Andy Kauffman, Chief Commercial Officer - US & Canada, Marriott International int. by Dorothy Dowling

Integration, Clarity, and Human-Centered Commercial Leadership

Andy Kauffman’s path into commercial leadership was rooted not in traditional sales or revenue management, but in digital performance marketing. Beginning with paid search and performance marketing at Marriott, he built broader product and marketing capabilities before returning to lead commercial performance for the US and Canada. His philosophy centers on integration—recognizing that while organizations may be structured vertically, the work gets done horizontally. He emphasizes aligning marketing, pricing, demand, and sales around measurable performance, ensuring every initiative ladders back to how the company defines success.

Kauffman believes leadership evolves from individual expertise to connecting dots across teams and motivating large organizations. He champions a one-page business plan tied to clear KPIs and insists every team member see how their work contributes to company priorities. Through digital transformation and AI, he embraces experimentation, encouraging leaders to be users themselves and build teams that reflect the customer base they serve. Balancing owners, customers, members, and shareholders requires clarity around the flywheel of value creation, transparency in change, and a commitment to empowering people while remaining relentlessly focused on performance.

Notable Quotes

• “What got you here won’t get you there.”

• “The work gets done horizontally.”

• “You should be able to articulate your business plan on one page.”

• “If you don’t evolve, you become less relevant.”

• “I am a father first. No one puts “I wished I worked more” on their tombstone”

Closing Reflection

Kauffman’s journey reflects leadership grounded in clarity, accountability, and integration. He demonstrates that measurable performance and human-centered leadership are not at odds, but mutually reinforcing. By aligning teams around shared KPIs and empowering them with trust, he creates scalable impact. His approach illustrates that complexity can be navigated through discipline, transparency, and connection.

His perspective reminds leaders that growth requires continual reinvention. By experimenting, embracing change, and remaining open to new technologies, he models adaptability at scale. He reinforces the importance of balancing performance with empathy and family with ambition. Through trust, clarity, and disciplined focus, large organizations can move as one. Ultimately, his story affirms that leadership at scale remains deeply personal and profoundly human.

Transcript

Dorothy Dowling 0:05

Andy, welcome to its Personal Stories. I'm so glad to have you here. At its personal stories. We focus on the human side of leadership, the experiences, inflection points, and personal disciplines that shape how leaders show up over time, especially as roles grow and scale and complexity. As Chief Commercial Officer for the US and Canada at Marriott, you lead one of the largest. Most complex commercial organizations in North America spanning multiple brands, diverse audiences, owner groups, and broad cross functional team. While your current scope is focused on the US and Canada, you've also had a number of global roles giving you deep experience in leading remotely and across markets. What we're most interested in today isn't just the scope of the role, it's how you lead through that complexity, how you think about priorities, how you stay inspired. How you support leaders at scale and how you continue to evolve personally while caring significant responsibility. We'll talk about your career journey in the moments that shaped you, your approach to leading large teams, how you manage change, including digital transformation, ai, and how you think about resilience and wellbeing along the way. So with that as our backdrop, Andy, let's start at the beginning.

Andy Kauffman 1:15

Let's

Dorothy Dowling 1:16

do it. Alright, welcome. So thank you. Looking back, it's

Andy Kauffman 1:19

a pleasure to be here. Truly.

Dorothy Dowling 1:20

Yeah, it's an honor to have you, Andy and I'm hoping we can start with really what drew you into commercial leadership.

