FOUR
The Simple Truths About Helping People Win at Work

The following twelve simple truths are just that—simple but powerful. They are all about the thinking, beliefs, and behavior that are necessary to partner for performance with people the way that Garry did at WD-40 Company. No matt er where you are leading—in the office, at school, at church, at home, or in the community—the real question is

The answer Garry Ridge chose made all the difference for the people of WD-40 Company.

As you read through Part Four, you’ll notice that I reference a number of my published books. That wasn’t done to blow my own horn, but rather because I thought you should know where these thoughts came from.

However, after The One Minute Manager came out and people were using that quote all the time, I thought that maybe we got caught in the old human relations trap of trying to make people feel good about themselves regardless of the results they produce.

As a result, I changed that quote when I wrote Putting the One Minute Manager to Work² with Bob Lorber. The saying became

What I’ve found over the years is that it’s hard to keep up good morale and human satisfaction if people are losing—if the results they’re getting aren’t making a difference. The relationship between results and human satisfaction has become important over the years in all the consulting and training activities that The Ken Blanchard Companies has been involved in. It’s not that we focus on just getting results. As Spencer Johnson and I argued in The One Minute Manager and Jim Collins contended in Good to Great,³ it’s a both-and process:

Overemphasizing either one can cause problems. But one thing is for sure: If people are not performing well, it’s hard for them to be excited about themselves or the organization where they work.

Garry Ridge has certainly found that to be true at WD-40 Company. As the company’s performance continues to improve, because people are given opportunities to get As, the opinion that tribe members have of themselves and WD-40 Company continues to go higher. In the 2008 employee opinion survey, 96.4 percent of the tribe members said, “I feel I am a valued member of WD-40 Company.” And 96.7 percent of them said, “I would recommend WD-40 Company to my friends as a good place to work.” Those are the kinds of attitudes that people have when they’re performing well.

The second part of an effective performance management system is day-to-day coaching, or what WD-40 Company calls execution. This is where a manager observes and monitors the performance of his or her people, praising progress and redirecting where necessary. This is all about teaching people the answers.

The final aspect of effective performance management systems is performance evaluation, or what WD-40 Company calls review and learning. This is where you sit down with people at the end of a period of time and review their performance. In many ways, this is regiving the final exam you established with them at the beginning of the process.

Which of these three aspects of an effective performance management system do you think is most time-consuming for the majority of managers? Undoubtedly, it’s performance evaluation. Managers all over the world agonize over their annual performance reviews with each of their people. Why? Because they have to fill out an evaluation for each of their people and then meet with them individually to justify their (the managers’) evaluation of their direct reports. As Garry shared, at WD-40 Company every tribe member fills out only one evaluation form—his or her own. When tribe leaders meet with a tribe member, they are reviewing the tribe member’s assessment of his or her own performance.

Some organizations do a good job of goal setting. But what happens after goals are set? They’re filed—until an obvious performance problem occurs or somebody says to a manager, “It’s time for your annual performance reviews.” Then everybody starts running around, bumping into each other, trying to find the goals. The “informal/formal” meetings at WD-40 Company make sure that doesn’t happen. The key here is having a final exam established at the beginning of the fiscal year. This is a living document that guides how tribe members and their leaders work together to help the tribe members get an A.

The least time-consuming aspect of performance management in most organizations is day-to-day coaching. Yet, as Garry Ridge has pointed out, this is key to implementing a “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A” philosophy—and it’s where most of the focus should be. This is when Situational Leadership^® II comes into play, giving tribe members the appropriate direction and support as they journey toward an A. It provides the basis for day-to-day coaching.

As Garry points out, the process begins with the essential functions: What are this person’s major responsibilities? Once basic responsibilities or essential functions are established, three to five goals should be created. Garry and I both believe in the 80/20 Rule, which is sometimes called Pareto’s Law. Eighty percent of the performance you want from a person will come from 20 percent of the activities that he or she can focus on. It’s the 20 percent for which you want to establish goals. This does not mean that people don’t engage in other functions or activities that are not covered by these goals, but those activities are not critical to that person’s job performance.

Once goal areas are established, people need to know what the performance standards are.

As Garry pointed out, a SMART goal has to be specific. This means that the goal has to be observable and measurable so that both manager and direct report will know if an A is being achieved. If a goal can’t be measured, it shouldn’t be a goal, because no one will know whether it has been accomplished.

