Kelly Munoz on Networking and Supporting Fellow Assistants

Kelly · 0:00

Hi, I'm Kelly Munoz, and one of my favorite quotes is, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

Speaker 3 · 0:17

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident, game-changing leader assistants.

Jeremy · 0:33

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Kelly · 1:49

Yes, that's correct.

Jeremy · 1:51

Well, welcome to the show.

Kelly · 1:52

Thank you for having me.

Jeremy · 1:54

And tell us a little bit about what city you're in and what do you like to do when you're not working.

Kelly · 2:02

I'm based out of New York. And when I'm not working and when I have time, I will, you'll find me at the gym. I'm a gym rat in general, usually five, six days a week. Hasn't been the case the last several months. But we're getting back there.

Jeremy · 2:22

Nice. And what kind of gym workout do you like? Are you a weight person or are you a cardio person? Are you a dance Zumba something? What's your favorite?

Kelly · 2:35

I like to power lift actually. Yeah. There's enough cardio and power lifting when you're doing volume works. You're like, the weight is so heavy after like two reps, you're like, that's cardio, that counts. I try to, you won't catch me running anywhere, that's for sure. Maybe like an incline walk. But that's about the extent of the cardio. Lots of heavy lifting, lots of calluses. It's just more my speed.

Jeremy · 3:03

Nice. Awesome. Do you have cats or dogs or kids or any of the above?

Kelly · 3:11

No, I am a dog person, but I opted to not have a pet recently because it's just a lot of work. I have a child and in his famous words when he was 10 years old, when I was considering a dog, mommy, you have too many responsibilities. Why would you give yourself more work to do?

Jeremy · 3:29

Okay.

Kelly · 3:31

Heard.

Jeremy · 3:32

Smart kid. Smart kid.

Kelly · 3:36

Yeah.

Jeremy · 3:38

That's awesome. So tell us about your career a little bit. Then how did you end up becoming an assistant? And how long have you been an assistant?

Kelly · 3:47

I've been an assistant for quite some time, actually. It's been, I would say, probably 20 years, maybe a little bit more. It kind of just fell on my lap. I think I'm just a very organized and analytical person, as most assistants are. We see things that no one else sees. And it kind of just happened. I actually started working in the medical field at the University of Miami as a front-end receptionist, checking in, checking out patients, taking blood pressure and transition to back-end billing. So I had a lot of experience in the medical field. And I moved to New York and started working at Columbia Presbyterian. And I landed a position as an office coordinator supporting two orthopedic surgeons there, one of which is the chairman of orthopedic surgery right now. And the other one happens to be the physician for the New York Yankees now. And yeah, so we were off to a great start. I was there for a long time. I was able to really understand the back end of things, front end. I started as a floater actually, which was one of my favorite things. And I always suggest to every company, you need to start a lot of people in their first weeks as floaters so they can understand the intricacies of each role. And they know where this mistake happens, how that affects the next role. And it really empowers people to take ownership and support each other. Sadly, not a lot of companies do that. But they find out eventually, maybe it might work. Yeah, so I got lucky and I floated there. And then the manager was just like, let's get you to be an office coordinator. And since then, it just kind of like transitioned into assistant to the president's office, EA to the CFO. And it just like started evolving from there. And I've been in every industry you could think of at this point. It's all the same. It's just a different label slapped onto it.

Jeremy · 5:55

Yeah, I was going to say, what's your favorite? I know the skills are transferable across industries when you're an EA. But what has been maybe your top favorite industries to work in?

Kelly · 6:09

You know, the funnest role I had was actually at Samsung Electronics, and it was fun. I was in the marketing team with partnerships, and it was actually I had two executives. They were, first of all, phenomenal. And I'll always scream their names from the mountaintops. I still text message them. I don't care. But it was a great just like environment in general, because they have a system and a team of executive assistants. And I mean, that was kind of like one of the best experiences. I would say some of the best experiences I've had were being on teams, where you can lean on each other and support each other. And some of the loneliest and most annoying roles have been being the lone wolf at the company and no one to bounce your ideas off of. So definitely Samsung was kind of like one of those roles that stood out to me the most during my career and I really had a great time and I made some really great friendships there too.

Jeremy · 7:22

Awesome. And you currently, what industry do you currently work in?

Kelly · 7:30

So Three High Members is actually a startup and it's a think tank kind of. There's not a lot to go into except that it's a networking, it's a hub for a networking hub for ultra high net worth individuals and they kind of, I would say, customize their networking opportunities to connect with other investors, to give them a different type of experience to, you know, maybe one investor is interested in something new and they don't know how to get into that industry or who to talk to, so we will connect them with someone we do know. And it's very niche, it's very cool. I actually find it very interesting. I've met some pretty cool people so far and the team is, it's a small team, but man, do they run like a big team, which is really fun to watch.

