Leadership Lessons of Lockdown 2020

We purpose-driven business leaders and experts spend a significant portion of our lives traveling the world (at least in normal times), addressing groups of people with the hope that we might shift some perspectives, inspire new futures, open some questions that only the audience members can answer for themselves, or change a career or business trajectory for the better – even if only just a little.  With the exception of a shared meal and posing for some grip-and-grins now and then, we don’t often have much opportunity to really converse with the individuals in our audiences to learn if what we have to say makes any difference to them at all. Most of the time, outside of those we lead in our companies, we just don’t really know what influence we have had.

For that reason, we especially welcome emails – or, even better, handwritten notes – from individuals who have heard what we offered.  When it does happen, they typically start out by saying, “You probably don’t remember me, but….” I received such a note just last week. And the writer was correct, I didn’t remember him. But I’ll never forget him now.  

It’s not so much because what I said helped him make a deeply satisfying career change that more closely aligned with his values.  It’s because of what he said happened one day on the way home from the hardware store.

As with most of us over the months of the COVID-19 lockdown, this young father had some time flexibility. He decided to use it by getting into bicycling again. Which required that he get his bike back into good working order. Which required that he clean his bike chain. Which required a trip to the store to pick up a can of WD-40 Multi-Use Product. 

He decided to bring along his 10-year-old daughter, who shruggingly accompanied him. And this is where we pick up his story:

“On the way home, I asked her, ‘Do you know what we just bought?’ 

“‘Some oil or something,’ she said, while staring at the screen on her phone.

“‘No, we just bought a memory.’

“When we got home, I asked her to help me clean the bike chain. I sprayed a rag with the WD-40 and told her to smell it. I then said, ‘You will remember this moment forever. Every time you smell WD-40 from now on, you will remember this time we had together.”

Considering that I am the chairman and CEO of WD-40 Company, I would understand it if you were beginning to think that I wrote this piece to do a commercial. But it could have just as easily been a roll of Gorilla Tape that he was talking about. And I would have still told this story. 

Why?  Because we’re in the memories business.  Yes, at WD-40 Company, we explicitly state this in our company’s purpose: “We exist to create positive lasting memories in everything we do. We solve problems. We make things work smoothly. We create opportunities.”

We elaborate on our commitment to memories in our second value: “We value creating positive lasting memories in all our relationships. As a result of our interactions with our tribe and stakeholders, we all will feel better at the end of the interaction than we did when we began; we will leave with a positive memory of it. Our stockholders should be proud to say they own our stock. Our customers should consider us a part of their business success. Consumers should be glad they bought our products, telling their friends about the quality and utility of our brands. Our company name and our many brands should become known as emblems of quality, performance and value. Our tribe members should consider each other valued friends and colleagues who share work, struggles, successes, life and laughter over the years. If we live these values, the result will be a higher degree of mutual trust and respect, if we successfully live these values.”

But this is my challenge to you as a leader:  Aren’t we all in the memories business? Isn’t this especially true when it comes to the way our people connect their talents, days, and careers with the company they work for?

Even more to the point: We’re all in the business of creating positive, lasting memories that will be nourished well into the distant future by the way we touch our people, their families, and even future generations.  This young father with his 10-year-old daughter had the foresight to understand that this was not just an annoying errand with an indifferent child in the passenger seat. He knew that if he framed this experience in just the right light, his daughter would not only remember this otherwise very ordinary experience, but she will likely tell her own children about “that time when,” and hand them a piece of cloth so they could smell the same smell that evokes a loving, sentimental memory of her experience with her father. And her children will, in turn, do the same with their kids far into a future that we can’t even begin to imagine today – removing the dirt and squeaks from toys yet to be invented.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if this father had had the same experience with his own dad while working on a bike in the 1990s. Or something similar. Such a shared moment can have a permanent, positive bonding impact.  Which brings us to where we find ourselves today.

What Will Your People Remember from the Lockdown of 2020?

Depending on where you are in the world, and where your people are located, the saga has a diversity of start dates. In the United States, for instance, most people point to March 16 when the national lockdown commenced. Others point to the troubling day of Friday, March 13th, when those who were traveling scrambled to airports in order to get home before that would become either complicated or impossible.

