It’s hard getting a hold of Uzoamaka Okoro; getting her to do this interview was no easy feat. But it’s all for a good reason.
As Head of Operations at Fincra, Uzoamaka Okoro has a lot on her daily plate to last 24 hours. But how does she manage it all, and what lessons has she learned?
In this episode of Tribe Spotlight, we speak to the dynamic Head of Operations about what drives her, her career journey and her typical day.
What do you do as Head of operations at Fincra?
It entails managing special projects across the organisation. This can be unique projects, new projects or new business opportunities or business we want to go into, process improvement across teams and across the organisation as well.
I also basically manage end-to-end, partnership, from sourcing to creating the relationship, getting onboarded and basically maintaining and retaining that relationship to ensure like our products are typically intact, functional and we are able to provide an amazing service.
What’s your style of leadership?
For me, the first thing that is important is an understanding of the person or the people that I am working with either in a work setting, or in a church setting, or in an extracurricular activity or wherever I find myself.
Who are the people I’m going to work with? Who are the people I’m going to need; just an understanding of them, their personalities, their backgrounds, their motivations as well for being in that particular setting.
Starting with that enables me to understand what perspective or pre-conceived notion they are bringing to the table, why they think of something in a certain way, why they might react in this way and all of that.
So it starts with the understanding of the person.
What does your typical day look like?
First of all, my ways are not always the same. For someone in operations, things may vary from time to time. So one just has to literally be up to speed and just ensure they are on top of things.
Career Journey
My career journey has been an interesting one; I obtained a B.Sc in industry Physics and renewable energy from Covenant University; after that to be honest, I really wanted to delve into that space, but circumstances happened and that wasn’t possible at that point.
I did think I would be interested in consulting, so I just started asking questions and trying to seek out how I can start my career in that space. Things didn’t turn out the way I expected but I did discover that, under the umbrella of consulting, was operations.
And so I got my first operations role at Workstation, a co-working space in Lagos. So we were pretty amazing there. I basically managed operations alongside four other amazing women and of course the team began to increase much later.
I left after some time to go to Fiber Technologies, a real estate tech company, one of the pioneers in Lagos. I was working to ensure customer success within the company. It was an amazing experience.
What really drove me all through was the impact that these organisations were making in society.
After some time, I decided to leave to figure out what’s next for me and I found Fincra. It has been a long journey from there. I started off as a Product Manager and shortly after I was promoted to the COO and now leading operations within the team.
What’s your favourite Fincra product?
My favourite Fincra product has to be the Payment Link; it’s easy to use; it’s one click, one payment. Who wouldn’t love that?
