in the company, we help people understand the elements of coaching that are important. Most importantly, Michael, we don't call our leaders managers. We call them the first coach or the second coach.

If someone is talking about their boss, in our company they'll talk about their coach. I think one of the most important elements of coaching is great coaches are never found on the playing field. That's what we talk about. We use your coaching model extensively.

Michael: That's so cool. Thank you. I wasn't setting up to do this, but I'm just going to do ... All my other future questions, I'm going to ask that same question, because that was awesome.

Garry Ridge: No, we love it. As I said, we use it a lot.

Michael: Thank you.

Garry Ridge: What's the real challenge here for you?

Michael: Right. You got it. Thank you. Any challenges in transitioning to this way of doing things now, because when history is written it always seems so obvious and such a linear process to get from A to B. It really is quite as smooth and as focused and as elegant as it sounds, so I'm curious to know what were the lessons you learned on the way? What did you maybe try and it didn't quite pan out?

Garry Ridge: The biggest mountain we have to climb here, Michael, and it was reinforced ... I was at the Human Capital Institute Conference last week speaking in Scottsdale, and I got a hold of some latest Gallup research on the re-engineering of performance management. The research says that just one in five employees strongly agree that their company system motivates them.

I think my learning from way back is exactly that actually it doesn't motivate them. It de-motivates them because it's never been used as an encouragement tool. It's been more used as a reprimand tool. It took us a long time and a number of years at WD-40 to win the trust of our tribe members that we are here using this to help them be better, when in the past it's mainly been used to harm or hurt them, and that's the biggest hurdle we have.

Michael: One final question, because I'm just curious about it. What I love about the story you're telling so far is how human-centric it is, how people-centric it is. It's about conversations. It's about connections. Has there been any kind of technology that you've found particularly useful or as a way of accelerating or enhancing this process?

Garry Ridge: Technology is the enemy of this. We use a very simple Word document, and I want to see a lot of coffee stains on these Word documents. I want to see a lot of scribble on them. It's about the conversation. That's what it's about. The documents and the program is there to give discipline around you as a coach finding the time to spend with your tribe member with one objective only, how do you help them get an A?

Michael: Garry, it's hard to not just want to walk away from this interview right now because that's such a powerful and fundamental insight to leave us on, so thank you so much. Who doesn't have a can of WD-40 in their garage or in their house somewhere? You probably have the statistics on this, but it's so nice to get an insight into a company that I'm sure most people think of as a kind of industrial company, but I love the way you've framed it about being a champion for memories and a champion for the very best of human practices. So Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40, thank you so much for being on the call with us today.

Garry Ridge: Thanks Michael. It's all about the people.

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About Michael Bungay Stanier

Michael is the Senior Partner at Box of Crayons, a company that teaches 10-minute coaching so that busy managers can build stronger teams and get better results. His most recent book, The Coaching Habit, has sold a quarter of a million copies. Along with David Creelman and Anna Tavis, Michael recently conducted and released a new piece of research, The Truth & Lies of Performance Management. Michael is a Rhodes Scholar and was recently recognized as the #3 Global Guru in coaching. Visit BoxofCrayons.com and https://boxofcrayons.com/pmresearch/  for more information.