As for me, everything changed a couple of weeks beforehand. It was in late in February. I was, as usual, traveling. I was in a small town outside of Rome attending a conference for my company. At this point, we already knew that China was suffering. During that conference,  Italy got hit. One-by-one, meetings all over the planet began to be cancelled. The effects of this mysterious and deadly contagion rolled around the globe like that big stone ball in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark.  I felt like Indiana Jones, running just barely ahead of it, working with our leaders to ensure all our facilities across 15 countries had action plans in place, and then get safely back to California, walk through my own front door and close it behind me by the time the calendar flipped to March 16.

At that point, the entire world community entered a chapter in the history of humanity that none of us have ever experienced before at such an epic scale, with an as-yet unknown outcome, and unforeseeable personal and economic implications. Everyone all over the world wondered “What do we do with this?” Business leaders around the globe asked themselves the same question. And we are still asking ourselves that question, as of this writing, doing our best to arrive at answers as things continually change. 

One of the key components to the answers we can come up with – answers that are within our power to actually convert into outcomes – is the decision on how we will apply our leadership principles, values, and commitment to our respective cultural attributes to ensure that we serve our people so that they emerge from this experience whole,  supported, and perhaps even transformed for the better, having had this shared experience.

When Employee Engagement Takes on a Whole New Meaning

Now would be the time when we would put all our long-cherished engagement drivers and cultural commitments to the test. The decisions and values-based choices we would make moving forward would create the memories for our people not only in the immediate fiscal year but for generations to come. What stories will they tell each other and their families about how WD-40 Company upheld its values?

My own personal journey into the world and rewards of sincere commitment to employee engagement began in 1997 – predictably – on a flight across the Pacific, from Los Angeles to Sydney.  Up until that trip, my leadership style could be easily summed up this way: “Be brief, be bright, be gone.”  I was a just-get-it-done kind of leader, operating on the principle that if I kept moving fast, people would forget that I was really just a one-time traveling salesman from Australia.

But during that flight, I read these words by the Dalai Lama, which changed everything for me:

“Our purpose in life is to make people happy. If we can’t make them happy, at least don’t hurt them.”

These words put me on a new leadership path, pursuing the foundation of a leadership master’s degree program at the University of San Diego, where I was fortunate enough to have Ken Blanchard as my professor and mentor.  All these years later, he still is.  

As I progressed in my understanding of how to apply what I was learning, it became reflected by WD-40 Company’s performance. When I started my role as CEO in 1997, WD-40 Company was primarily a domestic business serving a U.S. market. Our market cap was a mere $250 million.  Respectable for our company at that time, but definitely modest. Worse, however, was that our overall employee engagement score was just shy of 50%. 

As of 2020, over two decades into this adventure of transforming WD-40 Company into a truly global enterprise, with sales in 176 countries, our market cap is over $2.5 billion at the time of this writing.  It’s no coincidence that now our overall employee engagement score as of March 2020 is 93%. The one engagement indicator that I am especially proud of is: “I LOVE to tell people I work for WD-40 Company,” with 98% of our employees agreeing with that sentiment.

The results of WD-40 Company have been created over time based on our deep commitment to creating a tribal culture, where people feel that they belong, that they are connected to fellow tribe members, mutually invested in helping each other succeed. We pursue a culture where people believe that their leadership sincerely cares about their well-being, and they have a place to go to every day where they can do good and meaningful work, where they are happy to see people who are happy to see them as well. And at the end of the day, they go home feeling fulfilled for having done work that helps them express their own individual sense of purpose. (Click here to read the full story on how we created a tribal culture.)

And then COVID-19 hit. And everyone went home. I feared the WD-40 Company circle of safety would be shattered into thousands of shards – one shard per home address. Suddenly, other than online video calls, there was no certainty when anyone would actually see anyone else again. In a new context of isolation and survival-level uncertainty, the WD-40 Company tribe needed care from their leaders with a new frame of reference into the future. 

As it happened, just a few months prior, Simon Sinek had released his book The Infinite Game, in which he challenges readers to take on a larger mission than his famous why. Now he was talking about the Just Cause. Sinek states that a Just Cause is “a specific vision of a future state that does not yet exist; a future state so appealing that people are willing to make sacrifices in order to help advance toward that vision.”  The Just Cause, he writes, positions a company to prevail over the short-term challenges of quarterly performance demands, shifts in the marketplace, changing consumer needs or upheavals in global economic conditions. If there was ever a time to go through the exercise of identifying and articulating WD-40 Company’s Just Cause, the Fall of 2019 would have been it. And we did, not knowing what was to come, or how valuable it would be to us just a few months later.

