By Edmund Tijerina
April 2008

Don’t expect to see a blueprint for leadership success in the profiles of these powerful Texas women.

For one, the path to success involved a decision to attend law school when this field was considered unusual for women. For another, the path to leadership began as a young Spanish-speaking native enrolled by mistake in regular English classes.

The profiles of these eight powerful and influential women in Texas show that there is no “right” or “best” way to achieve in business, but that certain attributes are needed to rise to the top. Among them: Hard work, discipline, focus, teamwork and the willingness to take risks.

Of course, these women also bring the talent to make all this effort worthwhile.

Whether in human resources, corporate diversity efforts, legal affairs, accounting or higher education, they all talk about the importance of bringing their own background and perspectives to their work.

And isn’t that what diversity is all about?

It Starts With Taking Risks

AMY CHRONIS, Central Texas Managing Partner, Deloitte & Touche

Sometimes, people travel abroad after college to experience a new culture. As a graduate fresh out of Ohio State, Amy Chronis experienced her own sense of culture shock by coming to Houston in the 1980s.

“I was a Yankee female who didn’t go to [Texas] A&M,” she says. “Early on, I had an appearance issue. I looked and sounded like a little girl.”

Now, with a couple of decades of experience, she has worked her way into a position as the managing partner for the Central Texas office of accounting firm Deloitte & Touche. For her, the path to executive success began when she arrived in Houston in the last few years of the oil boom and the beginning of the oil bust. “They call those ‘learning opportunities’,” she says.

Chronis comes from an entrepreneurial family that knew about taking risks. Her family in Ohio owned a horse farm, and then a supply business that became a janitorial business. So after taking the risk of coming to Houston with the firm then known as Arthur Andersen, she went to Austin in 1999 at the very beginning of the tech boom. It turned out to be a perfect move. Then she moved from Andersen to Deloitte. The office – and her profile – grew.

In her job, Chronis oversees the operations of the Austin and San Antonio offices of the multinational accounting firm. “I know the risks and perils of a small business,” she says. “I like having the infrastructure of high-quality people around me. I see it as having the best of both worlds.”

Chronis is also a mainstay on the Austin nonprofit circuit. She is a member of the board of directors for both the Texas Business Hall of Fame Foundation and the Austin Chamber of Commerce. She is also the chairwoman of the board of directors for the March of Dimes Central Texas Chapter.

And as a leader, she says that one of the most important traits to bring is the ability to listen. “I can talk forever; listening is more important to get to the root of the real problems at hand,” she says. “You can’t make good decisions unless you get good information.”

Perhaps more than anything else, Chronis says that success in business begins with a combination of talent and hard work. “In our world, it’s a meritocracy,” she adds. “It’s pretty obvious whether people are competent or not.”

And for those looking to move up, it starts with high performance. Mentors, coaching, and professional development also help. “It’s not good enough to be average, you have to be outstanding. But that’s not good enough to be a leader,” she says. “You can’t fake sincerity and passion about what you do.”

Prioritizing Work and Family

PATRICIA DIAZ DENNIS, Senior Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, AT&T

Patricia Diaz Dennis has had a lot of “firsts” in her life. She was one of the first Latinas to graduate from law school at Loyola University and the first Latina to join a major law firm in Los Angeles and serve as national board president of Girl Scouts of the USA.

Now she is the first to say that her path to success went much smoother because she had a supportive partner. “The smartest dumb thing I did was to marry young and marry the right one,” Dennis says. Indeed, her husband, Michael Dennis, was the one who encouraged her to go to law school in the first place, and he moved with her as her career took their family to different cities.

Before her current position, she worked as an assistant general attorney for the ABC television network, and was the first Hispanic to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. Then she went to the Federal Communications Commission, and later, the first President Bush appointed her to the post of assistant secretary of state of human rights and humanitarian affairs.

Those may have been challenging years, but they built Dennis’ confidence as she arrived to Washington in 1983. “I was really intimidated. I thought I was inadequate to become a peer with these decision makers who were elders in their field,” she recalls. “Sometimes, you just have to jump in. After 12 years in Washington, I knew that I could handle just about any job.”

Today, Dennis works as the senior vice president and assistant general counsel for AT&T. And throughout her career, she has had to prioritize work and family. “At some point, you have to realize that you have to let some things go. You have to realize that you’re never going to do everything perfectly all the time,” she says. “You literally cannot do it all.”

At the same time, employers can be more accommodating, Dennis says. Things are getting better, but there is still plenty of room to go. “The workplace simply has not found the model on how to accommodate parenting,” she says. “We bear the children; you have to take some time off to have them.”

