Coaching The Boss

Computerworld - In his 30 years at Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G), CIO Steve David says he has learned a thing or two about mentoring. He's been involved in 30 to 40 mentoring relationships, often juggling four or five at a time. But recently, David had the tables turned on him. He participated in a reverse-mentoring program with Lois Lehman-McKeeman, who holds a Ph.D. in toxicology, and for the first time in a long time, he was the person being mentored. Cincinnati-based P&G's reverse-mentoring programs match up employees with executives to give senior management a new perspective in one of the following areas: diversity, biotechnology or IT.

Through the biotechnology reverse-mentoring program, 12 of the company's life scientists spent the past year teaching top managers about the implications of biotechnology on the business. Computerworld's Melissa Solomon recently spoke with David and Lehman-McKeeman about their experience.

How did you get involved in the mentoring program?

David: Well, I think P&G has had some type of mentoring program for as long back as I can remember. I had a mentor when I started with the company. The reverse-mentoring program was an outgrowth of the mentoring program, and I think we've used it for the last five to 10 years in different areas where we really thought that we needed to either change the culture or have more sensitivity to certain types of issues.

What was your goal with the biotechnology reverse-mentoring program?

David: We realized that the biotech issue was going to be something that was going to be very important for Procter & Gamble and our customers and our suppliers. Our senior leadership was not very well equipped to deal with this particular technology, and we needed to do something. So it was really trying to start from scratch to say, "How can we get people educated?" and "How can we tap into the resources that we have at P&G to move much more quickly in this area?"

How did you structure your relationship?

Lehman-McKeeman: We tried scheduling meetings; sometimes that didn't work. But we tried to meet about once every one to two months. . . . Frequently, we met over lunch, in part because that was convenient, but Steve also came to the lab, and so we actually did some things in the lab.

I mapped out what I thought would be literally like a course of instruction . . . although the more I worked with Steve and I saw what things interested him or how he reacted and learned different things, I just tried to cater my discussions to things that I knew would pique his interest. We started from the very fundamental concepts of the building blocks of "What is a gene?" and "What is DNA?" and moved up to some fairly high-tech technology and application of technology.

David: Lois is one of the brightest people that I've ever met. So the challenges were really scope challenges initially. My starting point and her starting point were not at total different ends of the spectrum, but mine was more from a business standpoint—what impact will biotech have on our business?—and Lois' was more buried in the science. So that was probably the first interesting challenge: to find the level where we could both operate together.