Taking an Engineer's Approach at Lockheed Martin

Linda Gooden is head of Lockheed Martin Information Technology, one of the company's fastest-growing units. She emphasizes personnel development. (By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)

"EEO is a compliance-based model," Stevens said. "We understand it. We respect it. And we comply with it. Diversity for us isn't the compliance-based model. It's an opportunity-based model."

Lockheed has nearly 124,000 employees in the United States; 21 percent are minorities and 25 percent are women. In its senior executive ranks, meaning the 52 positions that require board approval, there are four minorities and eight women. Its 15-member board of directors, which recently created an ethics and corporate responsibility committee to focus, in part, on diversity, includes two women, one of whom is African American, and one black man.

It's not that Lockheed never has problems with workplace issues; it has been sued in the past by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A Lockheed spokesman said the company has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to discrimination and harassment. There are multiple channels to lodge complaints, through each unit's equal opportunity officer or human resources representative or directly to one's manager or the ethics hotline. Every complaint is investigated and acted upon if evidence is found to support it, according to the policy.

Linda Gooden, president of Seabrook-based Lockheed Martin Information Technology, one of the corporation's fastest-growing units with more than 16,000 employees around the world, manages her company with a strong emphasis on personnel development.

"I'm a lot more focused these days on age than ethnicity" to improve staff diversity, Gooden said. She believes racial issues in the workplace may be less divisive in coming years because new graduates expect diversity. "Generation X is very different," Gooden said, explaining that she watches her stepdaughter's friends, who are diverse and comfortable with their differences.

Gooden likes to find promising young managers to assign to "stretch" assignments, meaning jobs more demanding and complex than they have handled previously. One veteran Lockheed employee said reaching down to less-experienced but talented employees was not the norm at the company until recently. It used to be that promotions were based more on length of service, as in the military. Employees expected to move up slowly, as their age and experience mounted.

Stevens and Gooden knew that model of entitlement for long-timers had to change. "You have a hugely interesting mix of demands that we believe a highly diverse, professionally talented workforce is best able to meet," Stevens said.

Two recent contracts were shaped by the team working on them, Gooden said. For a Social Security contract to develop an automated electronic disability payment system, Gooden tapped 200 recent college graduates to write the software application. She wanted it to be Web-based and figured she would leverage their experience growing up with the Web.

Meanwhile, a female program manager led another contract to track deadbeat dads for the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. The manager "understood from a gender perspective the importance of the program," Gooden said. "Not that men couldn't have done it, but there was much more passion. . . . Diversity helped us understand what mothers faced. Diversity helped us understand the bigger picture."

Gooden's company recently won the high-profile Sentinel contract from the FBI to link technology systems among the bureau's offices, allowing its agents to search and share information among one another and with other intelligence agencies. A previous effort led by another contractor was scrapped after hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted building a system that did not work and investigators alleged fraud and mismanagement.

The Sentinel program team is also led by a woman, Sandy Gillespie. "She's very good with customers," Gooden said. "She came in to do one job and won five others."

When Stevens is asked if he thinks it unusual for two women to be leading the company's high-stakes effort at the FBI, he brushes the question aside. The real genius, he said, was Gooden's ability to see that her company's work modernizing the technology systems at the Social Security Administration had lessons for how to handle the FBI.