Leading with Grit and Grace

As president of Onex – a family-owned industrial furnace service firm in Erie, Pennsylvania – Ashleigh Walters transformed the company into an innovative, stakeholder-centric, employee-owned enterprise. She draws on that experience to offer leaders a few lessons in changing their corporate culture. Writing in a no-nonsense, accessible style, Walters argues that successful transformation demands embracing servant leadership and putting stakeholders first.

Transformative Change

As company president, Walters discovered that the members of teams in her workforce didn’t collaborate well and that the company lacked a culture of trust. She crafted a mission statement describing her vision for the future and used it to create standards to guide her decisions and strategy.