I’m often amazed when I look at companies’ annual performance review forms. They typically ask managers to evaluate people’s performance on things such as creativity, initiative, and promotability, but no performance standards are spelled out for those categories. Any evaluation would be purely subjective. Remember:

A category such as creativity could be made objective by defining specifically what good performance looks like. For example, a person could be consistently high in creativity if he makes at least one suggestion every week to his supervisor about how performance could be improved. If fifty-two suggested improvements a year sounds like too many, the manager and direct report could lower that number and establish how many suggestions would equal an A in creativity. Remember, a SMART goal has to be attainable. If it’s too easy, it won’t motivate anybody. If it’s too hard and a person feels there is little chance of accomplishing the goal, discouragement will set in. It’s interesting that on the 2008 WD-40 Company Employee Opinion Survey, 94.6 percent of WD-40 employees indicated: “I am encouraged to offer ideas and suggestions for new and better ways of doing things.”

Clear goals have to do with expectations. That’s one of the things that WD-40 Company does well. On that same employee opinion survey, 97.5 percent indicated “I know what results are expected of me,” and 96.8 percent confirmed that “the work assigned to me is challenging and interesting.”

In The One Minute Manager Spencer Johnson and I suggested that people write each goal on a single piece of paper and that it take no more than a minute to read. The key here is that the goal should be written down and available for both manager and direct report to track on a daily basis. Goals that are filed away—only to be reviewed at the end of the year—are worthless. They certainly don’t do that at WD-40 Company.

Once goals are set, managers should stay in constant communication with their people so that both parties know how things are going and can stay on top of what’s required to get an A. That’s why Situational Leadership^® II is used throughout WD-40 Company as one of the key concepts driving their day-to-day coaching process.

While Garry talked about Situational Leadership^® II in his remarks, let me put the appropriate meat on the bone. Situational Leadership^® II is based on two beliefs:

• People can and want to develop.

• There is no best leadership style to encourage that development.

Managers should tailor their leadership styles to the situation.

To become effective in using Situational Leadership^® II, managers need to master three skills: diagnosis, flexibility, and Partnering for Performance. None of these skills is particularly difficult, but as Garry and the folks at WD-40 Company have found, they require commitment from top management, practice, and reinforcement.

When it comes to diagnosis, people go through four developmental levels as they move from dependence to independence in doing a task. Each of these development levels is a combination of competence (knowledge and task-relevant experience) and commitment (motivation and confidence). The four developmental levels are as follows:

• The Enthusiastic Beginner (D1: low competence, high commitment) is excited but has little knowledge or experience.

• The Disillusioned Learner (D2: low to some competence, low commitment) finds that learning the task is tougher than he or she thought it would be, so discouragement has set in.

• The Capable But Cautious Performer (D3: moderate to high competence, variable commitment) knows how to do the task but lacks the confidence to do it on his or her own.

• The Self-Reliant Achiever (D4: high competence, high commitment) is confident and motivated and has the necessary skills to complete the task without much supervision.

Before beginning any diagnosis, goals and performance standards have to be set if Situational Leadership^® II is to be effective. At WD-40 Company, since leaders and their tribe members partner for performance throughout the process, these aspects of the final exam are done together at the beginning of the fiscal year.

Once the final exam is established for a direct report, the planning process continues. The leader and direct report examine each goal to determine direct report’s development level. It’s important not to pigeonhole people into any particular development level. In reality, development level applies not to a person, but to a person’s competence for and commitment to doing a specific goal or task. In other words, an individual is not at any one development level overall.

An individual can be at one level of development on one goal or task and be at a different level of development on another goal or task. For example, a person in your marketing department could be exceptional when it comes to rolling out new products and opening new markets. In this aspect of her job, she is clearly a Self-Reliant Achiever (D4). However, when it comes to hiring talent and developing people, she is very inexperienced because she has never done it before on her own. Depending on her motivation for the task, she could be either an Enthusiastic Beginner (D1) or a Disillusioned Learner (D2).

When I was a college professor, I loved to teach and write. Those were tasks I performed well and without much supervision. However, when it came to administrative matters such as managing my budget and filling out reports, I was a Disillusioned Learner at best. As these two examples show, sometimes it takes not only different strokes for different folks, but also often different strokes for the same folks on different aspects of their jobs.

What does “different strokes” mean for the leader? That person needs to master the second skill of a situational leader: flexibility—being comfortable using a variety of leadership styles.

As shown in the Situational Leadership^® II Model diagram, four basic leadership styles—directing (S1), coaching (S2), supporting (S3), and delegating (S4)—correspond with the four development levels. Each of the four styles is a combination of two leader behaviors: directive behavior and supportive behavior. The best way to describe the difference between these two leader behaviors is to go back to my days in education. At the time there were two approaches to teaching. One we called the “empty barrel” philosophy of teaching. The assumption was that the students came to class with an empty barrel of knowledge and experience on the subject being taught. So the teacher’s job was to fill the barrel. Directive behavior is a barrel-filling style.