In addition to our purpose, and our values, we now have a Just Cause. It is this:

Make life better at work and at home.

As our tribe members’ front doors clicked shut one by one all around the world, my role was to hold our Just Cause top of mind and continuously ask myself the same question I ask myself today, “What needs to be true for this day to be better for our tribe at work and at home?”  (This question was inspired by the work of Rebecca Homkes, Ph.D, a consultant and lecturer at the London Business School.)

My main role is to keep them connected, nurture that tribal feeling of belonging and trust. Workplace experts are now reporting that the experience and experiment of grand-scale remote work is disenfranchising our cherished people.  I can say with some humility that because of our 23 years’ commitment to getting our culture of belonging right and authentic, our tribal network started out tight and intact, as was reflected in our engagement statistics. But I take nothing for granted, certainly not the feelings of the WD-40 Company tribe. My daily job – and privilege – is to serve them.

These are the leadership lessons I’ve learned along this journey…so far. I hope you will be able to adapt them to your own Just Cause, as you navigate the turbulence, leading your organizations toward a brighter future.

Recognize that employees are on a Hero’s Journey of their own.

When your people finally return to your workplace, they will be coming back transformed for having gone through the experience of this pandemic. It takes special characteristics to be working “at home,” living on the edge of uncertainty, without the in-person support of fellow tribe members. There’s the adrenaline rush of unexpected possibilities; the thrill of the last-minute saves; the satisfaction of going it alone, even when the destination is unclear. 

Every single level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been yanked out from each person, like a Jenga tower puzzle piece, causing levels of anxiety that few have experienced before. Add on top of that the isolation from each person’s work tribe, the obliteration of the “circle of safety,” the added stress of family members being on top of each other, lonely and bored children trying to learn from a computer screen, lack of exercise, unhealthy stress-management habits, the very real threat of the virus itself, and the constant stress of worrying about the uncontrollable. 

It will take many years for behavioral science and health researchers from all disciplines to fully understand the long-term ramifications of this global isolation. And, to be candid, physical injury, violence and death are also playing out in many homes. There’s substance abuse, child abuse and neglect, malnutrition, stress and anxiety-induced substance abuse. And there is no one from the outside to see. 

And then there is the devastation by the coronavirus itself—the lives it will have taken, the families it will have harmed and the loss of faith in many governmental and health systems.

This global calamity can be experienced as either a traumatic catastrophe or the makings of an epic adventure where your people will emerge stronger, wiser, braver, more resilient, and more confident for having overcome the huge challenges of this saga. 

Those who prevail will emerge from this experience transformed.  Exactly how the changes will manifest themselves remains a mystery as of this writing. But wise leaders will do well to bear in mind that the person they might have said, “Have a great weekend!” to on March 13 is not be the same person they will say, “Welcome back!” to when people return.

As leaders, we can’t forget that our people have also had to envision and prepare for worst-case scenarios unlike anything they’d experienced in the past. They’ve learned new ways of coping, new ways of facing fear head on, new ways of finding the gifts in the midst of disaster. 

They will be changing before your very eyes. Look closely and you might even be able to see it on a Zoom call. Reacquaint yourself with the people you used to know, and who have changed.  Adjust your leadership approach accordingly.

Embrace the Learning Moment.

As Indiana Jones said in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “I’m making this up as I go.” If you have followed my writing over recent years, you know that even in the best of times, the Learning Moment is essential to creating a circle of safety in your workplace community where your people are free to try things (ideas, products, techniques, strategies) without fear of shame or reprisals should the experiment fail.

If there was ever a time when we’re all learning as we go, it’s now. What part of your business hasn’t been touched by the pandemic of 2020? Our meetings are virtual (with at least one child, dog or cat photobombing the background), our systems have been retooled, our relationships with our vendors and customers have changed, our performance management systems have to be reimagined. We have to learn new tricks. And we’re not always going to get them right. At least not the first time we try.

Our ways of doing our work in each company is part of our secret sauce. Our personal sack of hacks gives us a professional competitive edge. And now they’re being tested as we learn how to work with each other over, say, Zoom. 

