CYNTHIA DANAHER divides the people she has worked with over the years into three types: "There are those who say, 'There's a rat in this room, and I'm going to kill it,' " she says. "A second group says, 'There's a rat in this room; let's figure out a plan to kill it.' And a third group asks, 'Did anyone notice there's a rat in the room?' "

She belongs to the first group. But as head of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Medical Products Group for the past three years, she hasn't always been able to take charge. "Here I've been with in-my-face problems, and I've had to sit back and ask, 'Has anyone noticed there's a rat in this room?' " she says.

Ms. Danaher faces a big challenge in management: how to take charge and get noticed when you're in charge of just a tiny outpost of the main corporation. Her unusually candid story, the subject of this column and next week's, has another wrinkle: She has had to deal with debilitating grief in her personal life.

With $1.4 billion in revenue and 5,300 employees, Medical Products is big by most standards. But it makes up just 3% of H-P's total revenues and is located in Andover, Mass., 3,000 miles from the Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters. It's sometimes been overlooked.

"It wasn't a deliberate oversight, but as just 3% of a company whose other, bigger parts were having trouble, we haven't gotten active attention," says Robin Purcell, the group's human-resources manager. Ms. Danaher "couldn't just wander down the hall" to talk to her bosses.

An H-P spokeswoman agrees that while it can be a blessing to run a small group like Medical Products, because "you can act more like a start-up" and avoid many meetings, it also can be a curse, because you "can't break through the cacophony of the rest of H-P."

Energetic and outspoken, Ms. Danaher is one of H-P's youngest general managers, at age 40, and among only a handful of H-P women at the senior-management level.

She spent her first year on the job restructuring her division and her top team. She kept just four of the 11 direct reports she inherited and reassigned each; she filled the remaining seven spots with employees from other parts of H-P.

AT THE SAME time, she phased out of the health-care information-management business, which provided computer systems to hospitals, after concluding it required steep investment yet duplicated some of H-P's core computer business.

She focused on clinical equipment, such as cardiovascular ultrasound imaging systems, where H-P is No. 1 in market share. She also closed an Oregon plant that manufactured cardiology equipment, transferring the business back to Andover and eliminating 150 jobs.

The cost cuts seemed necessary. Hospitals that had once automatically purchased the latest medical equipment were cutting back and seeking lower-cost products. Rivals like General Electric were getting bigger and more competitive, buying up niche players.

Not everyone was convinced. She was working out at the office gym after announcing the restructuring when an employee started screaming, "Who do you think you are to close the Oregon plant?"

She stopped going to the gym.

She also had to defend the business to her bosses. Her group's quarterly profit gains of about 11% looked anemic compared with the 20%-and-higher returns H-P's printers earned in some quarters. "It looked as though we were slowing the growth of the company, when in reality we were outperforming competitors and making money," says Ms. Danaher. "I felt we were in a pressure cooker without the deeper understanding that health care was a good business."

Then her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and Ms. Danaher began commuting to her parents' Connecticut home. When her mother died, in the spring of 1997, Ms. Danaher sank into a depression. Her younger sister had died of brain cancer a few years before, and this loss felt overwhelming. She stopped eating and sleeping.

SPIRALING DOWNWARD, she realized she had to confront her depression as directly as she faced business problems. She consulted a therapist and began taking an antidepressant. She took off five weeks during the summer to grieve and to hang out with her three children, ages 12, nine and six, and her husband, who runs a packaging company.

Ms. Danaher returned to work relaxed and tanned. She says she learned through her grief how to step back from work problems and accept not being able to fix everything, just as she hadn't been able to fix her mother's illness.

Working with her new perspective, she pushed her strategy of making and selling medical products for the growing nonhospital market. Last year, she acquired, for about $135 million, Heart Stream, a maker of automatic external defibrillators used by police, flight attendants and paramedics. But as growth slowed in H-P's computer business, she had to put off making other acquisitions. There were rumors that the Medical Products Group might be sold.

Last week the company announced that H-P plans to spin off its measurement-testing and medical-products businesses into a new company. Ms. Danaher feels liberated. She's betting that being a bigger fish in a smaller pond will give her a chance to shine as a leader.

"We've gone from being a voice in the wind to 20%" of the new company, she says. "Health care is an enormous market, and we're poised to grow."

• Next week: How Ms. Danaher changed management styles as she climbed the corporate ladder.