Garry Ridge
The Culture Coach – Chairman Emeritus WD-40 Company
Garry Ridge spent 25 years as CEO building one of the world’s most beloved and recognized branded companies--WD-40 Company--starting with creating a culture of leaders and individual contributors who are genuinely joyful in their work. He refers to this time of his career as his apprenticeship. And now, he fulfills his life’s purpose by transforming his learnings into teachings, extending his guidance as a coach to companies and executives worldwide.
“Creating a workplace experience where people gather as a tribe, where they support, protect, nurture each other, is simple, but not easy,” he says. “This goal is within anyone’s reach. You have to want it absolutely more than the typical rewards that come with the usual C-Suite. More than status, elitism, division, all those usual things we find in companies that want to enjoy the benefits of tribal culture but don’t want to sacrifice the ego amenities.”
Currently WD-40 Company’s chairman emeritus, Garry also serves as a speaker, coach and consultant to executives and companies all over the world. He welcomes clients with these characteristics: 1) a sincere desire to create a workplace environment that promotes psychological safety, belonging, and happiness in the work; 2) an eagerness to replace ego with empathy; and 3) a personal commitment to the attributes of servant leadership already in place.
Garry co-authored Helping People Win at Work with Ken Blanchard and contributed a chapter to the Marshall Goldsmith/Frances Hesselbein book Work is Love Made Visible. His forthcoming book, Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It, is scheduled for release in 2024. Garry is an adjunct professor at The University of San Diego. He is also on the boards of Gorilla Glue Company and Eastridge Workforce Solutions.
Contact Garry via his website: www.thelearningmoment.net
Why We Chose Him:
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.”
Company Name | Tenure at Current Position | Previous Position |
|---|---|---|
| WD-40 Company | Chairman and CEO of WD-40 Company | |
Education | Industry | Sub Industry |
| University of San Diego, School of Business Administration, Master of Science in Executive Leadership |