Back in 1997, as I was transitioning into my CEO role at WD-40 Company, I still held the belief that the currency of power within the organization was the knowledge we each harbored and doled out in small bits only when it served our individual purposes. I believed that the more knowledge you had and controlled, the more power you also held and controlled.

But I realized through my new learning that the hoarding of knowledge was actually driven by fear. As much as we were fearful of losing our competitive edge as individual contributors, we were also afraid of not knowing something to the point of making a mistake. We were concerned that we would be ridiculed, humiliated, maybe even punished for any error that we might have made. As individuals, our personal standing was at stake. We felt our careers were at risk every time we shared or tried something new. When you come down to it, our sense of personal security hinged on every decision we made as to whether to share, experiment, expand, or learn.

As the CEO, I recognized that we needed a much different culture, a culture where the silos of knowledge would be transformed into fields of learning. In safe learning environments, there would be no shame associated with failure. In fact, there would be no failure at all.

Thus was born the concept of the Learning Moment: A positive or negative outcome of any situation that should be openly and freely shared to benefit all. The Learning Moment is an opportunity to grow from the experience of our colleagues, who are free to report back to us, “Wow, I just had a learning moment! Here is what it was and here is what I learned from it.”

Replace fear with vision.

Fear is a fundamental part of our nature – it’s what our species has used to stay alive long enough over the eons to eventually result in, well, us. Over hundreds of thousands of years, our brains evolved to fear the lion, to be very sensitive to environmental cues of threat. Dreaming about tomorrow’s patch of savannah grass never saved the antelope. But knowing exactly where that pride of hungry lions was crouching in wait to strike surely saved the more quick-witted grazers. Antelopes and humanoids all got the survival gift of developing brains that are more interested in the worst-case scenario than the possibilities of a brighter future ahead. That’s how we survived into the 21st century where we are now concerning ourselves with global supply chains, whether our truckers feel safe on the highways’ rest stops, how easily we can source raw material from other countries when our main supplier is shut down, and how we explain our latest market performance to our investors.

There’s no getting around it. We’re all surrounded by figurative lions that we hadn’t planned for last year. We didn’t even have a clue they were lurking in the tall grass. These potential threats absorb a huge portion of our attention. 

But that focus on current threats is not where tomorrow’s greener pastures can be found. As leaders we owe it to our tribe to hold the vision of a better day safe for them. And to make that vision accessible all the time.  We have to paint the picture of where we’re going, even as we lead through where we are today.

It’s been said, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  Your tribe members may be working hard to avoid the current set of survival threats, but they still need to know what the vision is. What is the dream that will make this all worth while at the end? Managers might keep their people focused on the short-term goals for the next period or payday. But you’re the leader. It’s up to you to paint a more vivid picture of the larger landscape of possibility. 

In his book Emergence: 7 Steps for Radical Life Change, Derek Rydall wrote: “True vision is part of…what Plato called the realm of perfect prototypes or ideal forms. It comes from a place beyond the mind, beyond, time, beyond space, and beyond experience.”  

Rydall describes an ant determinedly making its way to a very large potato chip, a chip that looms so large it obscures the ant’s ability to see an entire universe of possibilities beyond the chip. The manager is like that ant sometimes, concerned with the chip. You, the organizational leader, have the higher perspective of being able to see what lies beyond the chip. An entire universe of future possibilities, once that chip is dealt with. 

Hold the vision of the larger array of life’s possibilities and business growth beyond the current state of affairs. Show the evidence for hope of a new day. That will be the inspiration that drives your tribe’s collective energy and commitment into the future. Then your people will become your partners in manifesting the vision that you see together.

Communicate with your tribe more than you ever have; communicate more than you think you need to.  

Many leaders might naturally assume that I’m advising readers to communicate more to their tribe members. That might be true but only in part. I believe that we should speak with our tribe members, making communication truly a two-way street in which everyone has the chance to hear and, even more importantly, be heard. 

My tribe members are crucial to the health of WD-40 Company and our shared future together. There is no way I could successfully do what I do without the companionship and the mutual support the WD-40 Company tribe members share with each other. I feel humbly grateful to be among this wonderful community of selfless, innovative, committed individuals.

