Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

I Didn’t Know I Was Qualified To Be An Operations Manager. I Said Yes Anyway.

How a passion for working more efficiently and it led me to a career I never could have planned.

There’s a particular kind of discomfort that comes with looking at a work process that just doesn’t make sense and not being able to walk away from it.

Most people deal with the annoyance and think: someone should fix that. I’ve always thought: I need to fix that. I’m not sure where that impulse comes from — some combination of temperament, stubbornness, maybe a low tolerance for inefficiency that I used to apologize for. But that instinct, the one I spent years treating as a personality quirk rather than a professional asset, turned out to be the thing that changed everything.

The truth is, I got into operations because I was desperate

Before I had a title that matched what I actually did, I was just someone who liked to learn about things and improve upon them.

But even more importantly, I was unemployed. I had left a low-paying, but stable government role to launch my own bookkeeping business. I had clients, and things were growing. Just not quickly enough. Then my only vehicle was totaled in the wee hours of the morning when a drunk driver barreled into it when it was parked outside of my house.

My cash reserves that were supposed to pay my regular bills was quickly eaten up by the unexpected expense of buying a new car. I nosedived into a job search, kicking myself that my efforts at becoming a self-sufficient entrepreneur were being thwarted like this. But I had a family to support. I applied for all types of positions that I would have not considered before.

But my short stint as a business owner gave me a wellspring of knowledge about what made a business tick. And in my government role, I did work under an Operations Manager who’s penchant for micromanaging made him insufferable, but it also gave me tons of insight into the type of work that an Operations Manager engages in daily. Even without the official job title, I was the one that noticed when a workflow created more friction than it solved. When we worked twice as hard as we needed to because no one had ever stopped to ask why the process existed in the first place. Or we didn’t fully utilize the software tools that we had access to. I had burnt out not because the entity that I worked for was a bad employer, but because the infrastructure around my position was quietly failing (add in that I was underpaid and underappreciated did not help either).

That feeling — that low-grade, persistent itch — is what eventually pushed me into entreprenuership, and then towards operations work. Not a career counselor. Not a five-year plan. Just the honest recognition that I was most alive, most focused, most myself, when I was in the middle of untangling something complicated and making it run better.

The moment I almost said no

When the opportunity to step into my first Operations Manager role appeared, my immediate reaction was not excitement.

It was fear.

I looked at the job description and ran through all the ways I might not be enough. I’m not sure why. I had an MBA. I had two decades worth of progressive work experience. But the job title came with responsibility that felt heavier than anything I’d held before. I catalogued my gaps with a thoroughness I never applied to my strengths, the way many of us do when something we actually want is suddenly within reach and the stakes feel real.

Yet my bank account was running low and the salary offered was more than my target profit goal for my business in that first year. So I took the leap. It is like having children; you might never be ready. If I waited for a version of the opportunity that felt safer, more certain, then I would probably still be stuck in administrative support roles.

It also helped that my first Operations Manager position was working for an organization where I had a passion for their mission. My new manager was respectful of work-life balance and open-minded to new approaches and ideas. She empowered me, even during the interview process. I knew that as long as their was this level of professional respect, I had a good chance of success.

So I said yes. Not because I felt ready — I didn’t. I said yes because I understood, maybe for the first time, that someone was willing to take a bet on me. That they saw what I didn’t and felt that I was fully capable of the job; in spite of never having anything similar to it on my résumé.

What operations actually taught me

The work itself was humbling in all the best ways.

Operations management, I learned quickly, is not glamorous work. No one writes profiles about the person who rebuilt the vendor contract system or redesigned the onboarding process so new staff could actually hit the ground running. The wins are often invisible — a problem that doesn’t happen, a crisis that gets absorbed before it becomes a crisis, a team that moves smoothly through a season because the systems underneath them are quietly doing their job.

But there is something deeply satisfying about that invisibility. When operations works, people don’t notice it. They just feel the difference. The organization breathes a little easier. People can focus on the mission instead of fighting the machinery. That outcome — that collective exhale — became the thing I worked toward.

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

I also learned that fixing broken systems is, at its core, about people. The systems are never really the problem. They’re the symptom. The real work is understanding the humans inside them — what they need, what they fear, where the trust has broken down, what they’d do differently if someone actually asked. Operations without that human layer is just rearranging furniture. Operations with it is transformation.

The distance between there and here

Today I am the Director of Operations and Finance. I’ve been promoted twice since that job offer and my salary has increased over 140% in the past 4 years (nope, that isn’t a typo)!

I still find it useful to say that out loud occasionally, not out of vanity, but because it grounds me. It reminds me of the distance between the person who thought that they weren’t qualified and the person writing this now. That distance is not nothing.

The title is not a trophy. It’s a timestamp. It marks where I started, what I chose, and what happened when I stopped waiting for someone else to decide I was ready.

Nonprofit work has added another dimension to all of this that I didn’t fully anticipate. The stakes are different when you’re working in service of a mission rather than a margin. The broken systems you fix have real consequences for real communities. The efficiency you build doesn’t just improve a bottom line — it extends the reach of work that matters. That weight has made me more careful, more intentional, and more committed than I’ve ever been.

What I’d tell the person who’s consider a role in operations

If you’re reading this and you recognize that feeling — the itch, the fear, the quiet certainty that you could do more than your current circumstances suggest — I want to say something directly to you:

The gap between who you are and who the role requires you to be is not evidence that you’re wrong for it. It’s the playbook. What playbook? That’s right — there is none!

Unlike many other professions, there is not set path to becoming an Operations Manager. My undergraduate degree was in liberal arts. My previous supervisor’s was in Industrial Engineering. Your previous work experience could be technical or more people oriented. Some of the most important skills to have is to be a good project manager, being tech savvy, and comfortable with reading and producing financial reports.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

You are allowed to step into rooms before you feel fully prepared. You are allowed to believe in your own instincts even when the résumé doesn’t perfectly reflect them yet. You are allowed to bet on yourself, especially when it’s scary, especially when the voice in your head is generating a very convincing list of reasons why you shouldn’t.

That voice is not wisdom. It’s fear wearing wisdom’s clothes.

Say yes anyway. Fix the broken thing. See what you’re capable of when you stop waiting for permission.

You might surprise yourself. I know I did.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear your story in the comments. What was the moment you bet on yourself — and what happened next?