Organized Roots: How Early Family Life Shaped My Path to Operational Leadership

By Kathryn Lomonaco, Business Director at ComTec Systems

I’ve spent my entire life being an operational minded person. In a family of 6 with parents who both worked full time, I saw schedule coordination and daily management at its finest. And that’s my earliest memory of coordinating and organizing. Along with that was constant questioning of why we were going here first instead of there - my dad was constantly explaining the efficiency of driving around town, I’m sure ad nauseam to him. The word bossy, I’m sure was one commonly used by my siblings to describe me growing up.  Little did I know that these instinctive habits I picked up in a fast paced family would set me up with the bones for my career.

When I talk to people about how I got to where I am today, one of the top things would be those habits I built at a young age. Don’t ever underestimate the power of playing  to your strong suits when it comes to career pathing.

When I graduated college with a Political Science and History background all that made sense to me was to go to law school, but law school costs money and I had a good deal of debt to take care of so I settled on making some money and then plan for school when I had that better under control. I was working part time at a department store, when I ran into a friend who just got a job with an employment agency. I sent my resume to her as soon as I got home. I was given a basic office suite quiz and was told I qualified for a temp to hire position at a finance company. I put in my notice at the department store, picked up some additional business casual outfits and was ready for my first day.

When I got to the company I would call home for the next 6 years, I was answering the phone and sorting through insurance reports. I worked closely with another administrator who had similar habits as I did. With the stacks of paperwork on desks and the amount of missing documentation when a deal came in it was hard to get through all of that on a daily basis and for a growing company it was not something that made sense to me. So we worked on check lists to make it easier to identify what was missing and flagging signature and initial spots to avoid having to get documentation back out to customers and hold up deals. Very basic things in our eyes, but the company had been in business for years and thrived off repeat business and references so it wasn’t the top priority. My boss was someone who knew how to move the needle and he knew there was a huge amount of potential with those referrals and if we got the other pieces in place we could scale much faster. We needed to work on operationalizing how we processed orders and paperwork to flow easier and have less follow ups required to get one deal done. He was right. He constantly challenged myself and my counterparts over the years to push further.

When we would get steady, he would find a new venture that fit in with something that our clients needed. Every time we did that it opened a new set of tasks to learn and optimize. I didn’t have a business degree, I had a leader who constantly challenged me because he believed in me and for that I am fortunate, but a big part of why I was able to rise up to the occasion was because of those instincts I had. I wasn’t given a manual for anything, but I asked questions, when I figured something out I made it a habit, I documented it and I organized it for others to replicate. I had so little experience in an office at the time I didn’t realize what I was doing was managing operations and building processes. After years of this success my boss promoted me to VP of Operations.

That experience was one of the most formative for me. It was what helped me realize that playing into my strong suits and working hard were what would help me succeed. I know that having a great leader, who believed in my abilities was helpful, but primarily it was those skills that came naturally to me. He knew that I didn't want to fail and I was a hard worker, and because of my natural curiosity and tendencies to need organization I was going to take challenges, figure out how to fix them and then make sure we could replicate and improve upon those solutions.

That role helped me get to the career I have today and I am grateful for the experience that helped me figure out that an Operational role was for me!