I grew up in Five Dock, a working-class suburb on the western side of Sydney. My mum sat at the same kitchen table in the same little house in Five Dock for over 70 years. She lived to 99 years and 9 months. And the most important leadership lesson I ever received did not come from a business school, a board room, or a bestselling author. It came from her, across a plate of lamb’s fry with onions, bacon and gravy, on a morning in 1999 when I had just flown into Sydney from Los Angeles as a newly minted global CEO.

She looked at me, with that quiet knowing in her eyes, and said softly but firmly: “Never forget, son. Even the Queen sits down to pee.”

People often hear that line and laugh. They should. It’s a great line. But behind the humor is something far more useful for any leader trying to build a company that lasts. Humility, as my mum understood it, is not a soft virtue. It is a hard strategic moat. It protects against the single most destructive force in scaled organizations, which is the distance that opens up between a leader and the people they are supposed to serve. The longer I led WD-40 Company, the more I realized she had given me the most valuable competitive advantage I would ever possess.

TLDR

• Humility is not a personality trait. It is a strategic discipline that prevents the distance between leaders and their people from destroying trust at scale.
• The research is clear: Jim Collins’s “Level 5 Leaders,” Bob Chapman’s “Truly Human Leadership,” and Hubert Joly’s “Human Magic” all converge on the same principle. The greatest performance comes from leaders who refuse to put themselves above the people they serve.
• Distance is the silent killer of organizational performance. It shows up as silence in meetings, hidden mistakes, and the slow erosion of psychological safety.
• Gallup’s 2024 data shows that only 23 percent of employees worldwide are engaged, and the manager relationship accounts for 70 percent of that variance.
• Staying real is not about staying small. It is about staying close enough to your people that they will tell you the truth.

Why Does Distance Destroy Trust at Scale?

Distance destroys trust at scale because the further a leader sits from the work, the less truth they actually receive. People stop speaking up. Mistakes get hidden. The room goes quiet, and the quiet sounds like agreement until the company quietly breaks.

In the early days of my time as a global CEO, I noticed something I had not expected. The bigger the job got, the more people deferred to me. They smiled more. They challenged less. The information I received was filtered, polished, and softened by the time it reached my desk. If I had not paid attention, I could have spent years making decisions based on a version of reality that no one on my team actually lived in.

Bob Chapman, the chairman of Barry-Wehmiller and author of Everybody Matters, calls this “the way we are taught to lead.” He spent decades unlearning it. Chapman’s company has grown into a $3.6 billion business by treating every employee as someone whose life is being touched by their leader’s behavior. His research, taught in a Harvard Business School case study used in more than 70 business schools, is built on a simple premise: people are not functions to be managed. They are human beings whose performance depends on whether or not they feel they matter.

That insight only works if the leader stays close enough to feel it.

What Did My Mum Actually Mean by “Even the Queen Sits Down to Pee”?

My mum was not cutting me down. She was holding me up. She was reminding me that no title, no achievement, no amount of recognition changes who you are at your core. Stay humble. Stay real. Stay human. Stay connected to the people and the places that made you.

What she said in twelve words is what Jim Collins took five years of research and a New York Times bestseller to document. In his Harvard Business Review article “Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve,” Collins describes the rarest and most effective category of executive he studied: leaders who combine intense professional will with deep personal humility. Out of 1,435 Fortune 500 companies, only 11 met his criteria for sustained great performance. Every single one of them was led by a Level 5 leader. Every single one of them gave credit away and took blame in-house.

What Collins found by analyzing decades of corporate data, my mum knew from raising five kids in a small house in Five Dock. Pride creates distance. Distance creates silence. Silence breaks companies.

“When you treat people like they’re above others, you don’t create respect. You create distance. And distance kills trust, honesty, learning, and performance.”

That is not a soft idea. That is a return on investment.

How Does Humility Function as a Strategic Moat?

Humility functions as a strategic moat because it keeps the channels of truth open. A leader who refuses to put themselves above their people receives better information, makes better decisions, and retains better talent. Over time, that compounds into a performance advantage competitors cannot copy because they cannot stomach the ego cost.

Hubert Joly, the former CEO of Best Buy and now a faculty member at Harvard Business School, calls this “human magic.” When he took over Best Buy in 2012, everyone thought the company was going to die. Amazon was eating retail alive. Circuit City was already gone. Joly’s response was not to slash costs or chase a charismatic turnaround narrative. He went to the stores. He listened to the people on the floor. He put purpose and people at the center of the business and treated profit as the outcome, not the goal. Eight years later, Best Buy was thriving. The stock had multiplied. The customer satisfaction scores were among the best in retail.

Joly describes the philosophy in The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism. He did not invent it. Bob Chapman did not invent it either. My mum did not invent it. None of us did. We just paid attention to the same truth from different angles. Leaders who stay close to their people get more from them. Leaders who do not, do not.