Jeremy · 8:25

Yeah. Yeah, very interesting. I want to look into that as my executive as an investor as well.

Kelly · 8:33

Oh, send him my way.

Jeremy · 8:36

Yeah, sounds good. So tell us a little bit about the EAs to the rescue. What is EAs to the rescue and how did that become a thing and why did you start it?

Kelly · 8:54

Going back to not having a sounding board, the career, every role I stepped into was that didn't have a group of executive assistants. It was like you create your own resources, you are the hub of information. After 20 years, it gets exhausting. And you remember everything, right? It's in your brain, your role as X. It's not like I never had it in an Excel sheet, because let's be real, Google Workspace just jumped on recently in the last 10, 15 years. It wasn't like everyone was using it. I didn't have it anywhere. It was just everything was always in my head. And I would see at one of my roles, I onboarded two new executive assistants, one who never had experience as an executive assistant. But based on her ability to see the finer details and bigger picture, I was like, oh, you're going to be great at this. I got you. Let me train you. We'll be good. And I realized there is no or there wasn't information out there to help one another. And it kind of bothered me. And in New York, there's a lot of executive assistants that know each other in New York, but a lot of them just do not communicate with each other. I don't know what it is about New York City EAs. Like, hey, y'all, communicate. They just don't. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the busy life. We kind of like are kind of moving at high speeds, which I get. But sometimes it makes sense to stop and just be like, let me connect with people that are in line with what I'm doing. They might have information that I don't understand or know or can point me to. And it kind of just started where I was on Slack a lot. And one of my old companies, a lot of the former employees had their own Slack channel. And that's where it kind of sprung the idea was like, why don't I have a networking group for the EAs in New York City that I know? And I kind of started with like four, five. And we barely used it. And in January, it was kind of like a joke. I was just like, yeah, whatever, I'm going to kick it off on LinkedIn. We'll see. And it just spiraled. I, it was so unexpected. I actually made the logo as a joke. It's like an ER, like everything is an emergency, everything's on fire. But is it though? Probably not. It's not. Nothing's really an emergency. We're not the emergency room. Like, calm down. It's okay. So it was really just a joke, the logo at least. And since then, it's kind of been like, whoa, I didn't realize how much EAs at all levels of their career kind of like needed help. They needed an area to that. They needed an area to help them revamp their resume and get actual honest reviews and answers. Not that, let's sugarcoat it so we don't hurt their feelings answers. It's more like, no, your spacing looks really terrible. Let's fix that. This looks bad. And it's been great. We've got coffee chats, some of the EAs in there are like, oh, I want to talk about this. I'm like, girl, I got you. Let me make you a little sign up sheet. We'll have people sign up and you can own it yourself and run with it and just give them that leadership, the opportunity to lead something. And the feedback that I've been getting has been really great. Thank you for creating this. This has been a relief to me. There's been several that used it to help them get through times of unemployment, where they didn't have anybody to speak to. And especially now with last year, especially the climate of unemployment and layoffs, and folks haven't been able to find employment for over a year. It's hard and there's no one to speak to, or someone's going through it with their executive, or somebody at their office, and they have no one to speak to. It's a place for them to go and just be like, am I wrong? Tell me, how do I navigate this? And it's been great actually. And yeah, and that spiraling actually has a lot to do with Becky from EA Social Club. Man, she jumped on. I remember the day she joined, and she's like, I'm going to post it on my LinkedIn, and I say, okay, girl, do you? She did, and oh my gosh, I wrote back to her like, I don't know what you did, but everybody's in here now. And I paused memberships to come in to one week a month, because the rolling membership is too much. And one thing, especially as I've gotten older, and with my son getting older, I've been creating a lot of hard boundaries for myself and saying, no, no, no, we're going to do this when it works for me. Because I can't keep doing things when it works for everyone else, otherwise I won't be on my two feet. And that's where I created that, okay, one week a month, everyone can apply to come in. I automated it. I do everything by myself. I literally do everything by myself. And I had to set it up in a way where I was just like, okay, I have to respect my own boundaries and make sure that everything is done when I need it. And it's been working out. It's slowed down the membership a lot, which is good because at the same time, there was a lot of people jumping in like, hi, I'm so and so. It's like next year, you got 50 people at the same day. You're like, oh shit, this is a lot.

Jeremy · 14:33

Right, right, yeah.

