Anthony Tjan - Good People: The Only Leadership Decision That Really Matters

I n 1953, industrial chemist Norman Larsen and his staff of two at the fledgling Rocket Chemical Company set out on a mission: to create a formula for the booming aeronautics industry that could coat space missiles and protect them from water. It took extensive trial and error to perfect the formula, but on the fortieth attempt they nailed it. Thus was born Water Displacement 40, better known today as WD-40.

WD-40 has a unique place in history and pop culture. It was first used on the Atlas space rocket, but then consumers began clamoring for it. Salesmen literally sold the now-iconic blue-and-yellow cans out of their car trunks. Today, WD-40 is a household name. Annual sales exceed $350 million, and the company is valued at more than $1.5 billion. WD-40s meteoric success makes it easy to overlook the most unique aspect of the company: the people who work there.

WD-40 has managed to retain its staff at three times the national average. Ninety-seven percent of employees report that they lovenot just liketo tell people they work at WD-40. Obviously, WD-40s results arent just the effect of organizational competencies. They reflect something deeper and more meaningful about the people at WD-40.

Under the leadership of Garry Ridge, who has been at the company for thirty years and has served as its CEO for twenty, there has been no question that the firms first priority and most valuable asset iswell above anything elseits people. The WD-40 tribe espouses and leads with the people-first philosophy that Ridge and management guru Ken Blanchard describe in Helping People Win at Work: Dont mark my paper, help me get an A. The primary core value of the WD-40 organization is doing the right thinghelping the people at WD-40 truly succeed.

In fact, at WD-40 mentorship is not just one expectation among many competing tasks; it is an imperative. The approval ratings for supervisors at WD-40 are through the roof, consistently around 96 percent. The number one responsibility of a tribal leader or coach at WD-40 is the success of his tribe members. Full stop, says Ridge. Its a simple concept for goodness, but one to which it is difficult to fully commit. But this is what makes WD-40 a paragon of a good company and its employees paragons of good people.

Good peopleits a phrase we hear all the time, both in the office and out of it. What do we really mean when we say those words? When we say that someone is good? We recognize that quality when were around it, and we can feel goodness when we experience it, but to really describe it, specifically and fully, is challenging to say the least. Certainly we dont understand goodness to the degree it deserves.

Good and goodness are words so embedded in our everyday colloquies theyve almost lost their meaning. Theyve become what my late neighbor, the illustrious intellect and MIT professor Marvin Minsky, termed suitcase words: overused, overstretched phrases or expressions that have next to no practical meaning. Even formal definitions fall short. Merriam-Websters Online Dictionarys definition of good, for example, is something virtuous, right, commendable. This is not incorrect, but we must build upon it and make it more concrete and understandable so that we may practice it in our daily lives.

If we take on the burden of creating a practical, actionable definition of goodness and putting that goodness into practice, we need to acknowledge that the topic has been a core question and source of inquiry for the worlds greatest philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders for millennia. As we can see from Aristotles relentless quest to better understand the human condition and human spirit, from twentieth-century psychosocial explorations of different stages of desire and development by the likes of Abraham Maslow or Erik Erikson, and from many faiths common principles of kindness, it is a near universal assumption that we should all live our lives striving to be good people.

But how can we think of goodness and good people as concepts that can be practically applied in the business world and understand their far-reaching benefits? First, we need to confront the ambiguities in the way businesses use the term good. There are two sides of the word. When hiring employees and managing teams, we often use good as a synonym for competent. But goodness is far more than a persons competencies; goodness is about peoples humanity, their values, the qualities inherent in their character, and other intangible traits. We therefore need to distinguish goodness as competency from goodness as values, and we need to understand that the latter ought to take greater priority.