The numbers tell the same story. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 report found that global employee engagement dropped to 21 percent in 2024, costing the world economy roughly $438 billion in lost productivity in a single year. The biggest contributor was a decline in manager engagement. When the people closest to the team disconnect from the team, everything below them disconnects too. High-engagement workplaces, by contrast, see turnover drop 51 percent, productivity rise 23 percent, and well-being improve 68 percent. Those gains are not produced by celebrity CEOs. They are produced by leaders who keep their feet on the ground.

What Does the Five Dock Test Look Like in Daily Practice?

The Five Dock Test is simple. Ask yourself, in the small moments of your day, whether you are still the person you were before you got the title. Three behaviors tell the truth.

First, who do you stop to talk to? Not the people you are supposed to talk to. The people you walk past. The person making the coffee. The receptionist. The new hire. If you can no longer remember the last conversation you had with someone three levels below you, you have already started building distance.

Second, what happens to bad news when it travels toward you? If your team softens it, hides it, or holds it for the right moment, you have a problem. In a healthy culture, bad news travels fast and arrives unfiltered. Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard on psychological safety confirms the same pattern: in psychologically safe environments, people surface problems faster and errors get caught earlier. In an unhealthy one, bad news crawls and arrives wrapped in spin.

Third, are you still asking for help? I used to introduce myself to my team this way: “Good day, I’m Garry Ridge. I’m the consciously incompetent, probably wrong and roughly right CEO of WD-40 Company, and I need all the help I can get.” It is amazing how much help you get when you stop pretending to have all the answers. When you stop needing help, you have stopped listening. And when you stop listening, you have stopped leading.

“Stay humble. Stay real. Stay human. Stay connected to the people and the places that made you. She gave me that gift long before I had any idea how much I would need it.”

The Five Dock Test is not nostalgia. It is a diagnostic. It is how a leader stays close enough to their people that the truth can still reach them. Every great culture I have ever encountered passes this test. Every broken one I have ever encountered fails it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Five Dock Test?

The Five Dock Test is a simple daily diagnostic for leaders. It asks whether you are behaving the same way you would behave if your mum, your old neighbors, or the people who knew you before you had a title were watching. It is named after the working-class Sydney suburb where I grew up. The test surfaces whether the distance between you and your team is widening or staying healthy.

Why is humility considered a competitive advantage rather than a personality trait?

Humility keeps the channels of truth open inside an organization. Leaders who lack humility receive filtered information, make worse decisions, and lose top talent. Jim Collins’s research on Level 5 Leaders, published in Harvard Business Review, found that humility combined with fierce resolve was the single defining trait of CEOs who transformed good companies into great ones. The advantage compounds over decades.

How is this related to Bob Chapman’s “Truly Human Leadership”?

Bob Chapman, chairman of Barry-Wehmiller and author of Everybody Matters, built a $3.6 billion business on the premise that every single person inside an organization deserves to be treated like family. His philosophy and mine converge on one principle: leaders create the conditions in which people either thrive or shrink. The Five Dock Test is a personal practice. Truly Human Leadership is the organizational system that practice supports.

What does Hubert Joly’s “human magic” have to do with humility?

Hubert Joly’s turnaround of Best Buy, described in The Heart of Business, was built on the idea that leaders unleash extraordinary performance by putting purpose and people at the center of the business. Joly did this by listening to frontline employees, refusing to lead from the top down, and treating profit as an outcome rather than a goal. His “human magic” is what happens when a leader is humble enough to ask the people closest to the work what they actually need.

Can a leader be humble and still hold high standards?

Yes. In fact, humility and high standards depend on each other. I call it a heart of gold and a backbone of steel. Without the heart, standards become cruelty. Without the backbone, humility becomes weakness. The leaders who transform organizations have both. The Level 5 Leaders Jim Collins studied gave credit away and took blame in-house, but they were also the most ferociously determined people in the room.

Where can leaders start if they realize the distance has already opened up?

Start with three behaviors this week. Stop someone you would normally walk past and ask how they are doing. Invite bad news from someone who is hesitant to share it, and thank them when they do. And go first with a Learning Moment of your own, in public, in front of your team. Distance closes the same way it opens. One small honest interaction at a time.

The Teacup on My Desk

My mum joined my dad on May 9, 2014, at 99 years and 9 months old. The house in Five Dock is sold. The kitchen table is gone. But I still have her teacup. It is a Noritake, Mardi Gras pattern from the late 1960s. Not my taste. But it was hers. When I wrap my hands around it, I feel her. I feel at home. And I remember what she taught me before I had any idea how much I would need it.

The most important moats in business are not patents or pricing power. They are the small, daily, unglamorous practices that keep a leader close enough to their people that the truth can still reach them. That is what staying real protects. That is what distance destroys. And that is what every leader I admire has learned, often the hard way.

If you want to build a culture where people can actually thrive, start with the leader. Start with the test. Start in your own version of Five Dock. To go deeper on building cultures of belonging, learning, and human-centered leadership, visit The Learning Moment to explore the frameworks, tools, and coaching that help leaders make this shift in their own organizations.