As I am the CEO, they naturally do want to hear from me – and all our leaders – about company news and the strategies that are being developed. They welcome even the hard news and difficult decisions, because they need to hear the truth, as frequently as is possible and relevant. I also make a point of sending out handwritten notecards every day to singularly acknowledge individuals within the tribe, and even to external relationships I deeply value. I hear it means a lot to people to receive these notes. But the time it takes me to thoughtfully think about how grateful I am for our friendship and their contributions to this journey we’re all on gives me the time to fully feel that very real gratitude that I have for being in this role with these wonderful people.

Likewise, it’s very important for our tribe members to be able to speak to each other and to me! We’re well past the time when the COVID-related work-from-home workstyle is a novelty. For many, loneliness and isolation are setting in. We must find other ways to use communication to keep our cultural fabric intact. 

Encourage your people to communicate directly with you. And respond to them personally, with individualized messages to prove that you have read their message and that it is, indeed, you who are responding. Encourage your tribe members to communicate with each other as much as possible, whenever they want to. Keep an online virtual meeting room open, for instance, for people to simply drop in and break up the day with a “water cooler” chat with each other. Keep your cultural values, company purpose or Just Cause conversations alive by asking your tribe members to tell stories of how the Just Cause is being served, even in work-from-home situations.

Vibrant, constant communication can be achieved. By the time everyone returns to work for real, they will be re-engaging with friends, not strangers they used to know.

Let empathy lead the way.

Empathy is a difficult emotional concept for many leaders, especially during a time in our history when it’s all we can do to keep ourselves composed and focused on the challenges before us. For many of us, empathy evokes rather squishy emotional boundaries where we’re being asked to take on the full weight of another person’s suffering. Actually, that is the sense of sympathy, where we actually feel as badly as the other person who is suffering.  Empathy is understanding how another person is feeling, validating that their experience is real.  Sympathy is very expensive emotionally and not productive. Empathy is powerful and engaging.

When I talk about empathy, it’s almost always in the context of contrasting it with ego, which will get you into trouble.  Empathy, no matter how you define it, always involves caring about others, fully understanding whatever it is that they’re suffering through.  Ego, by contrast, is focusing attention on oneself. When you make leadership all about you, you shut out the possibilities and good will of others who would otherwise be well-positioned to help you achieve your most important objectives. 

In times of intensity, the ego state is more likely to emerge. Leaders are more inclined to seize control – or at least try to. It’s based on some level of insecurity, reacting to outside pressures. Impatience. Fear. All these impulses are perfectly understandable. We’re all human. But they cause disasters that are perfectly avoidable. 

Commitment to empathy is the tempering stance that causes leaders to pause, listen, and consider other peoples’ perspectives and ideas, even in those hair-on-fire moments when speed to action seems to be the only course. That pause to listen to another’s perspective could be all that’s required to find a better solution to the emergency.

The ability to feel other peoples’ feelings and see things from other peoples’ perspectives is the cornerstone of servant leadership. When you bring that leadership philosophy into your company culture – even a virtual one – you lay down a foundation of trust. And on that foundation, your people experience what it’s like to be respectfully listened to and actually heard. And from there they feel free to contribute innovation, creativity and discretionary effort. They will be more likely to bring Learning Moments to the table, instead of hiding them.

Empathy is about having a heart of gold and a backbone of steel. It’s about being tough-minded and tender-hearted. Empathy is also about loving someone enough to have that hard conversation, the conversation that can save a life, a career, or a global company. 

It's also about forgiving everyone for simply being human. We’re seeing each other’s humanity more than ever these days, simply via Zoom or Webex. We can tell just by looking over our coworkers’ shoulder whether they made their bed that morning. We see what brand of cereal their children like. On one live webinar, the speaker’s cat walked into view and proceeded to throw up in front of a global audience. 

Which conveniently brings me to the next leadership lesson:

Don’t try to control things beyond your reach.

There are some things we just can’t know about.  We don’t know what the future will bring. True, you can close the door on your cat, which might have been a good idea in the above example.  But if you truly can’t change a situation, a circumstance, a condition…let it go. 

None of us can say for sure that we know precisely where we’re going within the foreseeable future. If you were to talk to your December 2019 self from your 2020 perspective, you would likely bust out laughing at your projections. As the Dread Pirate Roberts said in The Princess Bride, “Get used to disappointment.”