The other form of teaching was called the “full barrel” philosophy. The assumption was that the students came to class with their barrels full of knowledge and experience, but maybe it wasn’t well organized for the subject being taught. As a result, the teacher’s job was to draw out the students’ knowledge and experience and help them apply it to this classroom experience. Supportive behavior is a barrel-drawing-out style.

Suppose you hire four new salespeople. Although three responsibilities are required of an effective salesperson besides selling (service, administration, and team contribution), let’s focus on just the sales part of the job.

One of your new hires is fresh out of college and is clearly an Enthusiastic Beginner (D1). He’s never sold anything, but you think he has real potential to be a top salesperson because of his personality and commitment to learning. You clearly need a “barrel-filling” directing style (S1). You have to teach your new hire everything about the sales process, from making a sales call to closing a sale. If you know about a good basic sales program, you might even want to start there.

You take him on sales calls with you so that you can show him how the sales process works and what a good job looks like. Then, you lay out a step-by-step plan for his development as a salesperson. In other words, you not only pass out the final exam, but you also are involved in teaching him the answers. You provide specific direction and closely supervise his sales performance, planning and prioritizing what has to be accomplished for him to get an A. Teaching him and showing him what experienced salespeople do—and letting him practice in low-risk sales situations—is the appropriate approach for this Enthusiastic Beginner.

Suppose another of your new hires has some sales training and experience, but he had a bad experience in his first sales job. He had a hands-off sales manager who let him go out on his own and then seagulled in when he wasn’t performing well. He understands the basics of selling but is finding it harder to master than he thought. He likes your willingness to gamble on him, even though he is a bit discouraged about whether he has what it takes to become a successful salesperson. This salesperson is a Disillusioned Learner.

What’s needed now is a barrel-filling and barrel-drawing-out coaching (S2) leadership style, which is high on both direction and support. You continue to direct and closely monitor his sales efforts, but you now engage in more two-way conversations, going back and forth between your advice and his questions and suggestions. You also provide a lot of praise and support at this stage, because you want to build his confidence, restore his commitment, and encourage initiative. While you consider your salesperson’s input, you are the one who makes the final decisions, since he is learning on actual clients.

The third salesperson you have hired has a fair amount of experience in the field. She knows the day-to-day responsibilities of selling and has acquired some good sales skills. Yet she has some self-doubt and questions about whether she can sell well on her own, without your help or the support of her colleagues. You believe she’s competent and knows what she’s doing, but she’s not so sure. She has a good grasp of the sales process and is working well with clients, but she’s hesitant to be out there on her own. She may become self-critical or even reluctant to trust her own instincts. At this stage, she is a Capable But Cautious Performer (D3), whose commitment to selling fluctuates from excitement to insecurity.

This is when a barrel drawing out/supporting (S3) leadership style is called for. Since your direct report has learned her selling skills well, she needs little direction but lots of support from you to encourage her wavering confidence. Now is the time to stand behind her efforts, listen to her concerns and suggestions, and be there to support her interactions not only with clients but also with others on your staff. You encourage and praise, but rarely do you direct her efforts. The supporting style is more collaborative; feedback is now a give-and-take process between the two of you. You help her reach her own sales solutions by asking questions that expand her thinking and encourage risk-taking.

The fourth new salesperson you hire hits the ground running and becomes a key player on your team right away. In his previous sales positions, not only did he master sales tasks and skills, but he also took on challenging clients and was successful with them. He anticipates problems, listens carefully to clients’ concerns, and is ready with workable solutions. He is justifiably confident because of his past success in managing his own sales area. Not only can he work on his own, but he also can inspire others.

This salesperson is obviously a Self-Reliant Achiever (D4) in the sales part of his job. You can count on him to hit his sales goals. For a person at this level of development, a delegating leadership style (S4) is appropriate. He can fill his own barrel when necessary and draw out any information that is needed to achieve his goals. Your job now is to empower him by allowing and trusting him to act independently. What you need to do is acknowledge his excellent performance and provide the appropriate resources he needs to carry out his sales duties. It’s important at this stage to challenge your high-performing salesperson to continue increasing his sales ability and cheer him on to even higher levels of sales.

As you can see from these examples, leaders need to give their people what the people can’t give to themselves.

Situational Leadership^® II is helpful to tribe leaders and members at WD-40 Company at the beginning of the fiscal year, when they are determining what leadership style a tribe member needs to accomplish an A. It also is extremely useful during the quarterly informal/formal conversations.

To me, the curve in the leadership styles portion of the Situational Leadership^® II model is like a railroad track. Each of the four leadership styles depicts a station along the performance curve. If you start with an Enthusiastic Beginner (D1) using a directing style (S1), and you eventually want to get to delegating (S4), which is appropriate for a Self-Reliant Achiever (D4), what two stations do you have to stop at along the way? Coaching (S2) and supporting (S3).

