Episode Details

Connect with Ashleigh Walters:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleigh-walters-makethingsbetter/

Website: https://www.onexinc.com/

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the manufacturers' network podcast. I'm excited to introduce you today to Ashley Walters. Ashleigh is President of Onex, an employee-owned business operating for over 54 years in Erie, Pennsylvania. Onex designs services and manufacturers high-temperature industrial furnaces. When Ashleigh assumed the general manager role in 2013, the company has lost sight of its mission and family-centric core values. Today Onex's mission is to make things better: empowered employees, happy clients, thriving communities.

Ashleigh holds a BS in chemical engineering from Auburn University. She's the chairman of the board of directions for Northwest industrial resource Center, a manufacturing extensive partnership, and President and director of Aspire casualty, a reinsurance company. Ashleigh is the author of "Leading with Grit and Grace: a journey of organizational culture change. Ashleigh, welcome to the show.

Ashleigh Walters: Thanks so much for having me, Lisa.

Lisa Ryan: Please share with us a little bit about your background and what led you to Onex, to begin with, in 2013.

Ashleigh Walters: Sure, I have; as you noted, my bs in chemical engineering from Auburn University. I met my husband there back in 1998. He started Onex in the southern division in 2002 when we graduated from college; I joined Onex in 2003 as a technical salesperson.

Fast forward to 2013. I was a stay-at-home mom with two little boys, and my father-in-law called to let me know that the current leader had left the organization and that he needed me to lead and take a look at the financials.

Lisa Ryan: Okay, and then, and so what happened, I know that there was that they had kind of lost sight of their vision by that time so tell us a little bit about the process of what you saw and how that transition started to take place.

Ashleigh Walters: The previous leader was a command and control style leader, so he had siloed the company. People weren't working well together. People were living in fear. The first thing I started asking curious questions: how are we doing this; what's going well; what's not going well. 

As I asked those questions, employees at first were fearful of answering me because they thought I would find something wrong in what they were doing. They thought I was going to throw them under the bus. Then they realized, as I helped them solve the problems they were facing, that I wasn't there to hurt them; I was there for them and helped get rid of the obstacles in their way. I call that a much more democratic approach to leadership.

It's really about putting people first. As a leader, I have to help them. The most important part of my job is helping them do their job to the best of their abilities.

Lisa Ryan: How about how many employees do you have it Onex.

Ashleigh Walters: We have 50 full-time employees.

Lisa Ryan: Okay, so going around and talking to each of the employees and having those conversations. How much time would you say that that took out of your week?

Ashleigh Walters: To change a culture takes time. It took us a good four years before I felt like we were in a spot where everybody was on the bus everybody was on the same page. We did many different events and used many lean principles to help us make that cultural shift, so we started with a value stream mapping event.

We mapped our entire production process, and then we went on to map our office processes as well. Since we did those different lean-type initiatives, it started the conversation and started the collaboration. Thos