As a collective world of businesses, the best we can say for the moment – at least in terms of strategic planning – is “We’re about direction, not destination.” You can control the general compass settings of your strategic initiatives. You can adjust course as you travel, to keep yourself heading in the general direction of your objectives. But you still have no solid control over your final destination (although it would be nice to get as close to it as possible), nor your time of arrival. 

These current conditions have never confronted us before. But now that they have, the only expectation we can be relatively certain of is that they will visit us again. Maybe in not quite the same form or magnitude of impact. Or maybe it will be even worse (assuming that’s possible). Maybe we’ll be prepared next time for the resulting impact on our business. Or maybe it will be an entirely different scenario, one that yet again we didn’t see coming. 

(This year, a popular self-help writer wrote about her life of struggles from the perspective of having prevailed over a series of unforeseen disasters, all leading up to the lockdown. Her book is entitled, Didn’t See That Coming. Just as she completed the manuscript with that sigh of satisfaction of a massive project accomplished, and she was about to ship the file to her publisher, her husband of 18 years told her that he wanted a divorce. Their “successful” marriage had been part of her brand. She didn’t see that coming, either. And then her fanbase roundly – and loudly – criticized her for the perception that she was monetizing her breakup with the publication of the book. She didn’t see that coming either. It just never stops coming, does it?) 

The best thing we can do is come to terms with uncertainty, which a friend once defined for me as the way we regard a series of future events that may or may not happen. Almost all of the data and information that we were so confident about in 2019 is useless to us now. While not all our inputs are irrelevant at this point, we have the added need to determine what remains a legitimate assumption or projection. And what should simply be thrown over in the dust bin of “That was then, this is now.”

When the world started shutting down, we launched a process company-wide called Stabilize/Secure, Reset and Thrive (also created by Rebecca Homkes). The first stage, Stabilize/Secure, had us all reviewing our circumstances, resources, and motivation, to decide how we would prevail under constantly shifting conditions. We determined to simply get the basics right, to be responsive to all incoming expressions of concerns from all our partners and tribe members, and to set up clear communications to our tribe – relying on our already healthy relationship with them and the trust that was embedded in our culture – and to steepen our learning velocity. We had no time to waste, learning what we needed to learn to survive in these constantly shifting conditions.

Next was Reset. Readers of Who Moved My Cheese? will recognize the principle that when facts change, we have to change our beliefs and approaches to our desired outcome accordingly. Our old beliefs just aren’t valid anymore. So what would be the new belief set? What is the new definition of success? And what is the new path – or at least direction – toward that objective? And, finally, how agile are we to make a new pivot when conditions change yet again? And then again? And then again?

Finally, Thrive: What are our new competitive advantages in the changed business landscape? Where are the opportunities that have not been revealed under the changed conditions? What do we need to do differently? To do better?  To do unexpectedly? 

What’s within your reach to control today may be beyond your reach tomorrow. As long as you’re headed in the same general direction of your vision, and your people can see the rationale and logic behind your initiatives, you’re operating within your scope of reach. And that’s the best you can ask of yourself. For the time being.

Be clear about intent.

Even with such ambiguity, everything you say and do, every decision you affirmatively make and announce, should reasonably, logically, and transparently be able to fit into the larger picture that is understandable by your constituents. How do you accomplish this degree of certitude in an environment where the best you can aim for is a general direction, not a specific destination? You distill your decisions through the filters of your values, your purpose, and your Just Cause. 

These parameters are our boundaries, our guard rails to keep us on the road and headed in our desired direction. When we are able to say to all our shareholders, “We will not move outside of our values just because we’re in this situation,” we are able to extend the message that our intent is to always be the community, the company, that stands by what we believe in the most. 

Studies have shown that employee populations are more likely to accept and even activate unpopular decisions from the top if their leadership takes the time to intentionally explain the rationale for those decisions. Even if the employees still don’t agree with the ultimate direction of the initiatives, they are more likely to support them because their leaders demonstrate the respect necessary to engage them in understanding the rationale behind the decisions.

Inviting collaboration in this way is especially valuable during these chaotic times. You want your people to be creative, collaborative, reliable, cooperative, innovative. For them to be all those things, they need one main emotional condition: A strong feeling of that circle of safety that normally comes from the daily face-to-face interaction in a trusting environment. As so much is being done virtually now, the intention of being intentional must be even more, well, intentional. 