You’ll notice that no railroad tracks go directly from directing (S1) to delegating (S4). What happens to a fast-moving train if it goes off the tracks? It gets derailed, and people get hurt. It’s important for managers not to skip a station as they manage people’s journey to high performance. By staying on track and stopping at all the stations, you help your direct reports to perform well on their own, with little or no supervision.

The railroad track also works the same way in reverse. If you’re delegating to a supposed Self-Reliant Achiever, and a problem occurs, rather than going straight back to a directing style (S1), you go to a supporting style (S3) to find out what’s gone wrong. Then, together with your direct report, you can decide whether you should go back to a delegating style (S4), because that person is now ready to run on his or her own again. However, if that person not only lacks confidence, but also needs a refresher at the skill level, you might have to go back to a coaching style (S2).

At WD-40 Company, as part of the quarterly informal/formal discussions, tribe leader and member together examine each agreed-upon goal area and the performance progress. If a tribe leader has been using a directing style (S1) and the tribe member is progressing, that leader might want to agree to less supervision. If a tribe leader is using a coaching style (S2) and the tribe member is continuing to grow, a movement to a supporting style (S3) with periodic lunch meetings might be appropriate. The same goes for moving from a supporting style (S3) to a delegating (S4) style.

If a tribe member’s performance is not progressing in a given goal area, tribe leader and member might agree to move backward through the railroad track.

The key is communication. Communication allows progress to be praised (movement forward through the railroad track) or efforts to be redirected (back through the railroad track) if necessary. As you’ve learned, the key to feedback at WD-40 Company is caring and candor. To be effective, feedback has to be an ongoing process. It’s all about teaching people the answers to the final exam so that they’ll get an A on their performance evaluation. If someone’s performance is going in the right direction, he or she needs an “Att a boy” or “Att a girl.” Garry calls these “Good on ya, mates.” However, if the person is coming up with a wrong answer, he or she needs to be told in a caring way, “That’s a wrong answer.” Then quickly ask, “What would be a better answer?”

Coaching is the “secret sauce” that makes the “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A” philosophy a success, which is why we’ve spent so much time discussing it. If coaching isn’t central in the process, people are left to succeed or fail on their own. Their performance review is held over them as a demotivating threat. When tribe leaders and members partner for performance, the review becomes an energizing process.

It doesn’t take much to convince people that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to punish a killer whale and then tell the trainers to get in the water with it. They call them “killer whales” for a reason. Working as a team, these whales have been known to take on great white sharks.

Have you ever seen a Shamu show at one of the SeaWorld facilities? Let me tell you, there is no negative interaction between the trainers and the whales. What was most interesting to me was hearing that when they get a new whale—whether from another facility or a newborn—they don’t do any training with that whale for weeks. All they do is feed and play with it.

When I asked why SeaWorld had this extended no-training period, they said, “We want to convince the whale that we mean it no harm.” What a wonderful concept!

One of the most powerful results of WD-40 Company’s “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A” philosophy is that people trust their managers, because they see them as their performance partners. In fact, 94.5 percent of people on the 2008 WD-40 Company Employee Opinion Survey indicated, “I trust my supervisor.” It is also interesting to note that trust moves even further up the hierarchy. When presented with the statement “I trust the global tribal council to make sound decisions in the best interests of the company,” 96.5 percent of WD-40 Company employees answered “yes.”

To teach people how important it is to build trust, one of our colleagues, Cindy Olmstead, developed the TrustWorks^®: Leader as Trust Builder^® program with Luanna Olney and Nancy Jamison.⁵ They were motivated to create this program by research that suggested that leadership trust is not the “soft” issue that many in the business world generally and incorrectly perceive it to be. For example, at Stanford University a distinguished group of theorists and researchers gathered to examine the impact of trust on organizations.⁶ They found that leaders who have the trust of their employees maximize productivity, creativity, and loyalty in their organizations.

When a leader does not create a climate of trust, people

• Question decisions

• Have moral problems

• Fail to participate fully

• Avoid taking creative risks, and ultimately leave the organization

When employees do these things, the organization is deeply and measurably impacted by

• Reduced quality of the product or service

• Increased cost of turnover, hiring, and training

• Missed opportunities that would have been captured by fully dedicated and creative employees

In another study, Watson Wyatt found that companies whose employees trust the top executives posted 42 percent higher shareholder returns.⁷

Olmstead, Olney, and Jamison feel strongly that building leadership trust is an economic issue directly affecting the bottom line—and so do I.

Without trust, it’s difficult if not impossible to inspire commitment and loyalty from your people. Without those ingredients, you won’t have passionate employees who will go out of their way to serve your customers.