Andy Kauffman 1:28

Yeah. First of all, like I said, it's a real honor to be here and to be with you, to Dorothy today. And, my path into commercial leadership isn't I think a typical one. I think many in the space came up through sales, especially in the hospitality space. They came up through sales, maybe revenue management. I actually came up through the digital organization, so my career has had a number of zigs and zags to it. But always rooted in this notion of using marketing or sales activity to drive. Business forward in the digital world I started in the performance marketing space. So back when paid search was paid search, and that was the primary focus. I drove that for my organization. So for Marriot worldwide. And built that into a broader performance marketing practice. And from there I took on product responsibilities and ran merit.com and helped launch our first digital app a mobile app, I should say. And and then for mayor, expanded into a much broader remit inside the marketing organization. And I know we'll talk about some other paths I went, I did outside of travel, but when I came back to travel about a year ago. What was so attractive about this role is it brings together all aspects of what drives, let's call it top line performance or commercial performance. And I think we all know today, and certainly I've learned this from my performance marketing days, that everything's connected. While organizations may be defined vertically, the work gets done horizontally. And what happens in marketing impact sales and clearly is impacted by pricing and demand sensitivities and the like. So the model we have today is much more integrated and that has allowed a marketer like me. To transcend beyond marketing into a much more commercial role. Why? Because the tenants, if I go back to my paid search roots, the tenants of paid search is ultimately the same as revenue management. It's about yielding the greatest profit for the right cost at the optimal of let's just say occupancy. And when you do that. You look at the cost, you look at the demand sensitivities, you look at how much you're gonna, you're gonna profit on the other side of it. And so I bring those principles across the whole organization as I bring these things together. Unlike many I didn't come up, like I said, through the revenue path or the sales path which I actually think brings a different perspective to the work that I do every day. And I round that out with folks on my team that have.

Dorothy Dowling 4:05

I think that's a really interesting framing, Andy and I do think because digital now is the hub of the source truth for everyone. So I do think that kind of background and understanding how it permeates every aspect of the business today puts you in a really powerful seat too. Be able to support all the teams that I know you lead. I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit about, because you've had a remarkable career journey, obviously across some very interesting businesses. Thank but. I'm wondering if there's one or two inflection points that really fundamentally changed how you lead or how you see the business today?

Andy Kauffman 4:41

Yeah, a few come to, a few come to mind. I'm a firm believer, this is this phrase gets articulated a lot of different ways, but I'm a firm believer in the notion that what got you here won't get you there. And that you have to consistently redefine yourself by finding inspiration from. From other places, especially for a leader in your space, you're not gonna be inspired by looking around. You should be inspired by elsewhere. But I also learned, one of my favorite marketing books over the years is one, it's called Habit. And it's it's essentially ha, it's habit. 95% of marketing fails because you're trying to change behavior. First plug in to behaviors that already exist and ride that wave and get a disproportionate share of that inertia. And and I remember the early days of even in product, trying to create search capabilities and standing up and just saying why are we trying to reinvent the wheel? There's already a model and a standard out there that people use. In search engines. Let's replicate that. And I think that's a really good analogy of the philosophy that I take on online, which is how do we leverage properly what's out there and then create a space that enables us to get a disproportionate share, not by changing behavior, but by writing the inertia and inserting ourselves with differentiation in that. It's subtle, but very different than some many, start with, I wanna change consumer behavior. And that's a very hard thing to do versus determining where you can prosper from the behaviors that already exist and grab your share of that, or ideally, your larger share than that. And, and so that's one. And the other is, an inflection point. You get to a certain point in your career where you start to be evaluated not for necessarily what you've, what you know. Ultimately how you can motivate and connect dots across motivate teams and connect dots across an organization. And that was another I think, important inflection point for me in my career. When you get to a certain point, you're like, you're not being evaluated for the skills and the knowledge that you have, but rather for your ability. To steer larger teams and connect dots and be a visionary that motivates the masses towards your end goals. And I think that's a really important inflection point.'cause some people can't make that pivot.

Dorothy Dowling 7:13

Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think people, leadership and exactly what you're framing for us, Andy, is a really critical skillset that people have to develop intentionally. And you're right. For some people, individual contribution is really where they should stay because they don't have that ability to really connect and bridge teams in the way you're speaking. I also love the element of really leaning into the customer and focusing on their behavior and winning share because I do think a lot of people lose track of the fact that we have to focus on the customer first and our journey, and we can't really change their behavior too much. We influence them, but probably don't change. Which, especially in our space,

Andy Kauffman 7:53

In the travel space, it's really

Dorothy Dowling 7:55

Oh, yeah.

Andy Kauffman 7:55

Often off, we'll talk about let's inspire demand. It's really hard to inspire demand.

Dorothy Dowling 8:00

I

Andy Kauffman 8:00

agree with, we are not a, I'm doom scrolling on Instagram at night and all of a sudden I see, a, I don't know, a t-shirt, a hot, a jersey, something, and it's just a it's a a, a purchase that it just happened to make. Travel is a very considered purchase.