There is a feeling of safety and comfort in knowing that whatever surprises are sprung and swung our way, each decision is made with the utmost of care and respect for the entire community. To achieve that experience among your people, you must slow down, be explicit in your thinking process, and show them how your decision stays within the guiding beacons that were established long before chaos hit the fan. 

Resist the temptation to micromanage.

In stressful situations, people tend to want to micromanage more than they had in more normal times. If you’re intentional with your boundaries as we discussed above, you are better equipped to resist the emotional compulsion to “take the wheel.” 

One of the most inspiring presentations I’ve ever seen is a speech by U.S. Air Force (retired) Colonel Nicole Malachowski, who, along with being a combat veteran, flew with the precision Thunderbirds Air Demonstration Squadron. You can find it here on YouTube. You have probably seen pictures of the formation of these jets in air. It looks like they’re flying wing-tip to wing-tip. Fast. All the planning must be done first on the ground. Once they’re in motion, the order is to “fly loose,” with the hand lightly touching the stick regardless of whatever effects the turbulence is having on the jet. 

In the presentation, she introduces the term, “pilot-induced oscillation,” which isn’t a good thing. “Big movements, bigger corrections,” she says.  “That’s not how you nurture change.”  In the wing-tip to wing-tip formation’s collective agreement among all the Thunderbirds pilots, pilot-induced oscillation would produce a catastrophe as each jet collides with the next because one pilot reacted independently and out of agreement from the plans established beforehand.

“Not only does it make for a really ugly air show,” she said, “It’s also extraordinarily unsafe and makes the change even worse.”

In these current conditions, we’re flying in turbulence. Wing-tip to wing-tip. There is just no getting around it. As a team, make your plans and processes “on the ground,” where it’s still safe and theoretical, where nothing will crash. And then let your team fly the plan. They are your experts, and they are airborne. Trust them. 

Practice pragmatic optimism.

You’ve hopefully relinquished your grip on the idea that you can dictate to the future exactly what you want and when you want it. You and your team are now happy to just stick with the idea of “general direction” for the time being, until conditions stabilize (notice I didn’t say normalize). Everyone has become realists given the undeniable circumstances. But it’s your job to keep them from becoming pessimists. This is how you achieve a cultural climate of “pragmatic optimism,” without offering up your company’s version of unicorns and rainbows.  

Your people want to believe in a future worth working toward. But very recent memory (even current conditions) tells a different story:  Dashed expectations that seemed very realistic just last year (assuming you’re reading this in 2020); missed goals and projections at work; cancelled weddings, and even funerals. Jobs have been lost. Many small businesses shut down forever.  I think rainbows and unicorns have been packed away for the duration, don’t you?

So what’s pragmatic optimism?  I call it “optimism with a foundation.”  First let’s look at optimism.  Martin Seligman, considered the founder of the positive psychology movement, speaks of optimism as a life philosophy that whatever the current conditions might be, they’re not permanent. They’re also not personal. And they’re not likely to be within anyone’s power to change somehow. No, COVID-19 is not likely to be within any one person’s ability to eliminate from the planet forever.  But your response to it and how it affects the way you live your life on a day-to-day basis is at least somewhat within your grasp. It’s within everyone’s power to decide how to govern its influence in their lives based on their behavior choices. That point of view is the beginning of optimism.

As business leaders we can know what our variables are. We know what our resources are, what our Just Cause is, what our talent bench strength is. From there we can start building up the detailed plans for the changes we need to make to create the future we all imagine inside our circle of safety. 

Plan for the next iteration.

Even if you don’t know what the next iteration is, what needs to be true for it to be perfect?  You and your tribe might still have some of that time flexibility to prepare for elements necessary to create the ideal next iteration.

WD-40 Company has been here before. In the market crash of 2008-2009, when the bottom fell out of business worldwide, most large global companies reduced their exposure by shrinking their employee population through early retirement, furloughs and lay-offs. We went the other way at WD-40 Company. 

I was inspired by American baseball (which I knew a little bit about because Australia has a similar game that I grew up with). One day it hit me, “Great players don’t keep their form by sitting on the bench.”  If we were to have our top talent – our entire tribe, really – be in top form and ready to take on the next wave of market upswing and the opportunities that come with it – let’s raise the professional development bar. So while other companies were shedding their talent, we were building up our talent. And by the time that economic period had run its course, we were ready to take action with a whole new collection of updated skills throughout the entire organization. We made excellent use of that time.

