20: The Importance of Having a Healthy Company Culture - with Ashleigh Walters

Meet Ashleigh:Ashleigh and her family relocated to the rust belt town of Erie, Pennsylvania. In an attempt to revive her husband's family's 56-year-old business, she used the problem-solving skills she obtained while earning her BS in chemical engineering from Auburn. And was able to change the company culture by using a coach approach leadership style. She regularly shares her story with fellow leaders and encourages them to make things better by continuously improving processes.Kris: Why should leaders lead with grit and grace?Ashleigh: So I think it takes both. Kris, thank you for that question. So grit for me is that determination and resilience and persistence because it turns out things don't always go our way right. Or the way that we expect them to. And so we have to be able to make a decision and pivot when it's not going the way that we want, but also grace. And I think grace is one of the biggest components of leadership it's that empathy and compassion for others. And I think if COVID did one thing for us that was good, it was to make us more cognizant of how our peers are feeling, and the needs that they have. Whereas before, manufacturers were pretty inflexible. anyway. Yeah. So grit and grace, it takes them both. And some days it's grittier, and some days.Lori: Ashleigh, can you tell us about servant leadership and the freedom to fail?Ashleigh: Yeah. So servant leadership, to me, means, like, you go to the place where the work is being done to see the work because we all have different histories and perspectives. So sometimes when people are telling you about something, you're hearing it differently in your mind. then it's happening. So going to the place where the work is being done is the number one piece of service. But number two is like when you have that problem going on, or somebody has a problem going on, it's helping them find the resources that they need to overcome the obstacle, not doing it for them. So, as a leader, your number one job is to serve others. And I think historically, we've thought leadership about leadership in a very different way. there to serve us. No, it's the other way around. You are there to serve your followers and make sure that they are successful.Erin: How has your leadership style impacted not only the happiness of your staff but the on-the-ground ROI of being a servant leader?Ashleigh: Yeah, so we started a family-owned business. My father-in-law was not one of the founders but bought out one of the founders. And so it's always kind of been run with those family values, those people-centric values until it wasn't like we needed processes and systems in place and we certainly did. But what we did as a family was having a command-to-control leader come in because we felt like we needed that very strong leadership style and it was a deficit to the company. We went backward under that style. And what you find under that command and control leadership style is that people only do exactly what you ask them to do and nothing more. They're afraid of doing it. So when you're asking people to be innovative and creative back to Lori's question, you have to give them the freedom to fail. And what I mean by that is if you all have ever experimented, how many times is it successful ongoing one note, right? When you're trying to create and innovate, you need to do experiments and you have to have that freedom to fail and learn from those failures and then try, try again. And so that's where the freedom to fail comes in. So as I came into the business and my father-in-law had asked me to review the financials and everything and just typically lead, I figured out we needed to change our leadership style, number one because I didn't. Know everything that was going on in the business, and I needed other...