Profiles in Leadership: Champion of the Profession- Maria McIntyre
by John Kerr -- Supply Chain Management Review, 4/1/2005
Maria McIntyre is not one to settle for the status quo. That’s a good thing, given the extent and pace of change in the supply chain profession.
As the executive vice president of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), McIntyre has her hands full leading an organization whose 9,000-plus members are seeing significant upheaval in their industries, their companies, and in their profession.
Like many professional development organizations, CSCMP is feeling the aftershocks of competitive earthquakes in its members’ industries. China’s expanding manufacturing presence, a hotter climate for mergers and acquisitions, and tighter cost controls are among the factors conspiring to push professional development further down the priority list for supply chain managers. “It’s the first thing that goes off the budget and the last thing to come back,” observes McIntyre.
Setting the Strategic Direction
McIntyre and her team have been applying imagination and determination to revitalize the association to serve supply chain managers better. Several major initiatives stand out. McIntyre has pushed to extend the association’s reach to members with an array of new learning programs. She has opened up student memberships and led the association’s effort to create a set of supply chain process standards. (See the article “A New Way to Benchmark” on page 20 of this issue). And as members’ job titles and responsibilities have broadened, she has spearheaded a change in strategy and name. Until late last year, CSCMP was known as the Council of Logistics Management (CLM). Few people are better suited to leading the association. McIntyre regularly taps into a vast network of supply chain practitioners worldwide--the consequence of almost 40 years in the profession. She wins praise from executive committee members for her collaborative skills and consensus-building. “The real key is her ability to help facilitate the executive committee team in their meetings with her staff. She gets the committee and her staff to work as a team, and to look at things differently,” notes Elijah Ray, senior vice president of customer solutions at UTi Integrated Logistics. Ray was 2003-2004 president of the executive committee. In 1974 McIntyre joined CSCMP—back then know as the National Council of Physical Distribution Management—as an administrative assistant, becoming administrative director in 1984. By the mid-1990s, she was the association’s vice president of operations, a position she held until her appointment to the top job in May 2001. “As a woman, I’ve had to battle my way through. If I hadn’t had mentors who believed in me, I might not be in this role today,” she says, recalling the kindness and professionalism of the association’s former executive director George Gecowets. The oldest of six children, McIntyre was active in everything from junior high softball and volleyball to water ballet and the chorale group at her college. “I was never afraid to step up to the plate,” she recalls. “If someone wanted a volunteer for the baseball team, I was there. I got along well with all students.” Her open personality translates into an open-door policy at CSCMP’s head office in Oak Brook, Ill. But while she possesses the qualities of a natural leader, she’s not necessarily a proponent of the leaders- are-born argument. “If you have the will to lead, you can be trained to lead,” she says. To her, leadership is all about giving people the confidence that they can do what they set out to do--and then, as George Gecowets had done with her, letting them be responsible and accountable for what they do. A few months after assuming the executive director role, McIntyre began to map out a new strategic direction for the organization. She explains: “The idea was, if I could create a new association, what would it do, and if I could build the perfect staff, what would it look like? Where do I need to lead this parade to?” The result was a restructuring, with a heightened emphasis on marketing and a head-on approach to persistent questions about the association’s role.
McIntyre and her team realized that many supply chain professionals were hard-pressed to free up time-- and budget--to attend events such as CSCMP’s annual three-day conference. In response, the team developed one-and-a-half-day workshops geared to senior management held at different venues nationwide. Next came the idea of making conference materials available online for a small subscription fee. Again, the Web sessions, run at the user’s convenience, have been a hit.
McIntyre has also helped ensure the continuity of the profession by opening CSCMP to student members in January 2004. The annual fee is $25, for which students get almost all of the benefits of full membership. “They’re the leaders of tomorrow. They have all this passion and energy, but how do we tap into it?” she says. The association already has more than 1,000 student members.
What’s in a Name?
The topic of a move away from the CLM label had been discussed for several years; everything pointed to the inevitability of a name change one day. “We would see the changes in our members’ titles,” says McIntyre. While the idea of a name change met with little pushback from the executive committee, it was an easy project to postpone. About three years ago, McIntyre decided that if the change was inevitable, then CSCMP might as well start planning for it. A committee was formed to explore the challenge. Step one was to craft a definition of supply chain management. Although the term had been amply defined by others, McIntyre believed it was important for the association to be able to “put its own stake in the ground.”
With the definition in place, it was a relatively simple to launch workshops themed around supply chain topics. The workshops were a proving ground for the name-change initiative. They drew big crowds, giving McIntyre and her team the backing to begin planning the association’s 2003 conference with programs addressing broad supply chain issues. “We had to do that before we could actually say we were a supply chain organization,” she explains. In spring 2004, the executive committee voted to make the name change official.
But the initiative that most excites McIntyre is the development of a set of supply chain process improvement standards. The initiative gives supply chain managers an easy way to regularly benchmark many aspects of their companies’ performance—at no charge. “This is something our members have been asking for,” she says. “Long-term, it will be very valuable for them.” Partnering with APQC, the research organization for process and performance improvement, CSCMP has developed a standard system that makes it easy for supply chain managers to benchmark. After managers have shared their own companies’ performance data via an easy-to-use online database, they receive a comparative report with data that pinpoints opportunities for improvement.
McIntyre is constantly thinking of new ways to add value for members. Her latest idea is low cost but high impact: excerpting accessible “position papers” from the 300-400-page research handbook that CSCMP publishes each year. “We felt that members would get a lot out of documents they could put in their briefcases and read on the plane or on the commute,” she says.
A key element of McIntyre’s leadership profile is her mentoring work with young women business professionals. McIntyre is especially pleased with the outcome of one relationship. She’d been paired with a young woman who was struggling as a junior manager. McIntyre shared some of her early battles as a woman in a male-dominated industry, and over time, she was able to help the young woman see a longer-term future in the industry. The woman has gone on to carve out a successful career in the logistics and supply chain sector.
You’d think that McIntyre could rest on a laurel or two by now. CSCMP’s member retention rate, under 50 percent in late 2003, climbed to 63 percent a year later. Total membership, now around 9,000, is targeted to reach 9,500 by year’s end. But as a true champion of the profession, McIntyre won’t be resting any time soon. Her dream: to have supply chain managers believe that CSCMP is such a valuable resource that they’re willing to reach into their own pockets to pay for membership.
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