Kelly · 14:35

And it's slowed down to about five or 10 a day, which is a lot better than 50 and it's more manageable. And it was becoming overwhelming for some folks too, even myself. So yeah, batteries, membership, deadlines, things like that. They work, right?

Jeremy · 14:49

Yeah. So well, side note, Becky's awesome and Becky was in episode 271. So for those listening and they want to chat or listen to Becky and I chat, episode 271, leaderassistant.com/271. So just a side note there. What's the, so are you still using Slack for the platform?

Kelly · 15:14

We are.

Jeremy · 15:15

Okay.

Kelly · 15:15

We're still using Slack. It's a free membership. I raise funds through donations and fundraisers. I'm trying to keep it very accessible because globally, in the US, we're very, very, very privileged and we should all be very grateful to those resources that we have. Regardless of how hard it is, right? But there's other countries where EAs are not at our level of salary, respect, and they just can't afford to pay hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars to join a community and they really, really need help. I'm very adamant in keeping this as accessible as possible, and that is through fundraising and through donations.

Jeremy · 16:06

Right. Awesome. Well, what's been your favorite thing about the Executive Assistant role? You've been doing it for a while, as you mentioned, and you must enjoy parts of it because you're still doing it, and you've got a lot of energy, so I'm sure you still enjoy parts of your job. So what's your favorite part?

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Kelly · 17:16

You know, I'm a hyper observer and I just like to see things happening. I just like to see people in their environment. And I pick up on the little nuances like the microbehaviors and little things like that, the tentations and really for me is being able to pick up on those things and tailoring the service of being an EA to the executive assistant because not everybody's the same, right? What you do with one is not going to work with another. One executive can be monotone and say a joke while someone else is like, I can't stand working with them. And I'm like, are you kidding me? That was hilarious. So it's different, right? So I feel like for me, the the funnest part is figuring somebody out. And I kind of give myself like a deadline, like how long is it going to take me to figure someone out? And once I figure it out, I'm just like, I already know you don't worry about it. We're good. And they're surprised. And they're just like, well, tell me. And I tell them, they just look at me like, how the hell did you know? I'm like, I pay attention. I pay attention to everything. And it's like my execution could be better. You know, we all have like our flaws. I've got a ton of them. And but one of my or how everybody calls it nowadays, I guess everybody calls being an EA, what's your superpower, which I hate actually, would be being able to observe things that other people don't even notice. And giving the executive something that they didn't even know they needed. Yeah, that smile on their face, right? Where they're just like, well, I had no idea I actually needed that. Like, I know that satisfaction of item.

Jeremy · 19:00

Right. Yeah, you're like, oh, yeah, that's why you gave me the big bucks.

Kelly · 19:05

Exactly.

Jeremy · 19:06

Some of the big bucks. Cool. Well, what's what's your least favorite part about the role?

Kelly · 19:19

Navigating coworkers and their misunderstandings of what our position is. There's still a long way to go with executive assistants. There's still a long way to go. I think a lot of people still call us secretaries, note takers, or don't deem us as valuable, and they de-prioritize our tasks that are not really ours. Let's be real, our tasks are whose? They're our executives' tasks. When I ask you for something, it's not me asking. It's actually my executive asking via me. So I need it done. And I think our coworkers need to understand that we are an extension to our executives and we are valuable, and we were brought on for a specific reason. And that needs to be respected. And I think we still have a long way to go. I still come across that every once in a while, not every organization, but definitely I come across that. And it takes me a minute to step back and just kind of evaluate the situation and figure out how am I going to respond? Fix your face and respond with a smile. And I do have to remember that because I do wear my emotions on my face. It's pretty bad. So I've had to like slow down, Kelly. Fix your face.

Jeremy · 20:42

Fix your face. That's a good t-shirt for you. Yeah, right.

Kelly · 20:45

Fix your face. That's going to be the new EAs, the rescue shirt.

Jeremy · 20:48

There you go. Awesome. Well, what I really wanted to jump into as well is we I posted a LinkedIn post on or I think it was Administered Professionals Week or something like that. My friend's Spoonful of Comfort said, hey, we'll give away some packages, some of our spoonfuls of comfort gift packages to some assistants. I said, all right, let me think of a way to do this. I was like, I want to hear about the worst gifts that assistants received from their executives in different jobs or whatever, for Administrative Professionals Day or Week or whatnot, or it could be holiday gifts and whatever. Anyway, you posted one that was just hilarious. I don't even remember the details, so that's why I had to have you back on the podcast, so you could tell us a story about the worst Administrative Professionals Day or holiday gift or whatever it was from an executive.

