Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
"Culture is not about popcorn, peanuts, ping pong. It's about having a heart of gold and a backbone of steel. […] Be a caring organization […] It's a balance between being tough minded and tenderhearted. […] It's simple, it's not easy, and time is not your friend."
Episode S02E03 of the Rethink Culture podcast shines the spotlight on the incredible Garry Ridge. Garry is a “champion-of-hope” leader and has defined culture at the WD-40 Company for an impressive 35 years. He is currently serving as Chairman Emeritus at WD-40.
As the founder of The Learning Moment and an executive coach, Garry has dedicated his career to making the world a happier place by consulting leaders on how to create caring organizations.
There is so much to unpack in this episode. Get ready to be inspired and acquire valuable knowledge from one of the industry's most respected leaders.
Listen to this episode to find out:
· What are the ingredients that should go into the Petri Dish of Culture
· Who is The Soul-Sucking CEO of Fear Inc
· Which are the Four Pillars of Care
· What is The Learning Moment
· What are The Habits of a Servant Leader
· Why Garry's four values are Hope, Harmony, Optimism, and Confidence
· What influence Garry’s Dad, Mom and his employer Mr. Lambert had on him
· Why we should call it Culture & Capabilities instead of HR
· About the tribal culture they built in WD-40
· And many, many more
Further resources:
Books:
Garry’s Info:
· Website: thelearningmoment.net
· LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/garryridge
The podcast is created by Rethink Culture. Our goal is to help 1 million businesses create healthier, happier cultures, through data. Visit http://rethinkculture.co to see how you can create a healthier culture at your company.
Production, video and audio editing by Musicove.
The podcast is created by Rethink Culture. Our goal is to help 1 million businesses create healthier, happier cultures, through data. Visit http://rethinkculture.co to see how you can create a healthier culture at your company.
Production, video and audio editing by Musicove.
Creators & Guests
What is Rethink Culture?
Rethink Culture is the podcast that shines the spotlight on the leaders who are rethinking workplace culture. Virtually all of the business leaders who make headlines today do so because of their company performance. Yet, the people and the culture of a company is at least as important as its performance. It's time that we shine the spotlight on the leaders who are rethinking workplace culture and are putting people and culture at the forefront.
Good morning,
good afternoon and good evening.
Welcome to the Rethink Culture Podcast,
the podcast that shines a spotlight
on business leaders who are rethinking
workplace culture.
My name is Andreas Constantinou
and I'm your host,
and I'm also chairman
and founder of SlashData.
I'm an accidental micromanager
who turned servant leader, leader
over the years and developed
a personal passion for workplace culture.
Today I have the rare pleasure
of welcoming Garry Ridge.
Garry spent 25 years as CEO of WD-40.
He's now Chairman Emeritus
of that company, and he spends his time
coaching CEOs
on culture, among other things.
He's the author of Helping
People Win at Work with Ken Blanchard,
and he's also writing a new book,
he tells me,
which is provocatively
titled Any Dumbass Can Do It.
He is born in Australia.
He lives in San Diego,
where he also teaches
as an adjunct professor,
and he's also worked in over 70 countries.
And when I asked him about his frequent
flier miles, he's
accumulated over 7 million miles
with American Airlines.
That's quite a trophy, Garry.
Welcome to the Rethink Culture podcast.
Good day Andreas,
it's such a delight to be with you.
Thank you so much.
So where do we start?
Do you want to start with
a quick description
of what is culture to you?
And maybe tell us a bit about the WD-40
tribe and the culture you've built there.
Yeah, thank you.
I think businesses and leaders
have a responsibility
that they probably haven't
lived up to over many years.
And, you know,
if I could accomplish one thing,
it would be to help companies
create a workplace culture
where people can go to work every day
knowing that their efforts
make a contribution to a cause
that's actually bigger than themselves,
where they feel safe
and safety is so important,
where they're protected and set free
by a compelling set of values
that empower them,
where they learn something new
and try new things without fear.
And this makes people for happy people
and happy people
create happy families and happy families
create happy communities.
And we absolutely need a happy world.
So culture, to me,
is creating the environment
that I just described
with the elements that are so important.
Indeed, we often forget that
our duty as leaders extend
beyond the company into the lives
and the families
and the communities
of the people that we serve.
