“An Embarrassing Moment In Cricket Taught Me How To Lead,” Says WD-40 CEO Steve Brass

The memory still makes Steve Brass squirm. Growing up in Yorkshire, England, where Brass says, “the humans were outnumbered by the sheep 2-to-1,” Brass was made captain of his school cricket team. Only 15 years old and having no experience with leadership to speak of, Brass assumed that the captain was supposed to play the lead role on the field, so he put himself in as a starter at all the most desirable positions. At one point in the match, an adult sidled up to Brass and suggested that, just perhaps, he ought to let some of his teammates “have a go.”

Hence the squirm.

He’s come a long way since that embarrassing foray into leadership, however, and today can lay claim to being the president and CEO of the iconic global brand known as WD-40, a firm he came to in 1991 as a salesperson. The psychic smartness of his early cricket lesson still guides his approach to leadership. “I realized that leadership is about putting others first and taking more of a helicopter view,” Brass said in a recent interview. “The point of leadership is to be sure everybody gets a go.”

What Brass has seen from the vantage point of his helicopter view is that companies with a strong learning and people-first orientation — two sides of the same coin, Brass would argue — stand the best chance of building loyalty and engaging their teams over the long run. WD-40 considers themselves a “people development and learning organization” trying to create an environment where people thrive. Brass thinks the key to the company’s success lies in taking the right perspective.

“I am a big fan of the inverted pyramid in which the CEO is on the bottom supporting the rest of the team,” explained Brass. “It’s my version of servant leadership where the leader’s job is to develop everyone on his team.”

Brass says he fulfills his responsibility as a leader by using different methods of involving his staff not only in their own development but also the strategic decision-making that used to be the sole province of the C-Suite but that has grown more inclusive by design. At WD-40, learning and development proceed hand-in-hand through such practices as:

Co-creation: Brass believes in putting as many brains as possible on the strategic direction of the organization. “There’s an old proverb that goes, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’ There is power in getting as many people as possible involved in co-creating strategy. People will buy into it because they feel they contributed to it.”
Development trumps succession: Brass prefers to focus on broadly developing his team rather than building a succession plan around a few high-profile stars. Much like his soccer coaching and leadership idol, Sir Alex Ferguson, the legendary former manager of Manchester United, Brass focuses on training young recruits. “When you give young people a chance, you only create a longer lifespan for your team,” Brass noted. “You also encourage loyalty. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that.”
Listen to be influenced: When Brass took over as president and CEO last year, he embarked on a “global listening tour” and structured his conversations with team members around two key questions, which were also sent out in a survey. “First, we asked what each team member would change if they were made CEO,” said Brass. “Then, we asked each person to offer an example of one barrier that was getting in their way of being more effective.”
The “tour” wasn’t an exercise in venting or even simply getting to know his team. As the answers to these two questions came in, Brass and his leadership team didn’t simply file them away or just discuss them; they used the feedback to start making some concrete changes at WD-40, thereby demonstrating how a true learning organization behaves.

“Formally and informally, by asking questions you’re going to form a picture of what’s really going on in your organization,” Brass said.