Dorothy Dowling 8:19

Oh, for

Andy Kauffman 8:19

sure. And so it's hard to truly inspire versus steer.

Dorothy Dowling 8:24

Yeah. And we don't have the frequency with the customer. I think for sure. That's the other aspect is people don't recognize how infrequently on the business

Andy Kauffman 8:31

side.

Dorothy Dowling 8:31

Yes. On the leisure side, absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm wondering if we can expand a little bit on some of the thoughts that you were talking about, Andy, because I do think that element from moving from direct influence to leading teams or systems and other leaders, if there's anything that you can talk about what changed you in terms of your journey when you moved up in terms of your leadership roles.

Andy Kauffman 8:55

Yeah. There's a few. Phrases that, we all have our go-to phrases and sort of leadership philosophies and one that I latched onto pretty early in my career. Being a performance marketer, we had the advent of data and the and the ability to connect that data to performance. And with that, we didn't have to guess what worked. And I always saw that as an advantage. Often some would turn that into, yeah, you, you only think about the bottom of funnel and the like. And I'm like, no, actually I am confident that what I'm doing represents a significant return on investment for the company. And I'm not trying to be, argumentative and di and saying what you're doing isn't valuable, but just'cause you can't prove that it is valuable or is driving this volume, it doesn't mean that like you get off the hook to to have to justify the investment. And I remember countless conversations. People didn't like it because I turned what was the ability to measure into an advantage? To say, I am confident that this is a good return on your investment and absence of having that doesn't mean you should spend the money. It actually means you have to go prove that it's an effective use of the money. And so that changed that, that certainly changed things. The other thing that when I think about it is I am obsessed with the work we do every day as an organization has to ladder back to how the company values success.

Dorothy Dowling 10:34

Yeah.

Andy Kauffman 10:34

And some of those are, and we like to call that aligned KPIs and the like. But when you're motivating large organizations. A few principles have to be clear. One, let's be super clear on how we measure success. And two I learned this from one of my leaders. She ingrained this and I do this every single year. Now, you should be able to articulate your business plan on one page. And in the old days, you'd tack that up on your board and you'd always look at it Now. Now it's electronic document, but plan on a page, which it's very simple. It's three or four major objectives. An important point around developing your team, tied back to your KPIs overall. And then third, and then the third principle is in large teams, it is absolutely critical that every team member be able to see that the work they do ladders up to one of those important priorities. On the on your plan, on a page, because people it's human nature. You wanna know that the work you're doing is valuable. You wanna feel like you're making a difference, and you wanna make sure that the work you're doing is on the radar of your most senior leaders as well, because that's how you feel truly aligned as an organization. So that's how I think about it every year and when I look at my plans and everything, it should take those philosophies and apply'em.

Dorothy Dowling 11:57

I think there's really strong wisdom in there. I love the one page business plan framing Andy, because with the attention spans folks have today, and I do love the way that you connect the dots with everyone on your team so that they understand how their roles influence the business outcomes. Because I do agree with you understanding that commercial throughput and how they hit against some of the bigger performance goals is critically important. I'm wondering if we can move on to,'cause you have a lot of priorities. Given the complexity of your role. You've got a lot of stakeholders, you have ownership groups, you have brands that you have to be accountable to. You've got operators that have very clear points of view. You have a lots of partners that you have to negotiate and navigate with. So I'd love to know how you prioritize your time in terms of how you invest it.