We touch businesses, touch
more people every day than anything else.
So, you know, people do a good job
when doing meaningful work with people
they enjoy.
People want to know they matter
and they want to feel like they belong.
And, you know, caring in an organization
is what I call premium fuel.
And you don't run a Ferrari on
standard fuel.
So care is so important
in an organization.
So what is your journey in culture?
Did you
instinctively have a feel for what culture
you wanted to build at WD-40,
or was it like a revelation?
Was it an inflection point?
What was it? Yeah, it was an aha for me.
You know,
I joined WD-40 in 1987 in Australia.
I opened the Australian subsidiary
there and I worked out of Sydney
from 87 to 94 doing most of my work,
in fact, in Asia.
And in 1994, I got the opportunity
to move to the United States.
They asked me to move here
to help with our global expansion.
And in 1997, the then CEO retired,
and I was given the privilege and honor
of leading the company.
And I was scared that I wasn't afraid.
I knew what our what our opportunity was.
It was to take the blue and yellow can
with a little red top to the world.
And I knew how to do that operationally.
But how did you do it with with people
so that you didn't have to micromanage
anything.
Anyhow, I was actually on an airplane
and I was flying
from Los Angeles to Sydney.
And as you do when you're on an airplane,
you always have a bunch of stuff
you read.
And I was reading through some articles
and I read this quote that was attributed,
I believe, to the Dalai Lama,
and it said, Our purpose in
life is to make people happy.
If we can't make them happy,
at least don't hurt them.
And I thought, wow,
that makes a lot of sense to me.
Then interesting enough,
I then read a quote
from Aristotle, who was born in 384 B.C.,
and it says, Pleasure in the job
puts perfection in the work.
And I thought,
wow, doesn't that make sense?
If we had an organization
that there was pleasure
in the job,
the work output would have to be better.
But I didn't know how to do that.
So anyhow, I got back to San Diego
and I was reading a newspaper
and I read about a program
at the University of San Diego,
and it was a master's
degree in leadership.
So I went to an information session
and I heard Dr.
Ken Blanchard,
The One Minute Manager, probably
the one of the most known global people
around servant leadership.
And he said most MBA programs
get people in the head.
We've got to start
getting people in the heart.
And I went, Wow.
So here I am.
CEO of a US public company.
I didn't know what
I didn't know around culture.
So I went back to school
and I did a masters degree,
the Masters degree in leadership, ah, Ken
was one of my professors, amongst others.
And then subsequently, you know,
years later, we wrote a book together.
But that's where I learned
the power of servant leadership.
And being in my role as CEO,
I was able to take that learning
and start
to implement it in the organization.
So that's where the journey started
and the rest is history.
You know, the people around us
ended up building just an amazing culture
that today is, you know, we have,
WD-40 has 93% employee engagement
and 98% of the people
who work in the company globally
say they love to tell people
they work at the company.
— Wow. That's unheard of.
— So that's...
That's unheard of.
Well, it's not unheard of.
They did it.
So how do you get from this vision
in your head about leading from the heart
to metabolizing these ideas
within the organization?
Well, I think you first have to decide,
or you have to know,
what are the ingredients
that need to be in place
in an organization
to build a great culture.
And I learned a lot of that,
those ingredients
when I was going through the program.
But it also took me back
many, many, many years to a science class
that I did in high school.
And I remember my science teacher saying,
We're going to grow culture,
and he gave us a Petri dish.
And he said, Now
what are we going to do with this
petri dish is we're going to grow culture.
And there are two things
that you need to keep in mind about that.
Number one, what are the ingredients
that you put in the dish?
And then
you, as the owner of the dish,
have to do two things.
You have to continually feed
the ingredients that that grow
great culture and more importantly
or equally as important, important,
you have to treat toxins
as they enter the dish.
Now, the challenge was what do you what do
leaders know what to put in the dish?
And here are the things
I think that should be in the dish.
Firstly,
you have to have a people first mindset.
You're not there to manage people,
you're there to coach people.
Our job is to coach people to help them
achieve the best they possibly can.
You have to have clearly defined
authentic purpose.
Why are we getting up today?
What's our just cause in an organization?
You have to have a hierarchical set
of clearly defined values.
