Relying on Relationships: Dalia Ruiz's Story

If you ask Dalia what made those accomplishments possible, the conversation quickly turns from equipment and processes to people. 

“It’s building relationships with your team that makes you and your project successful,” she says. 

Dalia has spent the last eight years developing relationships across project teams, vendors, trade partners, and fields. Now a commissioning leader on Gray’s Advanced Technology team. The relationships she’s fostered over the years have helped shape her career.  

Today, her relationships are influencing the kind of leader she wants to be. 

Finding Her Place at Gray

Before joining Gray, Dalia established her career as an engineer. Originally from Mexico, she began in aerospace manufacturing before moving into the mining industry, where her engineering background and fluency in Spanish created opportunities to work throughout Mexico and South America. She found that this kind of work suited her. Mining meant traveling to remote project sites, working around heavy equipment, solving technical problems, and helping bring new operations online. 

Eventually, Dalia would come to work with Gray through a partner on a project for Champion Petfoods, this partner would later become GrayAES. After briefly returning to the mining industry following the conclusion of the project, another call brought her back to Gray—this time with a new opportunity. 

When Dalia interviewed at Gray, she could tell this team was different. She felt an immediate connection to one of the interviewers who would soon become her manager; she knew this was where she was meant to be. 

Knowing What Fits—And What Doesn’t

As Dalia settled into her new role at Gray, one of her first opportunities would teach her an important lesson about trusting herself. 

Dalia was asked to help establish Gray’s first-ever procurement function. She had a deep understanding of the equipment and enjoyed working with vendors, so this felt like a natural fit. However, the contract-heavy role made Dalia realize she didn’t want to spend her career behind a desk reviewing legal language. 

Around that same time, Dalia was asked to go to a project site in Georgia and receive equipment she had purchased. Things clicked almost immediately for her. 

“I came back and said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do your procurement stuff. I belong in the field,” Dalia recalls. “That’s where I belong.” 

Recognizing what she didn’t want to do proved to be as valuable as knowing what she did. Dalia understood her strengths and was comfortable saying where she believed she could contribute most. Gray gave her the opportunity to pursue it. 

Building Trust One Project at a Time

Moving into the field put Dalia where she felt most at home, but it also reminded her how much good work depends on good relationships. 

On those early projects, Dalia worked alongside Gray team members who trusted her to do her job and stepped up when she needed support. Their support gave her confidence to take ownership of her responsibilities and address problems directly. 

“I felt like I had Superman behind me,” she says. “They empowered me a lot.” 

As her career progressed through process engineering, MEP, and eventually commissioning, Dalia’s network grew with it. She cultivated relationships not only with Gray team members, but with the subcontractors and trade partners responsible for helping execute the work. 

Dalia has always believed that trust is essential to a successful project. She approaches trade partners with clear expectations and willingness to listen. “There may be a Gray way of accomplishing something,” she explains, “but if someone can demonstrate a better solution that meets the customer’s needs and the project’s requirements, I want to hear it.” 

Dalia’s combination of accountability and respect has followed her from project to project. Years later, she regularly arrives on sites to find people she has worked with before; the familiarity allows teams to get to work quickly. 

Work Worth Taking Pride In

Commissioning brought together many of the things Dalia had enjoyed throughout her career: technical problem-solving, equipment, field work, and collaboration. 

It also gave her the opportunity to see an enormous range of projects come to life. Since joining Gray, Dalia has worked on facilities producing everything from coffee to solar panels, learning the process behind each operation along the way. One of her favorite projects involved commissioning systems for a coffee facility, where the smell of roasting coffee could travel across the site. On other projects, the processes and equipment have been completely different, but the variety keeps her engaged. 

“Every project that I’ve been a part of has been so rewarding to my professional career, to me,” Dalia says. 

The long days that can accompany commissioning don’t change that perspective. Dalia sees time in the field as an opportunity to understand the process more deeply: following drawings, studying equipment, asking questions, and learning how all the pieces of a facility work together. 

Dalia takes her work seriously because she knows other people are relying on her to do it well. 

From Building Relationships to Building a Team

After years of commissioning projects, Dalia is entering a new phase of her career: building a commissioning team of her own. 

She approaches this new responsibility with the same clarity she has brought to her own career decisions. She knows what the work requires, and she believes in setting those expectations early. Commissioning can mean long days and demanding periods on site, but it also offers young professionals an opportunity to gain an extraordinary amount of experience quickly. Dalia wants the people joining her team to understand both sides. 

Just as importantly, she wants to give them what others at Gray gave her—the opportunity to learn while knowing someone has their back. 

“I need to train them and pass everything I know so they can be the person Gray needs,” she says. 

For Dalia, identifying talent is more than finding someone with the right technical knowledge. She pays attention to their work ethic, curiosity, reliability, and how people interact with the teams around them. Technical skills can grow, and Dalia believes interpersonal skills and strong relationships are the foundations that make that growth possible. 

Strong Teams Build Strong Projects

Eight years into her career at Gray, Dalia can look around the company and see relationships that stretch back to her earliest projects. Team members who once worked beside her in the field have grown into new responsibilities of their own. Trade partners she met years ago continue to cross paths with her on new sites, and colleagues who invested in her career remain people she trusts today. 

Dalia has always been confident about the work she wants to pursue. When something isn’t the right fit, she is willing to say so. When she finds something that challenges and excites her, she commits herself fully to it. But Dalia’s career has also taught her that individual drive can only take her so far. 

Projects succeed when people communicate effectively. They succeed because teams trust one another enough to ask for help, challenge an idea, share knowledge, and follow through on commitments. 

Now, Dalia has the chance to pass that lesson forward. 

She is still solving technical problems and taking on the challenges that drew her to field work in the first place. But she’s also building something that extends beyond any one project—a team of people prepared to learn from one another and eventually build relationships of their own. 

For Dalia, that’s simply how good work gets done.