Maggie Wilderotter on ROI--return on impact: interview with a corporate leader who sees her role as bringing out the best in people.

• Author: Kristie, James
• Position: DUTIES OF DIRECTORS - Interview

It is no surprise that Maggie Wilderotter, one of corporate America's most prominent and successful woman executives and hoard members, was spotlighted at the WomenCorporateDirectors (WCD) 2015 Global Institute. She engaged in a Q&A interview with WCD Chairman and CEO Susan Stautberg before a crowd of 300 accomplished women executives at the event, and has been named by WCD as the winner of the Visionary Award for Strategic Leadership for 2016. Last year was a big year for Wilderotter. She transitioned into the executive chairman role at Frontier Communications, having served as Frontier's chairman and CEO since 2006. She also rejiggered some of her board seats, stepping down from the boards of Procter & Gamble Co. and Xerox Corp. and joining the boards of Costco Wholesale Corp. and DreamWorks Animation. (She has served on over 30 public and private company boards during her almost 40-year career.) Following are edited excerpts of her WCD interview.

--James Kristie

Susan Stautberg: One of the things I've admired the most about you is that while you've had one hand on the ladder going up, as you've become more and more successful, you've had the other hand pulling other women along and helping them. You've become such a role model as CEO and chairman of Frontier by creating mentoring programs, creating a great succession plan, getting more women and people of color into top jobs and onto boards. How do you do it?

Maggie Wilderotter: It's important as women go up the corporate ladder, and get into positions of responsibility where we can make a difference, that we give other women a chance. When I joined Frontier--I came in as president and CEO and a member of the board of directors--I was the only woman in senior leadership and on the board. Within 18 months, the board had five women, and we changed the whole paradigm and leadership in the company. When I stepped down as CEO in April, four of the top seven people in executive management were women.

We have to give competent and capable women a chance and take risks on them and put them in positions where they can continue to move, morph, and grow. And I do that from a board perspective, too. I probably refer or place 20 to 30 women for corporate board seats a year. As the CEO of a Fortune 500 company I would get a lot of calls about board openings. Since I am full up, I always offered the names of other women in order to help them move forward onto boards. It is all about reaching out to build relationships and help each other move forward.

Stautberg: Tell us about the mentoring program you have at Frontier. You ask each director to spend two years mentoring one of your C-level execs?

Wilderotter: That's right. About nine years ago I put in place a mentoring program for the top 10 executives in our company. A board member gets matched with a senior executive for a two-year period. The criteria is that the board member spend time with that executive at least two or three times a year outside of board meetings--typically it's a lunch or a dinner--and they can talk about anything they want to. I am not in any of those get-togethers. Then every two years we rotate. I have some board members now mentoring...