Elaine Gordon

Not many people can still claim to work for the same company they started with right out of school. But Elaine Gordon can make that claim, while pointing to a willingness to keep learning as one of the criteria for a successful career.

Elaine’s first job out of college was with Dell, starting with the company in its early days in 1986. Elaine spent the first 14 years of her career in finance, followed by 10 years in IT, where she is now. This multi-disciplinary background has been helpful to Elaine in defining a niche for herself within Dell.

During the 1990s, a time of explosive growth for Dell, Elaine was an evangelist for a consolidated data warehouse. At the time, data about Dell’s business was scattered throughout the company. Elaine advocated for a consolidated system that would provide better visibility on sales results, product margins, costs and other business metrics. This led to the establishment of a small team charged with creating standard reporting hierarchies on a single architecture for the company. Elaine led the deployment of this capability for the Finance team, partnering with the IT organization to build out Dell’s first data warehouse. The data warehouse transformed how Dell ran the business since it provided much more insight on sales results and business metrics.

Elaine then held several leadership roles in IT. She is currently working to support the integration of the former Services Business Unit with Dell’s application infrastructure. In the process, her team is helping transition Dell IT to a service delivery model, so IT services for Dell are delivered in the same way as they are for our customers.

One of the skills that has propelled Elaine’s success is learning the how to lead teams versus coaching them to do tasks. As her career progressed, Elaine learned she needed to let her team members do what they do well, and lead by defining success and creating the environment in which her teams can then achieve success.

Elaine has also learned that leaders need to be open to new ideas and to make adjustments. Listening is critical — listen long and hard to peers, shareholders and team members.

Family is a top priority for Elaine. She has three daughters, aged 8, 7 and 5 years, and says “I work for them.” She believes it is important to pursue balance in work and life by asking for help everywhere — and by asking early and ask often.

Although she leads large teams of people working on massive projects around the world, Elaine has found that calculated risks, an open approach and partnerships with others are some of the keys to success.