Spotlight on Edyth Adedeji, 2021 WINiT Top 50 Women in Travel Recipient

Edyth Adedeji is Director of Sales, Los Angeles and Southwest Region at Delta Air Lines where she is responsible for developing and achieving Delta’s key strategic sales objectives across a mix of corporate and agency accounts headquartered primarily in California and Texas. Edyth joined Delta in 2010 as part of Delta’s Finance MBA rotational program in Atlanta and has worked on transformative and strategic projects across Cargo Finance, Joint Venture Finance, and Financial Analysis. She then joined the Sales Organization initially on the Strategic and Analytics team that transitioned Sales Support to a 24/7 operation before moving to New York Sales where she was responsible for maximizing revenue and share. Prior to joining Delta, Edyth spent five years at Accenture leading systems integration and technology projects across multibillion-dollar Oil & Energy and Telecommunication accounts. She holds an MBA from the University of Texas and a B.S in Information Systems from University of Texas in Arlington.

What do you love about being in business travel?

If my time in the travel industry has taught me anything, it’s that anything and everything that happens in the world directly impacts our industry. We see this every day and in every facet of our work. A tomato shortage could mean a decline in Cargo revenue, evolving movie productions could mean big changes for how we serve our loyal actors and film crews, and political discord between countries may impact our footprint to those regions – or as we’ve recently seen, our ability to operate there all together. As the world turns every day, our industry must turn with it, which poses exciting opportunities to adapt our business, keep things fresh, and get creative. Evolution also offers us the chance to grow as industry professionals and engage, teach, and support each other. I love organizations like WINiT that provide our industry with the platform to do so. We’ve become one big family that works better together. With all this in mind, it’s no surprise to me that people build their entire career in this amazing industry.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given in your career?

Build your personal board of directors. I took a leadership course that taught me this lesson, which is to have multiple leaders that I trust, people that I can turn to for honest feedback, and a “board of directors” I can look to for guidance on my career. Since then, I’ve worked to build mentoring relationships with two-to-three steps up my command and expanded my network to include leaders outside of my typical orbit – both internally and externally. It’s important to me that my personal “board of directors” also reflects the diverse backgrounds I aim to gain insights from – whether its gender, race, experience, industry etc. This helps me think critically and become more well-rounded as a leader.

What advice would you give to women just starting their careers in business travel?

It is very important to share your successes with your leadership. I hear women say all the time that they don’t like to “brag” about their work or their accomplishments. Unfortunately, that means that no one has any insight into what they are doing, and more importantly, how well they are doing it. When speaking about this with those that I personally mentor, I propose the idea of providing updates to their leaders as a way to share their wins. We must take our careers into our own hands and share all the great work we do. Gone are the days of working hard and hoping your leaders will notice.