When you are a senior leader, executive, or manager, you might think you have your finger on the pulse of your company. But the higher you climb, the more the air thins, and the more the truth gets filtered. Information is sanitized before it reaches you. Budgets are presented with a glossy finish. Roadblocks are downplayed. Bad news arrives late, soft, or sometimes not at all.
Without realizing it, leaders often make critical, high-stakes decisions based on a fictionalized, optimized version of their organization. To break this invisible barrier and build real psychological safety, leaders must operationalize vulnerability.
As part of our benchmark series on psychological safety on O krok do przodu / A Step Ahead, we explore one of the most powerful, strategic masterclasses in executive vulnerability ever shared: the management operating system of Garry Ridge, who led the WD-40 Company as CEO for 25 years.
“Good day, I’m Garry Ridge. I’m the consciously incompetent, probably wrong, roughly right CEO of WD-40 Company, and I need all the help I can get.” — Garry Ridge, Former CEO of WD-40 Company
To the untrained eye, this introduction sounds like a simple exercise in modesty. It is not. It is a highly engineered structural fix for the natural communication bottlenecks that plague corporate hierarchies. By proactively and publicly declaring his own limitations, Garry Ridge fundamentally shifted the rules of engagement.
Why the Truth Stops Traveling (The Filter Bubble)
No employee wants to be the harbinger of bad news to a boss. In environments lacking psychological safety, silence is the safest currency. When leaders show up as “all-knowing,” they create a silent contract: I have the answers, so you must have them too.
Consequently, teams hide their mistakes, mask their doubts, and avoid asking for help. This is where execution breaks down, resulting in massive operational friction, lost revenue, and team burnout. The issue is not that people are difficult; they are simply responding to the corporate vocabulary they have been given.
Did You Know? The Meaning Behind WD-40 – it actually stands for Water Displacement, 40th attempt. It took the original chemists 39 failed formulas—39 opportunities to learn, refine, and try again—before they perfected the solution in their 40th attempt. Operationalizing psychological safety is about creating an environment where attempts 1 through 39 are treated as necessary data points, not fatal mistakes.
Operationalizing Vulnerability: How to Re-engineer the Room
If you want high-performing teams, you must treat psychological safety not as an abstract human resource concept, but as a team performance engine. When leaders adopt a growth mindset and use inclusive, vulnerable vocabulary, they unlock the cognitive diversity within their team.
Here are three immediate shifts leaders can make, inspired by the Garry Ridge benchmark:
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Lead with “I don’t know” rather than “I do know.” Open your next critical meeting by outlining a complex problem you do not have the answer to, and explicitly ask the team for their insight.
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Normalize the “Incomplete Attempt.” Shift the language around failure. Reframe mistakes as natural milestones of progress—just like the 39 attempts that led to WD-40.
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Permit dissent. Actively reward and publicly praise team members who challenge your assumptions or bring you inconvenient truths.
An Executive Diagnostic Question: “Has anyone told you that you were wrong about something important in the last 30 days?” If your honest answer is no, your team has not gone quiet on you—you went quiet on them. They are merely adapting to the standard you set by default.
Moving from Intuition to Data: Scan Your Team’s Safety
While inspiring anecdotes like Garry Ridge’s give us a clear blueprint, sustainable leadership requires clear data. You cannot manage what you do not measure.
At ETTA. Go Global, we support organizations in shifting their cultures from default defensive posturing to high-performing growth zones. Utilizing scientifically backed methodologies such as ICQ Global’s Growth Zone™ and Global DISC™, we measure the invisible variables that drive team performance: psychological safety, cognitive diversity, and intercultural agility.
Rather than profiling individual personalities, a psychological safety scan measures the environment the team is creating together. It highlights where communication bottlenecks exist, where diversity is being suppressed, and exactly where leaders need to adjust their “vocabulary” to unleash their team’s full potential.
Ready to Scan Your Team’s Psychological Safety?
Uncover the hidden filters in your organization. Contact ETTA. Go Global today to arrange a certified psychological safety assessment for your team or leadership circle, and learn how to turn differences into your greatest business asset. Reach out to us through ettagoglobal.com.
This article was inspired by Garry Ridge’s original post, which you can read on LinkedIn here: Garry Ridge on LinkedIn.
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