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Paola Serna just turned forty-four. While many people view their age as a secret to guard at all costs, Serna is happy to share hers. Surviving a rare and life-threatening medical condition has given her a new perspective, and now OMRON’s legal and compliance director is committed to making the most of life.
It’s a commitment she keeps both personally and professionally. At OMRON, Serna is known for creating multicultural teams, mentoring colleagues, and developing robust risk and compliance programs. Outside the electronics company’s Chicago-area US headquarters, you can find her walking her four rescue dogs, parenting a blended family with her “partner in crime” Oscar, showing off her salsa skills, or hogging the mic at her favorite karaoke bar.
Serna is the oldest of three children and says her Mexican mother—widowed at age thirty-five—is her biggest role model. “She’s a strong woman who showed me what is possible,” Serna says.
The death of Serna’s father brought financial implications that threatened to end her dream of attending the esteemed Instituto Technológico Autónomo de México. Serna, however, refused to let the tragedy derail her academic career before it even started. She worked overtime to earn a scholarship and took a job at seventeen to pay for books and incidentals.
Some young students may have given up, but not Serna. She had proven her ability to overcome difficult times and unthinkable challenges. In fact, perseverance has become something of a theme in her life and career.
Serna’s first legal job was with a leasing company. Unfortunately, Serna knew little about finance. Suddenly, she needed to understand interest rates, banking laws, and securities regulations. “I realized I better give myself a crash course in finance,” she says. “One who is willing to go above and beyond can add value to a department and organization.” As her career in finance continued, Serna went back to school to study corporate finance in a formal setting.
The move opened new opportunities for Serna. She spent nearly twenty years advancing through corporate and investment banking teams as she helped organizations with trusts, loans, and other finance solutions. While usually based in Mexico City, she’s been able to use language skills in English, French, and Spanish along the way.
In the past fifteen years, Serna has been busy building legal teams and departments. As an internal employee, she creates units that match each organization’s needs. “Companies used to have outside counsel do a lot of legal and compliance work, but an in-house leader can assess needs and develop a custom legal plan that matches overall strategy and brings better results,” she says.
In 2015, after serving as chief legal counsel for De Lage Landen, Serna was ready for a new challenge. She joined OMRON to do what she had done before—build a brand-new legal department from the ground up. Once again, she found herself navigating a considerable learning curve as she immersed herself in the inner workings of a company that manufactures medical devices, robots, and security cameras. Serna traveled to factories, observed production lines, and taught herself about everything from industry regulations to unions.
First, she created a legal and compliance team for OMRON’s Mexico region by getting the right people, contracts, policies, and processes in place. After noticing that she had no counterpart in Latin America, Serna offered to take on additional duties and became legal and compliance manager for both regions in 2019.
Three years later, company leaders promoted Serna to her current role as legal and compliance director for Latin America and asked her to repeat her teambuilding success there. It didn’t take long for those in OMRON’s Japanese headquarters to notice the program results. They reviewed Serna’s blueprint and asked her to collaborate with local counterparts around the world to replicate and localize it in numerous regions.
Today, in addition to leading her legal and compliance teams, Serna guides OMRON as the company meets the goals set in the long-term vision, Shaping the Future 2030. She helps the company navigate the intricacies of moving from B2B to B2C and the new contracts that entails. She also monitors changes to the US judicial system, interacts with groups like the Latin-American Compliance Institute (ILC), and follows up with the Responsible Business Alliance guidelines to ensure ethical business conduct continues.
Compliance and ethics may seem straightforward to some, but Serna understands it’s always evolving, and keeping up with that—especially in the current climate—is fundamental to her job. When there are changes in the judiciary, they have to have as much certainty as they can, she notes.
Serna luckily finds the complexities intriguing and maintains a high level of integrity when it comes to her work. It’s her passion for compliance that inspired her to seek out opportunities to fill in the gaps, initiate previously nonexistent processes, and ensure that the business landscape can be ethical, sustainable, and innovative.