• No response

• Punishment or a negative response

• A positive response

• Redirection

Our notorious seagull managers focus on the first two consequences. They leave their people alone until something goes wrong, and then they move in quickly with a negative response. Effective managers focus on the last two: positive responses and redirection.

If someone told me, “Going forward, you can’t teach anything you have been teaching over the past forty years except one thing,” what I would hold onto is this:

I am a big fan of accentuating the positive. That’s the basis for One Minute Praisings, the second secret of Spencer Johnson’s and my book, The One Minute Manager.

Once goals are clear, managers should not disappear until an annual performance review. Instead, they should constantly wander around—as managers do at WD-40 Company—to see if they can catch their people doing something right and praise them for their efforts.

Imagine if, in teaching your children to walk, you stood them up and said, “Walk!” Then, when they fell down, you spanked them and shouted, “I told you to walk!” What would be the result? Probably you’d have eighteen-year-old kids crawling around the house. So you don’t do that. We all intuitively understand that when children fall, we praise them for standing. When they eventually take their first steps before falling, we praise that progress. This goes on until eventually they gain their balance and start to take some real steps.

At WD-40 Company ongoing feedback and praising progress are a way of life. Why? Because they don’t leave it to chance. Peter Drucker often said, “Nothing good ever happens by accident.” To get the results you want, some structure is needed to provide the necessary support and accountability. At WD-40 Company, daily use of Situational Leadership^® II and quarterly informal/formal discussions provide the structure to encourage feedback and praise. Does it work? Yes. In the 2008 WD-40 Company Employee Opinion Survey, 90.5 percent of the workforce indicated, “My supervisor gives me good ongoing feedback regarding my performance.”

It’s important to note that this process is not a one-way street of only supervisors giving feedback to their people. Since everyone fills out their own progress report, they are also expected to evaluate their own performance and catch themselves doing something right. The job of the tribe leader is to review the tribe member’s self-evaluation. Then together they can celebrate any progress. Managers and their tribe members are a team in making sure that people have a good chance to get an A.

If I were asked to redo any part of The One Minute Manager, I would emphasize redirection more than reprimands. Why? Because of new technology, today things are moving so fast that just when a person becomes competent in doing something, that job changes. People are continually asked to become learners. In fact, if you are not an ongoing learner today, your career may be in jeopardy. Consequently, managers are expected more and more to be teachers and coaches; therefore, the need for redirection is much more prevalent than the need for reprimands.

As I discussed in Simple Truth 5, “Trust Is Key to Effective Coaching,” no negative interaction occurs between the killer whales and trainers at SeaWorld. Again, you don’t want to punish a killer whale and then ask trainers to get in the water with it. So what do they do when a killer whale doesn’t perform a trick up to standards? When the whale comes back to the stage, the trainer doesn’t reward it with a bucket full of fish. What the trainer does is give the whale a hand signal that says either “Let me see that again” or “Why don’t you do a trick you know well?”

What makes an effective redirection? First, just as with praising, redirection must be given as soon as possible. For example, suppose you require each of your direct reports to give you a sales report every Friday afternoon. Before you go home one Friday, you notice that your new hire didn’t comply with that requirement. Rather than waiting until Monday, you go to that person and tell her, “You didn’t get your sales report in this afternoon.” Giving prompt feedback is important.

The second thing that makes redirection work is explaining specifically what went wrong, as well as the impact it is having on team performance. Using the preceding example, you could say, “When I don’t get reports from all our team members, I can’t do a complete analysis for my Monday leadership meeting.”

The third part of an effective redirection, if appropriate, is for the manager to take responsibility. For example, you might say, “Maybe I didn’t make it clear enough that I expected a sales report from you by 1 p.m. every Friday.”

The fourth part of an effective redirection is to reiterate the importance of the task. You could say, “Tracking our sales on a weekly basis is important. Not only do I need it for my Monday leadership meeting, but also tracking our sales helps us celebrate our progress or redirect our efforts if need be. That way we have no surprises at the end of the year.”

Finally, an effective redirection reassures the person you still have confidence in him or her. You could say, “I’m still excited about having you on our team, and I know you’ll be a good team member.”

At WD-40 Company, redirection, in many ways, is an outgrowth of a Learning Moment. It helps a potential winner to keep moving toward an A. Consistent with the WD-40 philosophy, this responsibility rests not just with the manager, but also with the tribe member. As Garry says, “It’s a partnership. Both sides are responsible.” They’re accountable to each other: “We owe each other for something we agreed on.”

While the reprimand can be construed as a negative consequence, if it is delivered with caring candor in the WD-40 style—which is the way Spencer Johnson and I intended—it can be a powerful motivator for high performers whose recent goal achievement, for some reason, is not up to its normal high standards.