Andy Kauffman 12:50

Wow. When you say it that way, I'm like, wow, how do we get anything done? It's a fantastic business we have, but you're absolutely right. We have, however you wanna frame it, a lot of mouths to feed a lot of partners to to ensure that they're properly taken care of. I don't look at that as a burden. I actually look at that as a, really a privilege of the organization that we serve, that we've gotten to a point that so many different constituents, if I can use that term, are dependent and and coexist with us for our mutual success. And often. It's sometimes described that like those different aspects of the business are at odds with each other. I don't see it that way at all. I like the three-legged stool analogy quite a lot because we have to value the we have to balance the value to our owners, the value to our customers, and the value to our members. The value to our shareholders, it's more than three legs, but you get, but the analogy still holds and. A successful business is valuing those why? If members are happy, they're coming back. If they're coming back, they're spending more time. If they're really happy and their members, they're spending time through our direct business, and that builds our base. If that's happening, our owners are seeing better financial returns because one, we're getting RevPAR index gains combined with channel savings and a better optimal mix, which helps their bottom line. Helping their bottom line helps our bottom line, a healthy member base and kicking in that flywheel, so to speak. Not only helps, us and our owners, but when that happens, our owners buy more and invest more and all of a sudden we see our new unit growth go up. As that happens, you start to create more and more membership base. That creates a even greater flywheel for the points that I just raised, as well as allows us to layer on additional businesses like credit cards and other means to, to turn that engagement into more monetization. And then the flywheel just really takes off. And so it is certainly a balancing act, but I think more than anything, it's really having clarity on what that value stream looks like, what the flywheel impact. Or what the flywheel really needs. And then balancing the performance of each of those pieces together, knowing that they have to coexist with the other elements that drive that value. And I'm not gonna sit here and say it's easy.'cause when one of those gets outta whack with the other, you have to try and balance those things together. And some days can feel like you're ping ponging between'em. Of course. But you do have to take that balance and and apply it. And I'll tell you, personally, once you have that balance on the business front, it actually gives you a very good lens to how you should be structuring your days. And I've taken a lot of, just like you and I'm sure everyone has taken a lot of different, time management and management classes and the like. And one that I remember back from years ago was called Take Back Your Life, which I loved it because, one, the catchy, catchy name but two, the notion was very much that to make the most of your day and to make the most of your time, you need to want do a few things. One. Don't let your inbox run your life. Let your calendar run your life, tie your calendar to, and code it by the important things in your business priorities. And so actually code it and look back and say, am I spending time in the right places against the priorities in the business? And then the last is layering your personal needs on top of that, because it's the old notion that you put your mask on first, and to take care of others. And so I really like that. And so like I obsess over my calendar and my task list. And I look at my task list. If it's critical, I code it that way. If not, I can push it forward. And I just use that to guide my life versus my inbox.

Dorothy Dowling 17:01

I think that is again, really powerful thought leadership to offer to the audience, Andy.'cause, Marriott obviously is a category leader. And I know how many pieces of the puzzle that you are responsible for and have to drive. And I do think that element of being able to say where am I really needed and where can I potentially delegate or not be present is, it's a really difficult. Decisioning. So I think that way that you've thought about it is really important and I must, and that I really admire the way that you lead and the fact that you do give people space to do their own work. I do. Which I think is a real mark of a trusted leader because I think you give your people the ability to lead as well. So anyways, that's something I admire about you. Thank you.

Andy Kauffman 17:48

Thank you. That comes from being scarred early in my career in all seriousness. I worked for, you learn from each of the leaders you work for, whether it's a good or bad experience. And let's just say I learned from a bad experience. I had a leader that didn't give me space. He would tell me he trusted me and gave me all the space, and this is your decision to make. And then 10 minutes later, he was in my cube again saying, is it done yet? I, and so that's one of those marks that I learned. I'm like, that is not what I'm gonna do. And so look, you surround yourself with people you trust. You surround yourself with great people. You give them space. If they stumble. Be there to pick'em up. Yeah. And, but ul ultimately give them the space to be as, as strong as they can be, and then be as a leader, have the security to know that if you have great people working for you and if they thrive, that's a reflection of you versus

Dorothy Dowling 18:50

no.

Andy Kauffman 18:50

Some leaders worry about that, but that is ultimately a reflection of you as a leader. And I love to be measured by the quality of my people.

Dorothy Dowling 18:58

Yeah. No, but I think that's a mark of amazing leadership, Andy, because I think that trust that they have in you and the trust that you place in them, I think allows everybody to bring their best work and their best self to their work. So I appreciate that. I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit about inspiration, because Sure. I do think we all put Marriott at the top of the food chain in terms of. Of the demands of your roles and I know you're highly performance driven in terms of outcomes and making sure that you're responding to all the different stakeholders. So how do you draw inspiration when you're in this relentless flywheel of performance?

