Formation of a leader

Physician Executive, March-April, 2007 by Tony Bartelme

Jet fighters flying in formation. Hold that image for a moment, because it helps explain the unlikely trajectory of Leslie M. Yee, MD, MPH.

Notice the precision of the pilots, the power and clarity in the jet trails they draw against the sky. They explain how Yee would overcome poverty and family crisis to become a doctor and eventually corporate medical director for Procter & Gamble, the world's largest consumer goods company.

Now picture Yee in his office tucked inside a cluster of cubicles overlooking downtown Cincinnati. Yee is an affable man of 51 with a Midwestern radio-announcer's voice. His thinning hair is a tad disheveled, and his desk?

It's not exactly flying in formation at the moment. Papers and books stand high in crooked stacks. A little disarray can be excused, though, considering his full plate.

In recent months, he's flown to Morocco, India, Spain, China, Japan, and other countries, working largely on the company's merger with Gillette.

"When I was in the Air Force, I spent most of my time as a flight surgeon for operational fighter units," Yee says, motioning toward a photograph of fighter jets above his busy desk, "and I learned a lot from them."

One lesson was especially useful: In fast-changing conditions, you depend on a few simple priorities, your training, and each other.

"When you're flying lead and someone is flying on your wing, you don't look over at them much. You trust them to take care of their part of the sky. This is the way I like to operate."

Yee's part of the sky is unusually expansive. As corporate medical director for a $68 billion company, he helps steer medical and occupational health programs at factories, research centers and offices in more than 80 countries. He makes sure the company responds quickly to a wide range of scenarios--from injured employees to epidemics.

His medical networks also must protect the company's 130,000 employees, the reputations of the company's 300 brands, and the five billion consumers who use Procter & Gamble products. It's a challenge to align all these clinical and financial responsibilities.

But Yee has found--in his work and life--that when those jet trails line up, big things happen.

Growing up poor

By all rights, Yee shouldn't be here in Procter & Gamble's glass-and-steel headquarters. After all, he grew up in Bond Hill, a neighborhood a few miles away but a world apart.

During the late 1960s, Bond Hill was in an economic and social free-fall, hit hard by redlining, blockbusting and other race-based real estate tactics. Yee was very much caught up in this plunge, a middling student distracted by muggings, bomb threats and fights between white and black gangs.

Because he was one of the few Asian Americans in the neighborhood, Yee sometimes attracted the attention of bullies. To survive, he learned about weapons and fighting tactics that would later impress his buddies in the military. Adding to the chaos, when Yee was 11, his father ended up in the emergency room for hernia strangulation.

Doctors quickly discovered something worse: hemophilia. During the next few years, his father's health and spirits deteriorated, and Yee and his mother sometimes took turns staying up through the night to ease his father's suicidal thoughts.

Yee and his mother called the ambulance more and more, and the family's medical bills piled up. Yee was an only child and felt a strong gravitational pull to take care of his family. Though his mother talked about college, Yee figured he would get a job after graduation to help pay the bills.

Then, shortly after Yee's 16th birthday, his father died of a cerebral hemorrhage, a blessing in retrospect, Yee says, considering his father's despair.

Yee eventually won a scholarship to a small Cincinnati college that later merged with Xavier University. He thrived away from the gangs and family turmoil, and by his senior year, was ready for the next challenge.

He entered the University of Cincinnati's medical school and signed up with the Air Force to pay for his tuition.

"The fact that I was able to reach medical school has given me the firm belief that nothing is impossible," Yee would write later in a memo to his colleagues at Procter & Gamble about his core beliefs.

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"Each of you can achieve anything, but you can't achieve everything--you must make choices."

Career takes flight

As a flight surgeon in the Air Force, Yee spent much of his time with F-15 squadrons in Asia and Europe. These bases had aerospace rescue units, and on one mission, Yee found himself in a helicopter during a violent thunderstorm over the Pacific.

Lightning struck the chopper over and over, triggering a cascade of malfunctions. The pilots prepared to ditch while members of the crew readied the life raft. At the last second, the lights from the base runway appeared and the pilots landed the helicopter without incident.

For Yee, the moment reaffirmed his growing belief in the importance of teamwork. "In air combat operations, mutual interdependency--we called it mutual support--is not just a desirable behavior, it's a life-or-death requirement."