An effective One Minute Reprimand has four steps.

First, it should be delivered in a timely manner—as soon as the unusual poor performance is detected. A reprimand should never be saved for an annual performance review.

Second, it should be specific. Using the example we gave for redirection in the preceding Simple Truth, you might say, “You didn’t turn in your weekly report on time.”

Third, the manager should share his or her feelings about the performance—frustration, disappointment, surprise, or the like. “I’m upset about your not getting your weekly report in on time. It’s frustrating to me, because it prevented me from doing a complete analysis of our team’s performance.”

Finally, a reprimand should end with a reaffirmation of the person’s past performance. “The reason I’m upset is because this is so unlike you. You’re one of my best people, and you usually get your reports in on time.”

This final step—the reaffirmation—is often missed. After giving negative feedback, many leaders storm away. I’ll never forget giving my then-teenage son Scott feedback about parking his humongous truck (if you put guns on it, you could go to war) in our driveway, blocking my wife, Margie, from getting out and me from getting in. When he arrived home in a friend’s car, I raced out of the house, told him immediately what he’d done wrong in very specific terms, and then shared with him my angry feelings. When I turned to go back into the house, Scott jumped out of his friend’s car and followed me all the way into the kitchen and said, “Dad, you didn’t give me the last part of the reprimand. You love me. I’m a good kid. This is so unlike me.” All I could do was laugh and acknowledge that he was right.

A reprimand should be used only when you are talking to a normally strong performer. If you are giving feedback to someone who is inexperienced but a potential winner, you cannot reaffirm that person’s past efforts, because he or she is still learning. With those people, redirection is more appropriate.

Again, with the WD-40 partnership philosophy, people might beat their supervisor to the punch and reprimand themselves at one of the quarterly informal/formal discussions or even sooner, if appropriate. The important thing is to not let the performance of a high achiever gradually go downhill.

I ask people all the time if they have ever received any surprises during their annual performance review—feedback that was news to them. They laugh, because it happens all the time.

With the “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A” philosophy, this would never happen. Why? Because, as Garry explained, everyone completes only one performance review—their own.

The performance review is essentially a review. Of what? You can bet it’s a review of the feedback they received during their four informal/formal discussions, or any time along the way. There are literally no surprises here, because all discussions focus on the final exam that they agreed on at the beginning of the year, or modified at one of the quarterly informal/formal discussions.

The job of tribe leaders is to fill out their own performance reviews, to be reviewed with their tribe leaders. When it comes to their tribe members, they sit down individually with each one and review each member’s self-assessment. If anyone disagrees with a review, tribe leader and tribe member go back to the agreed-upon essential functions and performance indicators from the final exam they agreed on at the beginning of the year to determine why the disagreement has occurred.

“Not everyone gets an A,” Garry says, “but that is the aim.” If someone receives a B, that person plays a major role in that evaluation. Now together manager and tribe member determine what has to be done and what help is needed to get that A next time. This takes any fear out of a performance review, because both manager and team member are accountable and responsible.

If, after a period of time, it becomes clear to both tribe leader and tribe member that an A is not possible—that person is perpetually a learner or has been stuck for a long time as a C performer, even with the right help—the focus switches to career planning, because the person might be in the wrong job. If this is a values-driven tribe member, a different opportunity in WD-40 Company will be explored. If this isn’t a values-driven tribe member, as Garry explains, “We will share them with a competitor.” Maybe that person can get an A in another organization.

Do most leaders know their leadership point of view? According to Noel Tichy, ⁸ effective leaders have a clear, teachable leadership point of view and are willing to share it with and teach it to others—particularly the people with whom they work. This realization so impacted me that, as Garry mentioned, my wife Margie and I created a course called “Communicating Your Leadership Point of View” as part of the Master of Science in Executive Leadership (MSEL) program at the University of San Diego.⁹

I believe that effective leadership is a journey, beginning with self-leadership, moving to one-on-one leadership, and then team leadership, and ending with organizational leadership. This course is the final focus of the self-leadership portion of the degree program. The course culminates in all the students making presentations to the class that describe their leadership points of view. The students deliver their leadership points of view as though they are talking to those who report to them in their organizational leadership positions. Garry went through that very process. Clarifying his leadership point of view motivated him to develop the WD-40 Company “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A” philosophy.

If you as a leader can teach people your leadership point of view, they may also begin to solidify their own thinking about leadership so that they can teach others, too. Tichy feels strongly that learning, teaching, and leading are intricately intertwined and, therefore, should be considered inherent parts of everyone’s leadership description. Why everyone’s? Because:

So think about your own leadership point of view. What can people expect from you, and what do you expect from them? Once you are clear on these expectations, ask yourself questions such as these: Where did those beliefs come from? Who were the leadership role models in the early part of my life? Do I have a life purpose and a set of operating values? What guides my leader behavior?