Not only was it a matter of prioritizing and working with a very helpful partner; there was a certain amount of resistance to a young Hispanic female working her way up. “Sure, there were things that happened and things that were said as I was coming up. One thing I always caution people on is to not develop a chip on your shoulder,” she says. “It’s not productive to hold on to this.”

That mindset has been one of the keys to her success — focusing on the goals of doing well at home and with her family while not letting herself be distracted with other things. “I always tell people to have a sense of humor,” she says. “Take your job seriously but don’t take yourself seriously.”

Mentoring Plays a Crucial Role

HARVA DOCKERY, Partner, Fulbright & Jaworski

When Harva Dockery started out in law school, there weren’t many women in her class, and practicing female attorneys in those days were still somewhat unusual.

“For a long time,” she remembers, “I was not a lawyer, but a lady lawyer, and often the lady lawyer.”

That was then. Now, Dockery is a partner at the Dallas office of Fulbright & Jaworski, and has been for the past 20 years. To get to her position, it took “being determined, being willing to work hard, and being creative. And a little luck along the way,” she says.

“I suppose when I decided to go to law school, it was considered an unusual thing for a woman to go to law school and be a practicing attorney,” Dockery says. “At University of Texas Law School, about a quarter of the class was women. When I look at my incoming class at Fulbright & Jaworski, it was about a quarter. Now, it has risen to about 50 percent. Now it reflects the community.”

Indeed, she has been working to make the number of qualified attorneys at the firm more reflective of the larger community. She has served as a leader of the firm’s initiative to recruit and retain top-caliber women, and has helped lead Fulbright’s firm-wide diversity committee. That is, when she’s not practicing corporate and securities law.

Despite the demands on her as a partner, Dockery devotes much of her time to diversity efforts because she sees it as just being good for business. Research shows that diversity is more conducive to finding solutions that are better for the organization, she adds.

Along those lines is the push to mentor younger workers, whether it’s in a formal or an informal setting. “For those of us who have been out of law school for a long time, we have a crucial role to play,” she says. “I take that role very seriously and lots of women of a certain age take it very seriously.”

Dockery remembers that when she started out as a “lady lawyer,” there were sometimes meetings where people in other firms would ask her to get coffee. She says she would handle those situations with a sense of humor and not let it get to her.

Today, she sees a much smoother path for the people coming behind her. “Earlier, there were barriers. People thought women could not be good leaders or could not lead,” she says. “[However], if an intelligent young woman in high school wants to lead, wants to be a leader in business or any other field, she can do it.”

Confidence is Key

WINELL HERRON, Vice President-Public Affairs and Diversity, H-E-B

When Winell Herron addresses a crowd, her poise and sincerity make it all look effortless. The reality, she says, is that she’s pretty shy. But early in her career, she took a chance and it paid off.

“I often think that if I hadn’t taken the risk, I would not be in my current position as spokesperson for a major corporation,” Herron says. “Years ago, I’d rather do anything than speak in front of a large group of people. As they say, the rest is history.”

The event was a reception for MBA students at her alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. Her speech was a huge success, and she later learned that it inspired a talented student to go to work at Herron’s company, H-E-B.

The experience, Herron says, taught her two key lessons: “You really have to challenge yourself to do things you are not comfortable doing” and “you never know what impact your activities will have.”

The process of challenging herself led to other positions, including vice president of customer service, and ultimately led to her current position, group vice president of public affairs and diversity.

Herron is the youngest of eight children and grew up on a dairy farm outside Austin. By the time she was old enough to work on the farm, much of it was mechanized. But not all of it. She also learned from her father – who used to wake up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows – all about the importance of hard work.

“Being from a large family, I know the importance of being able to work as a team,” she says. “I am focused on building relationships and giving back to the community.”

That’s the essence of what she does now for the grocery company. She tries to help others advance in their own careers. Among the challenges: balancing work and family and achieving a good quality of life.

But Herron sees another issue that’s more likely to face women, and that’s having the confidence to advance in their careers. “Many women will question whether they’re ready rather than having the confidence to move up,” she says. “Sometimes we’ll talk ourselves out of a position or promotion.”

For people looking to advance in their careers, she advises them to start by focusing on what they’re doing now. “Many folks will come into an organization and focus on the next two or three positions,” she says.

Her advice continues with urging people to look for opportunities to make an impact in their current positions. In the next step, people should communicate goals and aspirations to their managers and then go about demonstrating their abilities.

“Finally, look for opportunities to stretch yourself. Look for projects that demonstrate leadership ability, creativity and strong technical skills.”

Even if that project involves public speaking.

Leaving the Comfort Zone

ELSA MURANO, President, Texas A&M University

Whether in work or life, Elsa Murano always advises others to push themselves outside their comfort zone. “You have to do it in order to grow,” she says.

