Kathleen Tomaro

The best career advice I ever received was to step back a little bit and not go overboard on different things with people until they actually grasped what it was. I'm good with managing people anyway, but I was told not to be too intense about expectations right away. Instead, I learned to go down the line of what the expectations are, what they needed to do, and how they can overachieve, but to give them time to understand it first. I had to make some adjustments on that because some people take it like you're trying to change their personalities and the way they do business, and that's definitely not it. I just want to make sure that they understood the whole business processes and what they could do to improve. I don't think anybody really ever took offense to any of it. They actually found it was very informational and actually helped them through positions through the company.

I would let young women know that there are a lot of opportunities today, and they can choose the path that they want to go down, not something that they just came into and aren't really enjoying. With all the things that are current now, like AI, a lot of things are a lot easier than when I was doing these jobs. Things that I had to work on for hours before I could put a presentation together can now be done in 20 minutes. It's important to make sure you get the education that you need, which is why I'm finishing my master's, because I think it's helping as well. A lot of young women will say they're going to college but don't know if they should continue, but most of the companies I've worked for will pay part of their education, so they should take the opportunity while they have it because it's definitely going to help them and give them a different perspective on life and business.

The biggest challenge in my field right now is staffing and training new hires properly. A lot of times managers are busy and they just put new employees in there on their own, and they feel like they're not sure what's going on. I put together a solution where when we got new managers, we would have a class, like four classes, and I would do it at the stores so they could see things in action. It seemed to work really good because they had a lot of questions about things they most likely probably wouldn't have asked until they were experiencing problems. It actually was helping to keep staff in place. You weren't having people quit in a week or two or whatever, because that used to happen a lot. This was especially important with franchise stores, because if the franchisee isn't making money due to staffing issues, they're going to end up handing the store back or profits tumble. By doing the training for them with the staffing, I was bringing up a lot of things that the franchisee or manager wouldn't mention because they didn't think it was necessary, but there's a lot of things people need to know today. I would also provide them with information about positions above theirs that were open so they could move up in the company, which showed other employees they could come in and move up throughout the company as well.

Sincerity is very important to me, and I find people important. I try to go through and make sure that they're being accepted for whatever they need help with in their position. Honesty is definitely a big one too, because nobody wants to be lied to or just have you say this will happen or that won't happen when it's not true. A lot of what I do is just working with people so they're able to take a look at how you do it, why you do it that way, and going through explanations of just letting them know how you feel when you're doing something, how you make your improvements, and what they could do. This seems to help a lot, especially with jobs where you have mass employees, because everybody's different, everybody has a different personality. It's just working with them to show them the expectations and following up if they need any help or advice. I keep in touch with everyone and they all had my phone number so they could call me if they wanted to. When there are changes happening in the company, you take a risk of losing employees, but when you go through and explain to them what the difference is and how they could still make their achievements, it seems to work out really well.