Now, why do they need to be hierarchical?
Because people,
you don't want people cherry
picking a value
to meet a certain situation.
So they have to be hierarchical.
You have to have a transparent
and simple vision.
So transparency is so important.
We instigated what we called
the learning moment,
and my consulting business
is called The Learning Moment.
And what's the learning moment?
Well, the learning moment is a positive
or negative outcome of any situation
that needs to be openly
and freely shared to benefit all people.
So we took the word failure out
and we said, we don't make mistakes.
We have learning moments.
And if you've read any of Amy Edmondson’s
work or anyone,
any of that work, it talks about creating
psychological safety.
Now, interestingly enough, WD-40,
the product, was born on learning moments.
Because when it was invented
there were 39 formulas
that didn't work and the 40th one worked.
So if they had have given up at 39,
we wouldn't be having this conversation
today.
You have to create
belonging, acceptance and connectedness.
People want to know they belong,
They want to be connected
and they want to know they matter.
You have to have four pillars of care.
You need to care for your people.
You need to have candor in an organization
and candor
to me is no lying, no faking, no hiding.
I believe most people don't lie.
I believe they fake and hide.
The next one is accountability.
What are you going to be accountable for
and what am I going to be accountable for?
Is there clarity around that?
And then an organization
that respects responsibility.
And then finally, you have to be...
you have to have what I call
brave accountability and behavior.
Most leaders
protect their own comfort zone
at the expense
of other people's development.
So, you know,
culture is not
about popcorn, peanuts, ping pong.
It's about having a heart of gold
and a backbone of steel.
It's a balance between being tough
minded and tenderhearted.
So the petri dish is important,
to build great culture,
do you have the right ingredients?
Have you identified them?
Are they in place?
And then as leaders,
are you brave enough to not only
reward and applaud,
but also redirect behaviors
that are not fueling
that positive culture?
That was quite a download, Garry.
Amazing list of ingredients
for culture.
Very well thought out.
But my question then is,
okay, so you
have all this figured out
and then you have this large workforce.
I mean,
I assume it's in the thousands, right?
Or tens of thousands?
Not tens of thousands. No, there's not.
There’s thousands, yeah.
And then the thousands still.
And then like, how do you
pass that along.
Is it like set of values and behaviors?
Is it like culture...
opportunities to reinforce the culture?
Like, how do you make that real?
Well, it first starts with the leadership.
Leadership
truly is the reflection of culture.
So our leadership team had to agree to
and certainly support the fact that
this is what we're going to live up to.
And it was our values as an organization
that bonded us together.
We have the same values
in any of our operations around the world.
So they they bound us together.
And then leadership has to
you know, there's zero tolerance.
It means we're going to go out there.
The other thing that we did was,
in the book I wrote with Ken Blanchard,
which is called Helping
People Win at Work, we actually...
and it talks
about having these conversations
with the people
you have the privilege to lead.
And we actually had our values embedded
in those conversations.
So at least every 90 days,
we would ask people in the organization
to tell us how have they lived
our values in the last 90 days.
Give us real examples.
And we only had two measurements.
You either lived our value
or you visited the value.
And we didn't want visitors.
We wanted people to live.
So this this process is continual.
You know, it's...
a friend of mine, Charlie Malouf, is a
is the CEO of an organization
in the US called Broad River Retail.
They own a number of huge furniture
stores.
He has a beautiful statement.
He says, “You cannot microwave culture;
it takes a crockpot approach.”
And a lot of people think you can go
and, you know, sprinkle fairy dust
on an organization
with a couple of random programs
and some training efforts and suddenly,
boom, you have a great culture.
No, it doesn't work.
It's simple.
It's not easy and time is not your friend.
You have to be continually living up
to the values and the principles
that you've embedded in the organization.
You mentioned to me earlier
about your four values,
and I always find that, you know,
there needs to be
some alignment between the CEO's values
and the company values.
Otherwise it's just not fun
leading that business.
So did these values
emerge out of the culture
you built at WD-40,
or were you always aware
of those four values
that you represent
and infuse these into the company?
Interestingly enough, the four
that I shared with you have been a recent
awareness of them for me.
I you know, I was trying to understand
why I behaved the way I did.
And the four were hope,
harmony, optimism and confidence.