As the first woman and first Hispanic to serve as president of Texas A&M University, her very presence is pushing one of the country’s most tradition-bound institutions beyond its comfort zone.

For her, it continues a history of pushing her own limits that began at a young age. In 1961, her family fled Havana in the early days of the Cuban Revolution. From there, her family went to the Caribbean island of Curaçao, and later Peru, El Salvador and Puerto Rico. The family arrived in Miami when she was 14. She didn’t speak English and was accidentally enrolled in regular classes instead of those for students learning a new language. But she learned English in just a few months.

Murano’s career as a food scientist took her to become the first woman on the faculty of Iowa State University’s microbiology, immunology and preventive medicine department, the first Hispanic to serve as undersecretary for food safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and later the only female dean at Texas A&M in its College of Agriculture.

Along the way, she remembers the encouragement and challenge that came from her mother, who used to tell her “why not you?” In other words, success wasn’t something only for other people; it was possible for these immigrants, too. The lesson stuck.

Now as the leader of a university, Murano says that one of the most important qualities of any leader is to be open to new ideas and even opposing ideas. “Leaders have to be open enough to consider other ideas and accept that maybe they’re wrong,” she says. “Otherwise you’re not a leader, you’re a dictator.”

And that goes beyond any stereotypical roles or images. “When you say the word ‘leader’, I don’t think of it as having any gender. The best leaders are those who lead by example,” she says. “You trace a path as a leader and you inspire people to want to work with you, shoulder to shoulder.”

Part of the role of leadership is mentoring others, and it’s something that Murano strongly supports. “Men are used to being mentors. [Women] are great friend mentors, but we’re not used to being professional mentors,” she says. “Women in executive positions need to realize that they have that responsibility to pass on.”

The learning works both ways, too. “Being a mentor, you learn a lot. A younger person always brings a new perspective,” she says. “It’s refreshing to have a young mind that believes it can change the world.”

Who knows – she may be mentoring her successor right now.

“If you work hard, get out of your comfort zone, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish,” Murano says. “You can even become president of Texas A&M University.”

Versatility Opens New Doors

KAREN TAYLOR, Senior Vice President-Human Resources and Chief Diversity Officer, Reliant Energy

A sports analogy: When football and baseball teams draft players, they often look for great athletes who can play a number of positions instead of focusing on just one type of person for specific positions. This type of thinking in a corporate setting prompted Karen Dyson Taylor to make the initial move from accounting to human resources.

Taylor is now the senior vice president of human resources and the chief diversity officer at Reliant Energy in Houston. She oversees all of the company’s human resource and administrative functions.

But she didn’t begin her career thinking that she’d be a top HR executive. She is an alumna of Louisiana Tech and a CPA. After college, she went to work in 1979 with the accounting firm then known as Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. Fast forward a few years and she was working for a manager who valued ”best athlete” types. “He looked for bright and capable people,” Taylor says.

“The first time I had any HR responsibility,” she remembers, “I wasn’t sure I wanted that.” But once she began to demonstrate a proficiency in these HR projects, she also got more of them. Ultimately, it led into a completely different path.

“I allow myself to think of my career openly. I’ve never defined myself as an accountant,” she says. “It was a very freeing thing to use the educational background as a tool, not as an end in itself.”

At Reliant, the 3,500 employees of the company work to provide electricity to approximately 1.6 million residential customers; 157,000 small businesses; and nearly 76,000 commercial, industrial, and institutional customers, according to Standard & Poor’s.

Yet, one of the important keys to becoming a good leader is to not let that responsibility go to one’s head, Taylor says. “Leadership is a privilege, not a birthright,” she adds. “I have an important job, but I try not to wear that title on my sleeve.”

For those who are coming up in the corporate pipeline, she advises them to know their own strengths and weaknesses, have a plan to address both, and be open to opportunities when they come up, especially if they’re unexpected. “A lot of it still comes back to the individual taking accountability for their own job,” Taylor says. In other words, she advises those looking to move up to get all types of mentoring and training – and make their own final decisions.

“One thing that’s important is to be true to yourself. Try different things. Seek advice. But ultimately, it has to be true for you,” she says. “No one’s career path is the same. Success for one person is the death knell for another. Being authentic is an important part of knowing that.”

Earning Credibility Through Self-Management

LINDA VALDEZ THOMPSON, Executive Vice President of Administration and Diversity, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport

From a native of West Texas comes a management philosophy that’s easy to articulate and remember: Before you can manage others, you must first manage yourself.