Andy Kauffman 19:36

It is a good question. I was, and I was preparing for this today. I was reflecting back on moments in my career where I really felt inspired and, I've had the honor of working only for brands in my life that I I am actually a real fan of. And that's been important, whether it's, I spent 10 10 years at Disney. Spent four years at Expedia, 10 at Marriott. Then I left the travel space for a few years and joined the National Football League, which was a blast, which is why sees on my helmets behind me. Yeah. And and then I came back to Merit. And I, I feel very blessed. To only work for brands that I'm a fan of and that I love consuming. And and that, if you think about those companies, they're all leaders in their respective categories.

Dorothy Dowling 20:23

For sure.

Andy Kauffman 20:24

And as a leader, it's hard to find inspiration when you look around you gi, given that you're in that leadership position. So I actually seek inspiration outside of work and in everyday life. And as I was thinking about this. I wanted to, I have a quick story. When I worked for Expedia, this is a good example of where I got inspiration. So when I was working for Expedia, and this is, oh gosh, when was this? This was probably probably 2008, 2009, maybe that timeframe. And we were working on a series of. Large industry promotions. We were working on our big summer promotion, which the summer promotion at that time at Expedia was the biggest thing in the industry. And I remember on a Saturday, I was, at the time I had I took my little girl at the time, she was five or six years old to target. We were, we were, and I see a, I think it's a Barbie, I think it was a Barbie, and on the box it said exclusively for Target. So here they had unique toys being developed at Target only. And I sort I stepped back from that and I was like, huh. And Monday I went in and we built promotions that were Expedia exclusives only on Expedia. And started negotiating deals. Because we had the massive exposure and then we started building in unique opportunities and destinations and and started to really take on a life and then the Expedia Extras came out and all these unique products, but it literally started with Barbie and to,

Dorothy Dowling 22:22

I love that story because, I always think about marketing as being an anthropologist in terms of us observing. The human experience. So I do think the way that you bring your life experience into your work, Andy, that's pretty powerful. And your ability to connect the dots and say, how would that impact my customer? I appreciate that. I often think about the anthropo anthropological journey that we all have to be observers and that's why I fundamentally believe also consuming product and consuming your. Competitor's product is really important for us to understand. Absolutely. The customer as well. So thank you. I'm wondering if we can talk about personal wellbeing and how you balance all of that because you're a parent you have very demanding role, you have a lot of travel. I would love to understand how you balance all of that and if you have any non-negotiables in terms of how you approach your life and your work.

Andy Kauffman 23:13

Yeah. I'll admit like it's. I think I it's getting harder and harder. The stresses of life. The piece of life that just the chaotic nature of the world today, certainly weighs on me mentally. The job is demanding for sure. I am. While I am based in Bethesda, Maryland, in our headquarters building, I'm very conscious that my. Team and the business is not in Bethesda, Maryland and the headquarters building. So I am on the road a lot to be with the team, to be with customers, to be with partners, to be with the hotels. It's critical. And yeah, that takes its tax. I think we have, we all have, I could probably eat better. I certainly should exercise more and I'm and I feel like I do a decent job, not great job there. But I'll tell you your question about the non-negotiables and mo biggest non-negotiables family to me. And I always say I am a father first. One of my colleagues at Disney said to me don't work too hard.'cause no one ever put on their tombstone. I wish I worked more. And and so I've always taken that to heart and I'll Ms. Little things with my kids. I've never missed a big one, and that is the most important thing to me. And even to if you can't be there in person, at times I was, with. A few years ago, college essays, I was on the road and was helping my daughter and I'm FaceTiming from the hotel as we're collaboratively going through her college essay on Google Docs. You have to be there'cause that's really what's important.

Dorothy Dowling 24:43

I think that also makes you an amazing leader, Andy, because I'm sure you bring that humanity to your leadership and you give your team leaders. That permission too to put some of their personal priorities at the top of the list. But thank you for sharing that. And I love the story of you talking about working with your daughter virtually that way, because I do think that also is a lesson for her in terms of how she might approach her life as she evolves into her career. So

Andy Kauffman 25:09

For sure.