Kelly · 21:58

I've had some really great gifts. I even have some of them still on. I use them all the time. They're beautiful, gorgeous gifts. I've had some really interesting gifts too, or none. They're like, here's a budget of $25, one for you and split it amongst the others. It's like, oh, gee, thanks. I think that's segue to what actually happened, right? The gift that keeps on giving, the story that just keeps on giving. I had one executive. Actually, I'm thankful he never gave me a gift because, oh my gosh, my interactions with him towards the end of, I guess maybe the middle and end, we were working together, were a little questionable. I don't know what the thought process was behind the interactions and the behavior. It was really weird. But we would get on our one-on-ones during a time where we couldn't be in office, and not to give too much away about who it is. And we were speaking and just randomly starts picking his nose. I didn't know how to respond, not just verbally, but my body too. I'm staring at you on the screen.

Jeremy · 23:37

Does he know his camera's on?

Kelly · 23:40

Yes, and you're picking your nose. And it wasn't like, oh, let me just scratch my nose, because my lip flies and you're like... No, he was in his nose and deep and searching, and found what he was looking for and stared at it. And I can't quite recall what he did next with it, because I think I was just so horrified. And I didn't know whether I should say something. Why didn't I want to look? He's in front of me. I'm like, where do I look? It's not like I can just be like, disconnect. I can't do that. It was just very strange. And I guess that the funniest part of that was as soon as I hung up, I immediately reached out to the other executive assistants.

Jeremy · 24:42

You're never going to believe what just happened.

Kelly · 24:45

And it was funny because one of them said, what a passive aggressive way to have a one-on-one with somebody. And I go, wait, do you think that's what it was? And I let it go because I was like, well, maybe he just didn't know he had his camera on, as you mentioned. He did it multiple times afterwards. And at that point, I started to believe like, okay, he either doesn't care or doesn't understand like social etiquette or is really passive aggressive. So I just wasn't sure what to do next. I'm just happy that I don't, honestly, that was like, I would prefer to stub my toe to ever work with that person again. I would rather stub my pinky toe on a metal bed frame in the morning than ever work with that individual again.

Jeremy · 25:37

So there was nothing said, there was nothing never brought up, no comment or anything. It was just that right in front of you.

Kelly · 25:43

Right in front, in the middle.

Jeremy · 25:44

All righty then. Wow.

Kelly · 25:46

We were conversing just in the middle of the conversation and it was about important topics too. It's not like we were just shooting the breeze. We were literally talking about budgets and do operationally next and hit me with the booger.

Jeremy · 26:04

But at least it wasn't in person, I guess.

Kelly · 26:08

I don't know if that's happened in person to other people with this individual, to be honest with you. I have heard that it wasn't just me that they would do it with, so I felt better after that. I'm like, okay. Maybe it's not just me, but eww.

Jeremy · 26:25

Wow.

Kelly · 26:26

I would have passed them a tissue if it was in person. I'm like, you should use it. Wow.

Jeremy · 26:34

Well, on that note, thanks for sharing the interesting story and interesting interaction. Thanks again for being on the show. It's been awesome to chat with you. What's maybe one word or phrase that you had put on a billboard for all the Executive Assistants of the world to see?

Kelly · 27:01

Let's see. Are we talking inspirational or?

Jeremy · 27:04

Whatever you want. It could be humorous. It could be inspirational. It could be, I'm just going to put you on the spot and you got to pick something to put on a billboard.

Kelly · 27:13

Same thing I would tell myself. Just breathe. Just breathe.

Jeremy · 27:18

There you go. Love it. Just breathe. Perfect. That's a good billboard. Awesome, Kelly. Well, thanks again for being on the show. Thanks for the work you've been doing to connect and network assistance in New York City and beyond. It's been fun chatting with you. Is there the best place for people to reach out if they want to say hi and connect?

Kelly · 27:44

Yeah, definitely. My LinkedIn, send me a message. I'm very responsive and happy to speak with anybody. They can also check out the EAs, the Rescue LinkedIn page or even our website. The dates for the memberships are on the application on the website. There's no guesswork. It'll tell you, it'll be open every month. Yeah, so it's pretty direct and straightforward. But yeah, even if someone is outside the membership dates, they can reach out to me. I've had a few that message me and they're looking for assistance, and I'm happy to help them even if it's not membership week. I'm happy. My door is always open. My virtual door is always open.

Jeremy · 28:27

Right. Awesome. Well, I'll put those links in the show notes, leaderassistant.com/289 for everyone listening. Thanks again for being on the show and look forward to staying in touch.

Kelly · 28:40

Thank you for having me. This was fun. Please review on Apple Podcasts. goburrows.com