So I'm a...
you know, I think leaders have to be
champions of hope, no doubt, about it.
Harmony being,
you know, we're most inspired
when everyone and everything
is working in harmony together.
And that doesn't happen by accident
because things go off the rails.
So we've got to we've got to bring
that together in the organization.
You know, optimism being that,
you know,
we know that there is a better future.
So these are so important
and then confidence is so important too,
in that you have a high degree
of confidence in your ability to execute.
So those were an awareness
of the behaviors
that I think motivate me the most.
The values at WD-40 Company,
the first value is
we value doing the right thing.
The second value is we value
creating positive lasting memories
in all of our relationships.
So you can see that the second value
was very aligned
with building positive relationships
within our organization,
but positive relationships
with the customers we have the privilege
to serve, positive relationships
with Mother Nature who allows us to exist.
So, you know, it was those
that were really important
and those values came out of a process
we did 26 years ago
where we brought people together and said,
What are the things
that are more important to us
than anything else?
And as I said, they were
they were hierarchical.
The number six value was we value
sustaining the WD-40 company economy,
which is really
how do we build a an economy
within the business that can support
the constituents within the business?
Because, you know, at the end of the day,
strategy must support
the financial needs of the business
because if you're not
profitably successful,
then how can you support the culture?
You can't do it.
Now, as I shared with you, you know,
we had a very high employee engagement,
but over a 25 year period,
we nearly six-xed our revenue
and we had a compounded
annual growth rate of total shareholder
return of over 15% a year.
Our market cap went from 300 million
to nearly $2.6 billion.
Who did that?
We just sell oil in a can.
Who did that?
Our people did that because they were
the ones that lived up to, you know,
they went to work creating memories
that are positive amongst themselves.
And going home
happy was a place they wanted to work.
Wonderful.
Gary, before we continue on culture,
I want to quiz
you with this game I like to play,
which is Two Truths and One Lie.
So what are two truths and one lie
for you, in no particular order?
And we'll figure them out at the end.
Okay. Two truths and one lie.
Number one is I once had an Afro hairdo.
Number two was I once was a,
uh, a radio disc jockey in Sydney,
Australia.
I had a radio program on Sydney radio.
And number three was I played
first grade rugby in high school.
Oh, that's a tough one.
They all so likely.
That's why I like them.
I would I'll go for a random one,
which is that
you didn't play rugby,
you played another sport.
But we'll find out at the end. Okay.
All right.
Thank you for that.
Now, lots of stuff to to talk about.
And we did have a warm up discussion
before pressing the record button.
So you told me
or you showed me this little guy,
the the soul sucking leader,
this guy. This guy.
So. Yeah, this is Al.
Or it could be Alice.
And they're the souls...
I call him the soul
sucking CEO of Fear Inc,
because it's their behaviors
in an organization that create these toxic
cultures.
And, you know, they're behaviors
that many, many leaders have.
And when they become aware of them
and that's one of the big things
about leadership
is, you know, hold the mirror to your face
and see which of these behaviors you have
and how you're going to change them.
And I probably... I'm
going to share some of them with you.
And I probably had most of these behaviors
at a high,
at some level of competence
over my career.
Now, the number one, one
that is really destroying is this person's
ego eats their empathy,
instead of their empathy,
eating their ego, because empathy
and leadership is so important.
How do we care about other people?
I said care was the premium food.
Number two,
they think micromanagement is essential.
Now, I heard you say a little earlier
that you had that early on.
You had a little dose, I did.
I did a little dose of micromanaging.
They think they're corporate royalty.
You know, they have the biggest office
in the building, a private parking spot.
They love a fear-based culture.
They're a master of control
and a know-it-all.
They have all the answers,
even the wrong ones.
They must always be right.
They hate feedback and they usually don't
follow through on their commitments.
They're unreliable.
So they're some of the habits of Al
or Alice, the soul sucking leader
or CEO, versus what are the habits
of the habits of a servant leader?
Well, firstly, a servant leader
involves and loves their people.
They must always be in servant
leadership mode.
We are here to serve.
They're expected to be competent,
great learners.
I love the sign behind you.
Always learning.
We need to always be learning.
They have a high degree
of emotional intelligence.
In other words,
they have the radar of feeling.
