Garry Ridge

Garry Ridge is sharing his leadership experience now as a business coach and is working alongside one of our illustrious Social Capital CEOs, Marshall Goldsmith, who nominated Garry for this honor himself. As Garry jokingly says, “I just completed my 25-year apprenticeship in leadership; now it’s time for me to put it to work.”

The 25-year “apprenticeship” he refers to is his time as CEO of WD-40 Companies, a company whose bottom-line market success is matched with a culture where 97% of its people say they respect their coach. “Now, their coach is their boss,” Garry explains. “We don’t call our leaders ‘managers’ or ‘bosses’; they’re coaches. And why they’re coaches: Because their job is to help the people they lead get an A [as in top mark on a report card].” 

Building such a culture starts with being committed to the principle “it’s all about the people.” Says Garry, “A lot of people give this kind of blow noise about people are important. And then we go into a hard time, the first thing they do is they sacrifice their people. That’s not right.” He built WD-40 Company’s management and culture on four pillars: care, candor, accountability and responsibility. “In a great organization, the leaders need to care about their people,” he says. He breaks that down into two aspects. “One is, I care about you enough to reward you and applaud you doing great work. But I’m also brave enough to redirect you when the work you’re doing isn’t helping you succeed.” And while the other three pillars have their own attributes, care creates the foundation upon which they all rest.

Pert of his inspiration for his philosophy of leadership he credits to the Dalai Lama, in a work he serendipitously was reading on his flight to Australia to take the company’s helm. The Dalai Lama’s words “Our purpose is life is to make people happy. If we can’t make them happy, at least don’t hurt them” caused him to realize that what he saw all around him was leaders with a lot of behaviors that were hurting people. So, he posed the challenge to himself: “How do you create a place where people go to work every day, they make a contribution to something bigger than themselves, they learn something new, they’re protected and set free by a compelling set of values, and they go home happy?”

His explanation of why that was important to him perfectly sums up why we are so pleased to honor him as a Social Capital business leader: “Happy people create happy families; happy families create happy communities; happy communities create a happy world; and don’t tell me we don’t need a happy world in this turbulence we’re in right now.”