Taking Charge: Cynthia Niekamp, PPG Industries' highest-ranking female executive
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Cynthia Niekamp, senior vice president for automotive coatings at PPG Industries.
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Cynthia Niekamp grew up with four brothers, studied industrial engineering at Purdue University in classrooms filled mainly with male students, and cut her teeth in business working during summer breaks on the production floor of a General Motors Corp. subsidiary in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio.
So it doesn't strike Ms. Niekamp as startling that she ended up in a series of senior executive positions at male-dominated manufacturing firms including GM, TRW Inc., MeadWestvaco and Borg Warner Corp. Two years ago, she joined Downtown-based PPG Industries Inc. in automotive coatings and last summer was named senior vice president of that division, based in Troy, Mich.
Ms. Niekamp, 51, became the highest-ranking female at the coatings, glass and chemicals giant, following the departure in September of Victoria Holt, former senior vice president, glass and fiber glass. Ms. Niekamp oversees about 4,000 employees at 18 plants around the world.
"Honestly, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about being a woman in a male industry. It just is my life; it's been my life."
Not that she hasn't bumped into resistance as one of the few females in industrial environments.
At her first full-time job as a production supervisor at GM's Delco Moraine Division in Fredericksburg, Va., she had to discipline a male employee who then threatened to retaliate outside of the plant.
- Job: Senior vice president, automotive coatings, and member of operating committee, PPG Industries.
- Age: 51
- Hometown: Dayton, Ohio; resides in Birmingham, Mich.
- Education: Bachelor's, industrial engineering, Purdue University, 1981; master's in business administration, Harvard Business School, 1983.
- Career: (1983-90) Various management positions at General Motors Corp.'s Delco Moraine Division in Dayton, Ohio, and Fredericksburg, Va., and at General Motors France in Paris. (1990-95) Management at TRW Inc. in Cleveland, Irwindale, Calif., and San Diego. (1995-2004) Positions at MeadWestvaco/Mead Corp. included vice president, corporate strategy & planning, Mead Corp., Dayton; president and general manager, Mead Specialty Paper Division, South Lee, Mass.; and senior vice president and chief financial officer, Stamford, Conn. (2004-08): President & general manager, TorqTransfer Systems Division, Borg Warner Corp., Auburn Hills, Mich. (2009-present): Vice president and senior vice president, automotive coatings, PPG Industries.
The company provided security to ensure Ms. Niekamp, then in her early 20s, got back and forth to work safely.
"To be honest, it was not just the blue collar workers. Some supervisors were just as bad about me being female. I grew up very quickly in my early 20s. My skin grew thick significantly."
Though as a young girl she toyed with becoming a doctor, once she began engineering studies and landed the summer internships at GM's Delco plant in Dayton, Ms. Niekamp became intrigued with manufacturing and pushed for the summer jobs that got her out on the factory floor.
Even in that heavily union shop, Ms. Niekamp wasn't intimidated. In fact, she believes the union-management struggles she observed helped forge her leadership style.
"I love bringing people together in a team. I like to be very open with information about the business situation and possibilities and have the lights go on for them ... I always sought challenging environments, and I get a lot of pleasure when people say they want to take that hill and we take that hill together."
She employed that team-building strategy almost immediately upon arriving at PPG in 2009.
"It was a crisis environment," she acknowledged.
At the time, just months after the financial markets collapsed and the economy was sinking, PPG was in the midst of an aggressive restructuring that included shuttering plants and paring the workforce. Automotive coatings -- part of PPG's industrial coatings segment -- was hit hard because of the dramatic decline in car and truck sales, and the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler.
"I brought people together very quickly to make some very tough decisions," she said. "I don't like when things are under the table. I really like people to put everything out there. So I think if anything, that's what I did: I forced people to come around the table and put it all out there -- good, bad and ugly."
Though she admitted that as an outsider to PPG she lacked a background in automotive coatings, "I had enough familiarity with the [auto] industry to understand the cost structure issues."
The group she convened to determine where the cuts had to made included coatings managers from Asia, Europe, North America and individuals who managed the technical, financial, human resources and other aspects of the global business.
"It wasn't just Cindy saying do this, this and this," she said. "Because we had alignment as a team, it happened more naturally."
By the end of the restructuring process, automotive coatings had laid off more than 1,000 people and closed plants in North America and Europe.
Two years later, with an economic recovery under way, the business she oversees has turned around and is even hiring. It's thriving in China and she expects strong future growth there as well as in India and Russia.
In first-quarter results released last week, PPG said industrial coatings sales jumped by 15 percent over last year's first quarter, to $1.03 billion. The company does not break out specific sales figures for automotive coatings within the industrial segment.
"We got our cost structure in place," said Ms. Niekamp. "We're very efficient. Now we can focus on strategic initiatives and technology. The crisis is very much behind us."
With expansion going on, particularly in its Asian facilities, Ms. Niekamp is away from her suburban Detroit home much of the time. The first week in April, in fact, was the first time in 2011, she said, "I was able to sleep in my own bed seven nights straight." She finds the travel stimulating.
"I like being in the different environments. I like visiting the customers and walking the plants with the people, spending time understanding the financials, talking to the engineers, visiting the suppliers and talking to the community. I like the diversity of those interactions.
"What it takes to motivate someone in China, Italy, Brazil, or the United States can be very different."
The travel bug bit her when she was studying for her MBA at Harvard. Though GM provided full tuition, she and several friends ran a travel agency on campus to help pay for living expenses. With the steep discounts they earned on airfare, she and one girlfriend took a three-month trip around the world in 1983, focusing on countries like Thailand "that we thought we'd never get to again."
Nearly three decades later, Ms. Niekamp now flies regularly to PPG facilities in Europe, Asia and South America. She makes time for at least one "fun" vacation every year with her daughters, ages 19 and 17, and uses downtime to walk and read, although, she admits, "I do have trouble relaxing."
With few other women in prominent roles at the companies where she's worked, Ms. Niekamp turned to men for mentoring from her earliest days at GM's Delco.
"I would pick somebody I admired. ... There were many along the way. In the early days, I was progressing pretty rapidly and sometimes went beyond my mentors in the hierarchy. But I keep in touch with a lot of these people today.
"I think it's critical for women to find people who can be supportive and brutally honest with you. Sometimes men are afraid of telling women the truth. But it's important to get direct and honest feedback for your own development."
First Published April 27, 2011 12:00 am