They love learning moments
because learning moments
are the opportunity to be entrepreneurial
and grow and be better.
They have a heart of gold,
but they've got a backbone of steel.
As I said, it's not about,
you know, there's a balance
between tough-minded and tender-hearted.
They're champions of hope.
They know micromanagement is not scalable.
They always do what they say
they're going to do,
and they love the gift of feedback.
And for those listening but not watching,
you are holding up
a little doll that you made, right? Yes.
That looks like
a soul sucking leader with a
face covered in blood.
It's just a big mouth.
And Type A written on it.
It's just a big mouth.
A big, big mouth?
Okay. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah.
Oh, I get it.
So. Yeah, very vivid. I...
when I when I took that transition
from like micromanager
to servant leader
and it was many, many years
of transition, one of the pivotal books
for me was Liz Wiseman's Multipliers.
Oh yeah, great book.
Which talks about the multipliers
and the diminisher manager.
Is there another book which you recommend
leaders should read as they become
more conscious about how they lead others?
Well, I'm going to give you two.
The first one
I'm going to give you is an amazing book
that's been around for years and years,
and it's called Everything You Need
to Know You Learn in Kindergarten,
and it's written by Robert Fulghum.
Fulghum.
And in fact, I read this book every summer
because it reminds me again
of what did we learn in kindergarten
and some simple things,
you know, say please and thank you.
Pick up after yourself,
you know, rely on a friend.
If we were to take those and put them
into practice, it would be wonderful.
The other book that I really love
is written by a friend of mine.
His name is Ron Carucci.
It's called To Be Honest.
And it talks
about all of the things that are
that are alive in organizations
that we don't want to be honest about.
For example,
you know, as a leader, don't think people
aren't talking about you at home tonight.
They are.
But what are they saying?
Are they saying, wow, I hope he doesn't
call on me to have a meeting
because I never have a good outcome.
You know, is
is he going to create a an organization,
which is the job that I want to have,
you know?
When I get, you know, that message
that that I'm booked on
an outlook outlook calendar,
do I just freeze?
So To Be Honest is a great book
and and it really does
have some great examples
of, yeah, people are talking about you,
so, what are they saying?
And you know what they're saying?
They’re saying what you create.
Actions speak louder than words.
Leadership is the shadow,
culture is a shadow of the leadership.
It's,
you know, the fish rots from the head.
Right?
Right.
So if you were to write a book on
how to build
a thriving culture,
where would you start or what chapters
would that book have?
Well,
that's kind of the book that I'm writing.
And the first chapter in
the book is called Are You Okay?
And it's really about other people
in the organization okay.
You know, how do you feel?
And you know,
the first thing you have to do to change
culture is you, as the leader,
have to be aware of who you are.
Because it's like you said, Andreas,
when you had to pivot
from being a micromanager,
that was an amazing revolution
because that's who you were.
So firstly,
do you know who you are as a leader?
And in fact, the master's degree
I did at USD, the first week of the course
was all about understanding who you are,
you know,
who do you are, what are your values,
you know, where do you sit
and then what do you like about that
and what don't you like?
I actually did...
in a DiSC profile...
My DiSC profile, when I went into
the program, I was a turbo D and the...
my definition of a turbo D is “be
brief, be bright and be gone”.
That wasn't going to build a great coach.
I had to move myself into more of an I,
which was more
of the interpersonal person,
and that had to be deliberate.
And now if I take a DiSC program
instead of being a DI,
I'm an ID
because I've changed those behaviors.
Another book that's a fabulous book around
that is written by my friend
Marshall Goldsmith, and it's a book called
What Got You Here Won't Get You There.
And it's the 20 bad habits
that through his coaching career have,
he's identified in leaders
that they need to be aware of.
Yeah, I love Marshall Goldsmith.
So in your
in your transformation,
were there some values or principles
which stood the test of time,
something perhaps that
you inherited from your childhood,
a former experience
which really influenced who you became?
Yeah, you know,
I can think of three things.
Number one, my, my dad,
he worked for the same company
for 50 years,
from when he was 15 to when he was 65.
He started as what was called a fitter
and turner and ended up as an engineer.
And the one thing that I admired about
Dad was he was consistent.
You know,
he said a man's word is a man's bond.
