Culture Is the Work: Turning Values into Everyday Performance

Many organizations treat culture as an optional extra, something to revisit after the strategy is set and the targets are missed. The reality is the opposite. Culture is the system that makes every plan either possible or impossible. When people feel safe, included, and trusted, they lean in. When the environment trains them to play it safe or to fend for themselves, even brilliant strategies stall.

On The Bliss Business Podcast, we sat down with Garry Ridge, Chairman Emeritus of WD-40 Company and Founder of The Learning Moment, to explore how leaders can shape cultures where people thrive and results follow. Garry’s core message is simple and demanding. Fix the culture, not the people. Create the environment, and performance becomes a natural outcome.

Culture Before Strategy

Leaders often react to poor results by correcting individuals, tightening controls, or replacing talent. That approach assumes the problem sits inside people rather than in the system surrounding them. Culture is the sum of what gets encouraged, tolerated, celebrated, and repeated. If fear and blame are present, initiative disappears. If transparency, trust, and coaching are present, people contribute more than their job descriptions require.

Putting culture first is not a soft move. It is an operational decision. It determines how decisions get made, how information flows, and how quickly teams learn. Strategy describes where the business is going. Culture decides how the business will get there.

Five Foundations That Unlock Performance

High performing cultures rarely happen by accident. They are built on explicit foundations that turn values into everyday behaviors. Garry highlights five that leaders can operationalize.

• Belonging. People do their best work when they feel part of the tribe. Belonging is created by inclusion, recognition, and the language leaders choose every day.

• Significance. Work matters when people see the impact. Connecting tasks to outcomes helps employees understand how their contribution creates value for customers and for one another.

• Choice. Values serve as simple rules for complex environments. When values are clear and lived, teams can make decisions without waiting for permission.

• Safety. Mistakes are treated as data, not as ammunition. Psychological safety encourages intelligent risk taking and faster learning.

• Coaching. Leaders act as coaches who ask questions, expand capability, and give timely feedback. Authority does not disappear. It gets translated into development.

When these foundations are present, the day to day experience changes. Meetings become places to solve problems rather than defend positions. Teams spend less time hiding issues and more time improving outcomes.

Measuring What Matters

There is a persistent myth that culture cannot be measured. In truth, every organization is already measuring it. Attrition, referral rates, engagement, quality defects, safety incidents, and customer advocacy are cultural indicators as much as operational ones. The question is whether leaders will look at them through a cultural lens.

A practical starting point is to track a short set of people centered metrics alongside financial ones, then review them with the same rigor. Ask how many employees would recommend the company to a friend. Ask how often teams share learning moments after a project. Ask how quickly cross functional issues are surfaced and resolved. Measurement is not about policing feelings. It is about seeing the health of the system that produces results.

Confronting Cultural Toxins

One tolerated toxin can undo months of progress. The most common is the high performer who violates values. When the numbers are strong and the behavior is corrosive, leaders face a test of credibility. If values only apply to some people, they do not exist.

Confronting toxins means setting explicit behavioral standards and holding everyone to them. It means refusing shortcuts that compromise the culture in exchange for short term wins. The payoff is a workforce that trusts leadership to protect the environment where they do their best work.

From Mistakes to Learning Moments

Cultures that grow quickly have one habit in common. They turn errors into shared knowledge. Garry’s notion of the learning moment reframes outcomes as information that should be shared for everyone’s benefit. That shift replaces the hunt for blame with the search for insight.

Leaders make this real by asking a few consistent questions after a miss or a win. What did we expect, what happened, what did we learn, and what will we change. The cadence matters. If teams wait for an annual review to reflect, learning arrives too late. When learning is frequent and lightweight, improvement accelerates and fear declines.

Purpose as the Operating System

Purpose is not a paragraph on the wall. It is the operating system for decisions, tradeoffs, and priorities. When a company articulates a clear purpose, people can navigate ambiguity without constant escalation. Purpose answers the question, what are we here to create.

In practice, purpose shows up when teams choose customer trust over short term gain, when leaders invest in development even during busy seasons, and when success is defined by the memories the brand leaves with people, not just by the quarter’s numbers. Purpose does not replace performance. It gives performance direction and meaning.

Servant Leadership and Love

Servant leadership is a choice to put the growth of people at the center of the leadership role. It involves real discipline. Leaders listen first, coach often, and remove obstacles that slow teams down. Accountability does not disappear. It becomes a shared commitment to the standards the team agreed to uphold.

Love has a place in business. Not sentimentality, but genuine care. Love looks like believing in someone’s potential before they see it themselves. It looks like telling the truth with kindness, and it looks like sending people home with more dignity and energy than they arrived with. Cultures shaped by love are resilient because people feel safe enough to try, fail, learn, and try again.

Practical Moves Leaders Can Make Now

• Name the values and the behaviors. Translate each value into two or three observable actions. Review them regularly.

• Create a simple ritual for learning moments. Ten minutes at the end of key projects is enough to capture lessons and apply them.

• Protect the culture in hiring and promotion. Choose for values and coaching ability, not just for individual output.

• Measure two people centric indicators. Track engagement and referral intent with the same seriousness as revenue and margin.

• Tell purpose driven stories. Share examples of choices that honored the purpose, especially when they required tradeoffs.

Key Takeaways

• Culture is the system that enables strategy. It must be built first and guarded daily.

• Belonging, significance, choice, safety, and coaching turn values into performance.

• Measurement, when viewed through a cultural lens, reveals the health of the system.

• Tolerating toxic behavior destroys trust, even when short term numbers look good.

• Learning moments convert mistakes into shared knowledge and speed.

• Servant leadership and love are powerful drivers of sustainable results.

Final Thoughts

Fixing people rarely works. Fixing the culture changes everything. When leaders choose to build environments of belonging, safety, and purpose, they unlock performance that no command and control system can match. The ripple effects extend beyond the balance sheet into families, communities, and the wider world.

Check out our full conversation with Garry Ridge on The Bliss Business Podcast.