The following is a book excerpt from From the Sandbox to the Corner Office by author Eve Tahmincioglu. Her specialties include workplace issues, the small business and entrepreneurial world, and leadership, including interviews with some of the biggest names in Corporate America.
Linda Dillman, Chief Information Officer of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Linda Dillman has always believed in picking her battles, especially when it came to injustices she faced as a woman ascending the ranks of corporate America. During her early career, prior to Wal-Mart, she worked for a company where she was surrounded by many older men who looked at her as a granddaughter rather than a peer. “You’d be going to a meeting to work on something as a team and I’d always get relegated to the job of secretary or scribe,” she says.
It’s not that she wasn’t bothered by sexist behavior, but she felt it was fruitless to protest everything she encountered. “To me, being the secretary didn’t mean I didn’t contribute or add value during the meeting,” she explains, attributing her ability to focus on the job at hand and not the put-down to something she learned in college. When she studied business administration at a small Methodist college now called the University of Indianapolis, the campus minister, Reggie Monson, introduced her to transactional analysis. “He taught me you have control over your emotions. You have control over what you do and how you feel. You can choose to be mad, but if you go into a situation like that you hurt no one but yourself,” she says.
That approach helped propel her in her career because, she believes, when it came to a point where she wasn’t happy or not doing what she wanted she could move on. In one situation where gender could have played a role, she made such a choice. She was working for a company in an administrative role and wanted to move into information technology (IT). “My local manager and district manager wanted me to move into the role but it was blocked by someone at a higher level,” she explains. She never figured out for sure whether it was being a woman that kept her from the move, although she suspected her gender played a role. Her focus was not on the why, however, but rather “What do I do now to gain that experience?” It was the early 1980s, and Dillman decided to work for a smaller company that would let her manage their information systems.