Circumstances are different now, though. Back then, we weren’t forced to physically separate and isolate. We’re doing more online training now, obviously. But more to the point, we’re learning to pivot around fear and keep our future top of mind. We will be ready for the next iteration of the entire world, when it comes around again. 

We will also know that with each new iteration, we must remind ourselves, “This too shall pass.” The good and the bad. Fly loose. The tribe will prevail. 

Honor your own Hero’s Journey.  

In a cascading series of events around the world, we all left our offices for the last time and went home. Generally speaking, our expectation was perhaps a four- to six-week event, “just to flatten the curve.”  And then the extension lengthened by two more weeks, then a month, etc. You know the rest. You’re likely to be still living it now in some fashion or another. 

I may be the CEO and Chairman of a company that is so essential to everyday life that a young father will take his 10-year-old daughter on a hardware store errand to acquire a can that will improve their lives at home. But I’m also an employee of WD-40 Company, just like all my fellow tribe members. And as such, I am home with my wife Maria and my, by now, world-famous black Lab-shepherd-Great Dane rescue mix, Max the Wonder Dog.

I have my daily routines, which includes exercise (although maybe not as daily as I’d like it to be). I have my home office, which now has a place specifically set up for my Zoom calls and live webinars. I have my books. I have my calls with the leadership teams, the board, and the investors. And I have my own Hero’s Journey that I have embarked on.

Like all my fellow tribe members, I am learning about life in new ways. My three big discoveries so far:

1. Free Flow Fridays. On this day Maria and I commit to taking the week’s pent-up tensions and frustrations and just, phew, let it all go. 

2. To never lose sight of the joy and privilege of my life’s purpose as it is expressed through my work. Aristotle said, “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”  I am serving my life’s purpose as CEO of WD-40 Company. It is my pleasure. And it’s also my responsibility to role model that pleasure to my tribe so their spirits will stay aloft as well. 

3. And, forgive myself (and others) for being human. We’re all learning new ways of doing things, about being tribe members, about running a global company, about responding to mixed signals and constant changes in policies state by state, nation by nation, market by market.  

New learnings mean new opportunities to try new ways. Which, in turn, means new opportunities to experiment. 

Which means new Learning Moments to bring to the tribe!

I value every opportunity to contribute my own Learning Moments to the learning of others.  

How will you use the memories of 2020?

Catastrophic events have shifted the known business world on its axis throughout human history. Each event, from Mount Vesuvius swamping lava over the small businesses in Pompeii in 79 AD, through the devastations of the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, through the Great Depression through the obliteration of modern European cities during WW 2, to the massive fires in my homeland in Australia, ordinary citizens watched their worlds turn upside down and crumble. No doubt their survival instinct was encouraged with the thought, “It can’t possibly get any worse than this.” Ah. But history shows us it can. Just in different, unpredictable ways.

I think it’s safe to say that the year 2020 has presented the most tumultuous challenges that our current generation of corporate leadership has ever seen. Not just one. But many. We can only hope it won’t get any worse than this. But history, as we have already seen, would tell us otherwise. And they seem to be speeding up in frequency, the intervals shortening. To be realistic, we are likely to still be in the leadership seat when the next hammer drops.

In every classic Hero’s Journey, the hero acquires tools, skills, lessons along the way to bring back to the tribe. In this case, I hope you will have picked up the lessons, skills, and tools necessary to have built a resilient culture of vision-inspired tribe members who trust and support one another, who create that essential circle of safety that will enable them to not only watch out for the threats but also to spot the opportunities.

As for me? Yes, I’m still a one-time traveling salesman from Australia. But now, in my own Hero’s Journey, I hope I have acquired the skills and tools to teach and inspire other leaders how to create a culture that treats people with respect and dignity, a place of learning and sharing, that survives in bad times, thrives in great times, and has employee engagement that is admired around the world, with an extremely successful financial track record to prove Aristotle’s axiom throughout the organization.

Will this time we’re in right now be just the latest in the historic series of catastrophic episodes that shake humanity awake from the complacency of normalcy bias, only to go back to sleep again?  

Or will it be the ultimate Learning Moment that will equip you and your tribe to advance, prepared to take on the next one, making epic memories along the way to inspire and teach future generations? You’re the leader. You are the one who must decide.