You need to do what you say
you're going to do.
And he was very much around
the principles of
what a good leader should be, dependable
and reliable and a great learner.
My mom, who lived till she was 99 years
and nine months old, she was born in 1914.
She only passed away about nine years ago.
She was an adventurer
and she would always tell me,
you know, you can
you can be anybody you want to be.
You know,
she used to make a funny comment.
You know, she used to say, Garry, even
the queen of England sits down to pee.
So, you know, let's level ourselves out
and, you know, God bless Queen Elizabeth.
She's not with us anymore.
And then I had the opportunity
growing up to have experiences.
You know,
I worked in the local hardware store
and the local dry cleaning store, and
I actually worked in a local sports store.
And that store was owned by a guy.
His name was Jack Lambert.
And part of what that store did,
they did repairs on tennis rackets.
And I remember walking out into the back
workshop one day
and he had a tennis racket
kind of in a vise, and he was pulling the
what they used to call catgut,
which I'm sure wasn't.
It was nylon through the holes.
And then at the end,
he would have a little roller
and he would turn the roller and tense
this string
and then put a like a spike in to hold it.
But it was always rubbing on his fingers.
So he had lots of calluses on his fingers.
And I remember saying to him one day,
Hey, Mr.
Lambert, that's damn hard work,
you know, Is that your tennis racket?
And he said, No,
it's not my tennis racket.
And the lesson he gave me is
he was stringing a tennis racket
for one of the top
tennis players in Australia.
And he said, his game tomorrow
somewhat depends on the work
that I do today.
And it's a bit like that story around who
who patches your parachute.
So our job as leaders in creating
great cultures is to remember
that the work we're doing,
there's a lot of people depending on us.
You know, we have no right to get in
the way of people doing good work.
Our job is not to mark people's
paper, it's to help them get an A.
And that's
what the how we talk about it as coaches.
You know,
we're not managers, we're coaches.
And if you think about a great coach,
never runs on the playing field,
always is on the sideline
observing the play, knows the rules
and knows what it takes to win and spends
a lot of time in the locker room
building great camaraderie and connection.
So, you know, we need to be coaches
and our job is not to mark people's paper,
it's to help them get As.
So what does that A look like and
how are we going to help people succeed?
And coaching
is something that is overlooked.
Definitely not in the dictionary
of most managers in my experience.
You know, we talk about leaders
versus managers, leaders
being those that help people
get the most out of their potential.
But coaching specifically
is such a core aspect of getting people to
outperform their potential.
Absolutely.
And I love a quote of Adam Grant's.
He says, “It's easy to be a critic
or a cheerleader.
It's harder to be a coach.
A critic sees your weaknesses and attacks
your worst self.
A cheerleader sees your strengths
and celebrates your best self.
A coach sees your potential
and helps
you become a better version of yourself.”
And in fact, the WD-40 company,
we took the word manager out.
Everybody was called a coach.
So if you reported to me,
I was your coach.
So we took the word manager out,
which absolutely
put the responsibility on a person.
You're not.
If you manage your bank account and you
manage inventory, you don't manage people.
What you do is help people
become a better version of themselves.
Which is exactly the reason
I, I hate the term HR. Yes.
Because that is about resources and we're
not resources to be managed and directed.
We’re humans to be led and inspired.
It's about... Yeah. Or coached.
That function is really about culture
and capabilities.
That's what it should be called:
culture and capabilities.
And from everything that you've built
at WD-40 in terms of culture,
what's one shining example?
Something you'd be proud
if others stole from you?
Well, firstly, I didn't build it.
I didn't do this on my own.
This is not,
you know, it's not Garry's magic.
You know, we had the inspiration
and we brought the tools
and I couldn't do it
without us all doing it.
So we built it together.
I think
what I would like people to
to take away or to steal is
the first thing I said
when I said with the ingredients,
a people first mindset,
we need to care about our people.
So, you know, be a caring organization,
which means you've got to be both tough
minded and tenderhearted.
And as I said, this is simple.
It's not easy and time is not your friend.
So you have to have consistency around it.
So, but care. You know, life's a gift.
Don't send it back unwrapped.
Let's unwrap
what we need to unwrap and enjoy and
send people home happy
and do what we need to do
to make this world a little better place
because it needs to be better.