As Linda Valdez Thompson explains it: “Managing yourself is fundamental. Managing time, projects, emotions, relationships with other people. It’s very difficult to provide leadership to other people when you don’t know how to manage yourself,” she says. “Sometimes people climb the corporate ladder quickly and don’t know how to manage themselves, and it shows.”

Indeed, it is a lesson Thompson learned in a career that has taken her as an executive with companies such as Hasbro, Baxter Health Care Corporation, Turnkey Services and Levi-Strauss & Co. Now, she is the executive vice president of administration and diversity at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. She oversees the airport’s human resources, supplier diversity, internal communications, risk management and procurement management, and its diversity programs.

All of this started, the Wichita Falls (Texas) native explains, with a commitment to never settling for just good enough and the willingness to take some risks. “The most important quality is performance, consistently doing excellent work,” Thompson says. “It can’t be emphasized enough that if you perform on a consistent basis, it is recognized.”

She remembers a time early in her career when a vice president took a leave of absence and she asked if she could fill in. Back then, she was a manager. “All they could say was ‘no,’ ” she says. Her supervisors said yes, and she was able to impress plenty of people – including the vice president on leave.

If she learned early the importance of doing good work and taking risks, she learned later the importance of leavening those qualities with patience. “When I was younger and full of passion, if things didn’t happen the way I wanted in the fist couple of years, I was gone,” Thompson says. “It was a matter of maturity.”

But patient doesn’t mean passive. “Don’t wait to be invited, because you may not be,” she says. “Make it so that people want to invite you to the table. Every meeting is an opportunity. Every encounter is an opportunity.”

Now, Thompson talks about the importance of earning credibility to do the things she wanted to. For example, she spent her first year or so doing items that she had already done in her career, but it built credibility and relationships. “Now, I can say we need to do a mentoring program and voilà – we have one,” she says.

Thompson says this mentoring program now includes about 40 women and it’s an investment that’s paying off for the airport. She explains that more women than men are now flying through DFW – and having more women on staff helps the airport to better understand the needs of the increased numbers of female customers.

And those women are in a position where they can excel, too. “You do your job, you perform it well, you get on two or three highly visible projects and you get noticed,” Thompson says. “Everybody wants a contributor on their team,” she adds. “They don’t care about your gender or your race.”

Leaders Must Earn Respect

LORA VILLARREAL, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, Affiliated Computer Services

A child of East Los Angeles who effortlessly quotes John F. Kennedy, Warren Buffett and a Toltec-inspired best-seller as sources of tremendous wisdom – clearly, Lora Villarreal is not your typical corporate leader.

Since 1998, she has been running all the human relations activities for Affiliated Computer Services, a Dallas-based outsourcing and technology firm. She says that diversity isn’t just her job; it’s the job of everybody at the company.

“You ask what diversity is. Look around – it’s all around you,” Villarreal says. “Diversity is having respect for one another.”

Her path to leadership wasn’t easy, and it taught her lessons about the importance of personal strength. “You have to be strong,” she says. “You look at all the good leaders – they’re tough.”

Indeed, her early years took place in East Los Angeles with her grandparents, who raised her after her parents divorced. As a teenager, she and her sister went back to live with their mother and new stepfather. After high school and a brief first marriage, she began her life as a single mother of two daughters – without a college education.

From there, she went to work for Southern California Edison in human resources. A supervisor encouraged her to get her college degree, and she began her studies. A few years later, she met a career Air Force officer, Larry Villarreal. They married – and are still together.

As a military wife, Villarreal and her daughters moved as a family with his various assignments. Along the way, she worked in human resources and various other positions for the Omaha World Herald and as an assistant at the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And she was able to obtain her undergraduate degree from Bellevue College and a master’s in administration and management from Central Michigan University.

As chief people officer for Affiliated Computer Services, Villarreal is now responsible for making sure employees receive the right training, salary packages and career development opportunities. “We are supporting a group of 60,000 people,” she says. “They depend on us to make the right decisions.”

As she looks back, Villarreal notes that many of her mentors throughout her career were men – and they encouraged her because she showed talent and potential. From those examples, she learned the importance of developing talent. “A leader’s role is to help the people under them to be successful,” Villarreal says. “You have to find a way to encourage them, to guide them, to motivate them to take the next step.”

By the way, the Toltec-inspired words of wisdom come from Don Miguel Ruiz, whose 1997 bestseller, The Four Agreements, gives these principles: Be impeccable with your words; don’t take anything personally; don’t make assumptions; always do your best.

To that list, Villarreal would add the importance of respect, both giving and receiving. “A lot of leaders demand respect. That’s not ever going to work,” she says. “You have to earn it.”

Edmund Tijerina is a columnist with the San Antonio Express-News and part-time freelance writer. He resides in San Antonio , Texas .