Tamara Kilonzi

I attribute my success to being a people person and loving a challenge. I love working with people and staying focused. One of the biggest things was that I was a fast learner and could train people. I knew all aspects of the job, not just my position. One good thing about advancing in a company is you always want to gain as much knowledge about the company as you can. You want to be able to do all different positions within the company, even though you master your position. If someone's gone or decides to transfer, you want to have a little bit of knowledge about their job so you can fill in. I'm a multitasker, meaning I like doing lots of different things. I'm not one of these people that just sits behind a desk. Whether it was working at a call center taking inbound calls, working at the station as a dangerous goods specialist or international specialist, handling equipment, or sending messages to drivers through dispatch, I wanted to do whatever needed to be done. That's what I contribute to my success - I've always learned more than one job and knew how to do all the jobs.

The best career advice I received was 'Teamwork makes the dream work.' At FedEx, our model was 'People, Service, Profit.' If you take care of the people, which would be the customers and the employees, it brings about a service which brings about a profit. In other words, us as the people take care of the people out there, like delivering packages, and give a good service, it brings about a profit. We were all about people, service, profit. We were even at the Super Bowl one year at halftime - our commercial was People Service Profit on the Super Bowl.

I think customer service always has opportunities. If you look on LinkedIn, there's always customer service jobs. There's always opportunity because customer service is needed. I don't know of a company that doesn't need customer service. The company needs customers in order to be successful. As far as challenges are concerned, to me, my biggest challenge on the job was really never the customers, it's been your coworkers. Jealousy on the job can really cause some problems. You can be friends with someone, and a lot of times because you're getting advanced and they're not being advanced, there's jealousy and it can really cause problems. Say you're getting promoted because I'm the type of person who wants to know every aspect of my job, and someone's not as adventurous or a go-getter as I am. Then they're going to say someone's favoring me, but no, instead of accepting the truth that you're not one of those people that goes the extra mile or wants to learn somebody else's job. I might even offer to help someone if they're running behind, but you may not be that type of person. Again, teamwork makes the dream work. The challenge is jealousy on the job. Don't get me wrong, there are some times that there's favoritism, and then that can be a challenge because sometimes the right people that should be promoted don't get promoted.

First of all, you have to be honest. I was always the type of person I was honest with my coworkers. I would always tell the ones I trained, no matter how uncomfortable it is, you want to always tell the truth because everyone's different and everyone has different situations going on in their life. You don't want to lie. If you have a job, you want to be faithful to the job. I believe in integrity and being faithful. That's another thing that kept me on my job. You want to be on time. There's people that don't miss any days of work. Now, when you have children, that's kind of hard, but you want to come to work because that's why you got the job and that's why they hire you, because they need you there. I would tell them my integrity is being honest, even when it's uncomfortable. Telling the truth. Coming to work, being on time. Knowing how to do your job. All of that. And even in your personal life, I'm not going to lie to anyone. If someone's taking something, they said, well, you shouldn't rat on people. If you're stealing, you're stealing. No matter what it is, if you didn't pay for it and you're not supposed to be taking it, I didn't take it. My values are honesty, integrity, dependability, and authenticity.