Once you can answer these questions, you can share the answers with your people. When you share your leadership point of view with your people, not only will they have the benefit of understanding what they can expect from you and what you expect from them, but they also will know where that thinking came from. It also puts pressure on you to walk your talk, since you have made public your leadership point of view.

That’s exactly what Garry has done with the people at WD-40 Company. Implementing a “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A” philosophy provided the structure for him to walk his talk.

Yet servant leadership is an odd concept. When I talk about it, people often raise their eyebrows. They think it means the inmates are running the prison or that it’s about pleasing everybody. These people don’t understand what servant leadership is all about, the way Garry Ridge does. Two aspects of servant leadership are practiced in the “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A” philosophy—vision/direction and implementation.

A number of years ago I asked Jesse Stoner to write a book with me titled Full Steam Ahead!¹⁰ Jesse had been studying the power of vision for both individuals and organizations for more than twenty years. She determined that a compelling vision—one that engages the hearts and minds of others—has three parts:

• Your purpose. What business are you in? Where are you going, and why?

• Your picture of the future. What will your future look like if you are accomplishing your purpose?

• Your values. What do you stand for? On what principles will you make your ongoing decisions?

Walt Disney started his theme parks with a clear purpose. He said, “We’re in the happiness business.” That is very different from being in the theme park business. Clear purpose drives everything the cast members (employees) do with their guests (customers). Being in the happiness business helps cast members understand their primary role in the company.

At WD-40 Company everyone is clear that they are in the “squeak, smell, and dirt” business. Their products take care of squeaks and get rid of smells and dirt. As Garry puts it, “What could be clearer than that?”

If your organization does not have a purpose statement, if your purpose statement is not worded so that everyone understands it, or if people are not excited about your purpose statement, your organization will begin to lose its way.

Walt Disney’s picture of the future was expressed in the charge he gave every cast member: “Keep the same smile on people’s faces when they leave the park as when they entered.” Disney didn’t care whether guests were in the park two hours or ten hours. He just wanted to keep them smiling. After all, they were in the happiness business. Your picture should focus on the end result, not on the process of getting there.

At WD-40 Company their picture of the future is that if they do a good job at the squeak, smell, and dirt business, it will create positive, lasting memories for their users.

The view of the future is what keeps people going when times are tough. It prevents your organization from stopping short or arriving at the wrong destination.

Values are the nonnegotiable principles that define character in an organization. My observation is that fewer than 10 percent of the organizations around the world have clear, written values.

Most companies that have stated values do not have them rank-ordered. Why is that important? Because, as Garry indicated, life is about value conflicts. When these conflicts arise, people need to know which value they should focus on.

The Disney theme parks have four rank-ordered values: safety, courtesy, the show, and efficiency. Why is safety the highest-ranked value? Walt Disney knew that if guests were carried out of one of his parks on a stretcher, they would not have the same smiles on their faces leaving the park as they had when they entered.

Here are the rank-ordered values that guide tribe member behavior at WD-40 Company:

1. Doing the right thing

2. Creating positive, lasting memories in all our relationships

3. Making it better than it is today

4. Succeeding as a team while excelling as individuals

5. Owning it and passionately acting on it

6. Sustaining the WD-40 economy

So at WD-40 Company, no matter what’s happening, doing the right thing is the first order of business.

Once you are clear in your organization about who you are (your purpose), where you are going (your picture of the future), and what will guide your journey (your values), you can set meaningful goals. Why do I say that? Because a compelling vision provides a context for your goals. It makes your goals come alive and makes them relevant.

© 2004 The Ken Blanchard Corporation. No rights reserved. Do not duplicate.

Here the frontline people can be responsible—able to respond to their customers with a sense of autonomy. In this scenario, leaders serve and are responsive to people’s needs, training and developing them to soar like eagles so that they can accomplish established goals and live according to their vision and values.

Organizations run by self-serving, egotistical leaders never risk what Garry Ridge has done at WD-40 Company. By philosophically turning the traditional pyramidal hierarchy upside down, he’s made it a major responsibility of every manager to help their people get an A. In organizations run by self-serving leaders, the traditional hierarchy is kept alive and well. People throughout the organization are often judged and sorted into arbitrary performance categories. This not only eliminates trust, it also demotivates people. Rather than taking responsibility for making things happen, people protect themselves by bowing to the hierarchy. When something goes wrong, they act like ducks and say, “It’s our policy. Quack, quack. I just work here. Quack, quack. I didn’t make the rules. Quack, quack. Do you want to talk to my supervisor? Quack, quack.” This is dramatically different from the eagles you will find at WD-40 Company, who are soaring above the crowd and taking care of business.