It's not a happy world.
How do you balance in practice
caring versus...
caring for people versus
caring about performance?
Is this a conflicting balance
or is it a complementary balance?
No, it's a complementary balance.
As long as you have been very clear
about what we're going to hold each other
accountable for.
So, you know, most performance,
most performance
is really about
have we been clear about what
I'm going to hold
you accountable for and what are you going
to hold me accountable for?
So there's clarity around
what are we in this together
to achieve, which is so important.
And how do you instill
a sense of ownership?
So apart from the engagement,
which is the care aspect
of your philosophy, how do you instill
a sense of ownership so that the people
can take care of the business
while you take care of the people?
Well, as I said, two things
people want to do.
They want to belong
and they want to know they matter.
So we had...
we installed
what we call the tribal culture.
And the tribal culture is a place where
a group of people come together
to protect and feed each other.
And if you... when I say tribal, it's
not because of any reflection
of any particular indigenous group.
It's a reflection on
we are tribal as a as a a human being.
That's where we all started.
So what's the number one
responsibility of a tribal leader?
Number one responsibility
is to be a learner and a teacher.
You know, if we were to go back in time,
thousands of years
to my homeland of Australia and observe
a group of Indigenous Australians
at a camp meeting,
what would the leader be doing?
The leader would be teaching that person
to throw a boomerang. Why?
Because the boomerang
was the tool of survival.
So if you couldn't throw a boomerang,
you would not survive.
So our responsibility as a leader
is to help people throw boomerangs.
So we only do that
by continually learning and continually
teaching, which then empowers
and helps the people grow.
And if you help people grow,
they come back and say,
yeah, I'm growing,
I'm able to be a better person.
I feel better in my life.
I feel empowered.
Now I have ownership.
And another thing
we were discussing earlier is this
question that Seth Godin
posed in his latest book,
The Song of Significance, which is
How can we build an organization
which is someone's best
ever job, which to me is so heartfelt.
So if you were to
be appointed as CEO of another company,
with that mission, where would you start?
I would start with the leadership.
Is the leadership, you know,
are the leaders
brave enough to care about their people,
to be candid with their people?
Are they brave enough
to hold their people accountable,
and are they brave enough
to be responsible for their behaviors?
So, but it all starts with the leadership.
You know,
who are you as a leader
and what do you have to change?
Because that's the example that'll be set.
So what do we as leaders need
to rethink about culture, do you think?
It's not about you,
it's about the
people that you've been given
the privilege and honor to lead.
Because
everybody who comes to, as Bob Chapman
says,
everybody who comes to work
every day is someone's precious child.
I would say someone's precious child,
husband, wife, aunty, uncle,
cousin, whatever.
And that's a huge responsibility.
So many things to reflect back on and
and note,
I love all of your
your aphorisms
or your quotes about culture.
One last question, Garry,
which is going back
to that game of Two Truths and One Lie.
So which of the three statements
is the lie and what's the truth?
Well, believe it or not,
I actually did have an Afro hairdo
when I was 18 years old, and I was a radio
announcer in Sydney, Australia.
I used to do a Sunday morning radio show.
Even though I did
play rugby, it was never first grade.
So, so I got it right.
You got it right. Yeah.
Wonderful.
Where can people find out more
about you, Garry, and like,
maybe follow your your leadership path?
Well, thank you for the opportunity
to share that.
I have a website.
It's www.thelearningmoment.net.
And on that
site it has, there's also a page on that
that has probably about 20 or 30 books
that I recommend that I update over time
that I found valuable.
And please follow me on LinkedIn.
It's G-A-R-R-Y-R-I-D-G-E at LinkedIn.
I think I have about 125,000 followers
on LinkedIn and I'd love people to join
and I share on LinkedIn
and my experiences in my learning moments.
So Garry, thank you for...
from my heart for the work you've done
for not just the people, but
also their families and their communities.
I think more people need to think
about the impact
of our leadership, the collective impact.
And for everyone listening, thank you.
And do hit the subscribe button, if
you don't want to miss the next episodes
because there's lots of interesting guests
coming along
and don't forget to tell us what you think
by emailing Rethink@RethinkCulture.co.
And Keep Leading.
Thank you.