Grace under Pressure

An interview with Dixie Garr, vice president of Customer Success Engineering at Cisco Systems.
by Sally Richards

She is stunning in every way; her energy, her sincerity - she is like the speaker who launched a 1,000 ships. Dixie Garr's knowledge of the human experience has encouraged many women to take a different path in their careers - and her message is clear, if you don't like where you are, go somewhere else. Say bye-bye and move on. In your heart, you know she's right, but change is difficult and something that most of us do not embrace very tightly.

Garr, vice president of Customer Success Engineering at Cisco Systems, is a fabulous mentor for women of all ages. Garr has achieved success in her private and career lives, but it wasn't because she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Garr, the youngest of eight children, grew up in a family with few financial resources in the small town of Dubach, Louisiana, a town the size, as Garr compares it, to one-quarter of the population of Morgan Hill, California. She graduated in a high school class of 33.

"Of those 33, eight were finalists for the National Merit Scholarship, there was nothing else to do but study in Dubach," says Garr, one of the recipients of the award, of her hometown. "Although I never imagined what I might be, I always knew I wouldn't be this young black child from Dubach, Louisiana who never went anyplace. There was never any question or discussion i financial means. They had the faith and believed that each one of us would go to college. There was no doubt, at all. That kind of faith and confidence set the foundation for all of us. Growing up the youngest of eight children you learn a lot of survival skills. You jump right in there, and all of those skills gave me a great stead in moving on. With eight people who care about you and providing support for you feel you can accomplish anything. Half the battle is believing, and then it comes true."

Garr gives her family much of the kudos for her becoming a success in business and feels that other young girls also need to be given tremendous encouragement in order to succeed. "Had I not had that foundation? It would have been difficult to have come this far. It was my family's faith and their supportive environment that built my confidence. It was also being protected enough where I could practice my leadership skills. Even though the world might have given me different messages, I had those messages filtered for me. Young girls need that."

After high school, Garr graduated summa cum laude after only three years with a double major in mathematics and computer science from Grambling State University. She completed master’s course work as a Hughes Aircraft Fellow in computer engineering at UCLA.

"Grambling is a historically black college and one of the best decisions I ever made was to attend there," Garr says. "It gave me the forum to practice leadership skills that I may not have gotten at larger, majority school. By the time I finished, I had really developed a lot of the skills - competency and confidence that became my foundation. With that, I joined the working world. I do wish somebody would have told me earlier, but I sat in my office thinking one day somebody would notice how hard I was working and come and tap me on the shoulder. It wasn't until I participated in Leadership Texas that I saw what other women who were accomplishing their goals. I learned I was also perfectly capable of making it happen for myself. It was really that networking opportunity and seeing those role models for myself that changed how I viewed my career. We talk about children needing role models, but we as working professionals need to be working role models for each other. That whole team of women were a tremendous influence in my life."

Garr has some very straight-forward advice for women who want to be successful in their careers. Her advice may seem like common sense, but you need to work hard every day to consciously make an effort to apply it to your own situations. Garr knows the lessons she teaches intimately; in her more than 20 years of experience in high tech, in the commercial, industrial and defense segments within five companies, she finally did land her dream job.

"Number one," advises Garr, "do what makes you happy, what makes you get up in the morning and say, I get to go to work! rather than oh, shoot, I've got to go to work. Whatever it is that stimulates you and makes you look forward to doing - do it. Find a job that gets you excited. Next, find the things that are really outstanding in your life, things you really enjoy on a personal level. Don't do the things people say you should do for prestige, prestige gets old pretty quickly when you have to get up every morning for it. Don't do it for money. I did, and I lucked out, but there are a lot of people who don't. And don't stay in a job because you feel you can't make a change. Go to an environment that will appreciate you. There will always be those who will recognize your talent, and please don't hesitate to leave if you happened to pick an environment that doesn't appreciate you. I'd never heard anyone who made a change say, I wish I would have stayed another 10 years."

Garr feels that there are valuable lessons all around us, you just need to be willing to learn. "I've been fortunate to have some people who were really good friends who gave me really insightful pieces of advice that were valuable. I've never had a formal mentoring relationship, I believe a more effective way is to go out and solicit help with each situation rather than to approach somebody or expect somebody to take care of you. My philosophy is that you learn lessons from everybody. Speaking at WITI, for instance, I learn so much. There are lots of mentors in our lives, they're the women who come up and talk with me after I speak, they're the women who call me up and let me know what's happening in Cisco's organization, they're the people who ask me for advice. They're all my mentors. But, I don't look to anyone to manage my career, that's my job."

Being happy in her job doesn't even begin to describe the career Garr has made for herself. "I've seen so many cultures and so many approaches, many of them successful, but Cisco is the best. Cisco is incredibly focused on customer service and results oriented - and it's a fun place to be. Any executive who has been here more than a year is financially secure, but we're still here. We're literally changing the world and how the world operates. We get up in the morning and we're not thinking about the tasks on our to-do lists, we're thinking about the incredible impact we're having. How many people get to make history and be a leader in so many areas? Not many. We led in e-commerce, in the Web, integrating voice, data and video and we're about to lead in e-learning - there are not that many companies who have such a place in history. I am Cisco's biggest fan. I am absolutely happy and if I wasn't I would say goodbye. I may be pleased with my career, but I always look forward to new challenges. In my public speaking, I talk about how, when I was a manager, I was acting like a director, and when I was a director, I was acting like a VP - now I'm acting like somebody's CEO. I want to be closer to business with profit and loss responsibility, so I'm looking forward to the next challenge."

Garr has met many challenges in her career and has been acknowledged as a leader in her industry. She was a 1997 recipient of the Black Engineer of the Year award for professional achievement and is a frequent speaker on technology trends, continuous improvement journeys and the business value of inclusive environments. She is an alumnus of Leadership America and Leadership Texas, and serves on the board of directors and was founding chair of a corporate Minority Leadership Initiative. Garr also had the privilege of addressing the Congressional Black Caucus in 1995. She was selected for Leadership Texas in 1991 and is an alumnus of the Leadership America class of 1993.

Garr suggests that making mistakes is all part of life's journey, and that we apply those lessons to our ongoing learning process. "I wish that I'd had failures in my life early on, because I learned so much from them when they happened. I didn't have one until I was in my professional career. I think it's important for people to realize that mistakes are part of life. The most valuable experiences for me have been those times when things weren't so successful and I had to take a step back and reevaluate. Sometimes I believe women think of mistakes as if they wished they hadn't done them, or that they're not perfect and will have to quit, or that they're failures. Until you've done some of those things you really can't internalize all the lessons you need to. I think if there was one thing I could have changed in my life early on, it would have been making mistakes earlier. The first time it happened, I was absolutely devastated and thought I would crawl into a hole and never come out. For me I used to believe I represented all women and all black folks, so it was even scarier to fail, now it absolutely doesn't even phase me; you learn and move on."