To discover whether that statement is true, Drea Zigarmi and Scott Blanchard worked with Vicki Essary to study the interaction between organizational vitality and success, employee passion and success, customer devotion and loyalty, and leadership. In their year-long study,¹¹ which included an exhaustive literature review of hundreds of studies from 1980 to 2005, they examined two kinds of leadership: strategic and operational. Strategic leadership focuses on vision and direction (the leadership aspect of servant leadership), while operational leadership focuses on implementation (the servant aspect of servant leadership).

Interestingly, Zigarmi and Blanchard found that while strategic leadership is a critical building block for setting the tone and direction, it has only an indirect impact on organizational vitality. The real key to organizational vitality is operational leadership. If this aspect of leadership is done effectively, employee passion and customer devotion will result from the positive experiences and overall satisfaction people have with the organization.

It is also interesting to note that positive employee passion creates positive customer devotion. At the same time, when customers are excited about and devoted to the company, this has a positive effect on the work environment and the employees’ passion. People love to work for a company where customers are raving fans. It makes them gung ho, and together the customers and employees directly impact organizational vitality.

The big-picture conclusion from the research of Zigarmi and Blanchard is that the leadership part of servant leadership (strategic leadership) is important, because vision and direction get things going. But the real action is with the servant aspect of servant leadership (operational leadership). When leaders with vision serve their people by helping them achieve their goals and treating them with respect and dignity, that kindness is returned to their customers—who in turn keep the business thriving.

The same is true with organizations. In general, and in business in particular, it’s assumed that we don’t need to celebrate the good news.

I think one of the greatest things in the world is the free enterprise system. Whether it’s in this country or others, there’s nothing more heartening than to see people taking the opportunity to build a business that not only serves customers well but also creates opportunities for people in the organization to win and soar like eagles. And there are some really outstanding examples. Yet you wouldn’t know that from reading the newspaper or listening to TV news. Most of what’s reported about business is negative. As a result, the impression the general public gets is that all businesses are bad and that they’re run by self-serving, egotistical leaders who are only concerned about themselves.

That’s why I’m excited about this series of books spotlighting leaders and companies who are successfully practicing an aspect of Leading at a Higher Level. It’s been a joy to do this first book in the series, featuring Garry Ridge and the successes at WD-40 Company. As I travel around the world, I find a number of people discouraged about how they are managed and evaluated. They feel judged, sorted out, and rank-ordered. They don’t really feel that their managers are on their side, because the managers are under the gun to find a few winners and identify a certain number of losers.

I’ve talked about the “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A” philosophy all over the planet. From Europe to Australia to China, people’s eyes light up when I tell them that it’s the responsibility of a manager to help people get an A. They’re amazed when I explain that if a manager doesn’t do anything to help a person perform well, that manager could get fired, not the poor performer.

WD-40 Company is such a great story. As a company it not only has tremendous performance by Wall Street standards and every other financial measure, but it also has a high level of human satisfaction. It’s a win/win story.

So celebrate the good stories in your organization! Let other people know about them. Let those stories be good role models so that people can say, “Look what they’re doing in that department. Maybe we should be doing that in our department.”

I encourage you to find good stories not only in your own organization, but also in other organizations in your community. Publicize them so that people can learn about and perhaps replicate them, or even improve on them. The point is:

2. Ken Blanchard and Robert Lorber, Putting the One Minute Manager to Work (New York: William Morrow, 1984).

3. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (New York: Collins Business, 2001).

4. Ken Blanchard, Jim Ballard, Thad Lacinak, and Chuck Tompkins, Whale Done! The Power of Positive Relationships (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).

5. More information on this program is available at www.blanchardlearning.com.

6. Roderick Kramer and Tom Tyler, eds., Trust in Organizations: Frontiers in Theory and Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995).

7. Watson Wyatt 2007/2008 Communication ROI Study, “Secrets of Top Performers: How Companies with Highly Effective Employee Communication Differentiate Themselves” (Arlington, VA: Watson Wyatt, 2008). For more information, see www.watsonwyatt.com.

8. Noel Tichy, The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders at Every Level (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).

9. For more information on this program, visit www.sandiego.edu/business/programs/graduate/leadership/executive_leadership.

10. Ken Blanchard and Jesse Stoner, Full Steam Ahead! Unleash the Power of Vision in Your Company and Your Life (San Francisco: Berrett -Koehler, 2003).

11. Scott Blanchard, Drea Zigarmi, and Vicky Essary, “Leadership-Profit Chain,” Perspectives (Escondido, CA: The Ken Blanchard Companies, 2006).

12. Ken Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Ethical Management (New York: William Morrow, 1988).