That decision played a pivotal role in her career. “I took a chance by moving to this new company. I had been with the other company for five years. I had a lot of ties there and I earned a lot there. Getting to the decision to leave was difficult, but once I decided to go it was easy. I also learned that you don’t leave people behind as you move forward.”
The company she moved to was Dunn & Hargitt, and Dillman quickly realized there are things you can learn in a small company. “It’s difficult at a larger company sometimes because you can often feel out of touch. At a small company you touch everything in that environment.” From there she got a job at a wholesale club in Indianapolis, her first retail gig, and that company was eventually bought by Wal-Mart.
“I could have been a victim and still be in that office today,” she quips.
But it’s not that Dillman is a superwoman who never questions herself. “All through my career I underestimated what I could do, until the last few years. You build a perception of your potential based on what you see, the people who break out of a mold. I grew up in a blue-collar town in the 1960s where the most successful women I saw were beauticians and administrative assistants.”
That underestimation of herself sometimes popped up in her career. She recalled one of her first big assignments as an IT manager at Wal-Mart in 1994, at age 38, when she spearheaded an effort to implement a new inventory tracking system. “We dramatically changed how we managed inventory in our stores and we had to change people’s minds at very high levels. There was one gentleman in particular who said he’d leave the company before he allowed us to implement one major piece of it. His team had to play a key role in its implementation, and it was a battle through the entire process.”
Dillman did not enjoy confrontations with men. “The first few times it was very uncomfortable. I wasn’t very sure I should be doing this, that it’s appropriate. I thought, ‘am I killing my career?’” But she soon got over that and decided if you concentrate on having all your proverbial ducks in a row and doing things for the right reasons, “not just trying to make yourself look good or score political points, you’ll have the ability to go head-to-head with anybody.”