Dorothy Dowling 25:09

So thank you for sharing that. I'm wondering I know you really began your journey in digital and we're all in this transformation stage right now in terms of what is happening in the digital space and with artificial intelligence. So I'd love to know how you stay current. You're already a digital first mind, but the speed of this change, I think for many of us is, it's hard. So what wisdom would you share with the audience?

Andy Kauffman 25:35

Yeah, that's exactly where I would start. It's hard. Having grown up in digital, I used to be, I even used to say digital guru and it sounded good. And I feel, and I felt like I knew everything you had to know. And that, and the pace of innovation, certainly, I think, we all know how much that's increased the pace of change and the scale of that is, is at levels that we've never seen before, which goes to Moore's Law and all those things. But the reinvention and the scale that the AI is learning today. The exponential leaps it's able to take in weeks, months. Certainly not years is unreal. And each new version that's coming out is a leapfrog from where it's been. But it is very hard. And so here's what I'll tell you. I experiment. The first thing I would say is if two things in, in, whether it's AI or anything in, in, in business and digital and the like, I think you have to embrace two basic tenets. The first is. Be a user yourself. Be willing to test and learn. Fail stumble, don't have an ego about it just try. And then the second is you have to make sure your workforce looks like the customer base that you want to serve. And that's. Ethnographic, demographic economic, cultural, however you wanna slice it. That was something that when I was at the NFL, we really embraced and we changed the composition of our team to mirror the fan base that we wanted to become. And so why I raised that. Answering your AI question is, I think your workforce has to not just be willing to test and learn, but they have to be users themselves. And so like Like we have now given all of our leaders co-pilot and we use it on a daily basis. And it's sanctioned and and it's not just a proxy for a search engine, it's literally doing work for us.

Dorothy Dowling 27:47

Yeah.

Andy Kauffman 27:47

And we're building agents and we're learning. And that's critical. And then the other piece of it is I've worked with my team. We've built a a next generation leadership council. And these are not just digital natives. These are AI natives and they're using AI at levels that I'm not today. I am humble enough to tap into them to see how they're doing it so that I can change my patterns as well. And at the same time, that actually as a leader, it gives me a pipe into a more junior set of really high potential leaders that are gonna shape where the company goes. So it's it works both ways. I get to learn from them on the AI front. I get to test and learn, but I also get to, to learn from them on where the organization should go. Yeah. And and that's proven really beneficial for us.

Dorothy Dowling 28:45

I think, the few things that you have offered I really love the analogy of marrying your fan base, Andy, because I do think as a senior leader, that's really important'cause we can get stuck in terms of our own. Perspective, but I also love the advice of people embracing and becoming that user and engaging in the journey, because I do think it, it's part of it it's that testing and learning and seeing how other applications may work and connecting the dots in terms of the way you see it. I think is really helpful because you can look at it as a business traveler, you can think of it as a parent, you can think of it as, just a general leisure traveler. So I think that's really important and I do think it's part of the learning journey that we all have to embrace today. I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit though about this nature of what AI is doing, the uncertainty that it's bringing. We've all seen the. On white collar blood bath, and all of these kinds of phenomenal changes, which, which is going to be disruptive not just in terms of how we do work, but what the worker journey might be. So I'm wondering what and how you support your team in terms of how they navigate all this uncertainty.

Andy Kauffman 30:01

Yeah. It's, look, it's, it certainly feels unprecedented as you noted, especially the white collar blood bath, so to speak. There's a number of places, one, we do exist in a business that is powered by people and they, and hospitality in the humanity of that shouldn't change. And what I, one of the reasons I came back to the company is because I missed a people powered company. And I love the hospitality business. No machine is going to take that from us, but what a machine can and will do is. Speed up repeatable tasks and do other things. And why To free up people to spend more time on hospitality. And I think that's, we're lucky in that regard to be in this industry and that, but does that mean changing what people do? Absolutely. And one, I'm very pleased with how our company is leaning into that experimentation. And we're openly experimenting. We're actually, we're in the midst right now of adding a few team members on my team so that they I'm calling it commercial services optimization'cause I'm not gonna call it AI'cause that's not what it's aI is the tool to optimize the organization and commercial services optimization is essentially a set of team members that ride the hip of my leaders. And say, where can we optimize the organization to be more efficient? If you can make the organization more efficient as a top line organization, you can generate more revenue for the same labor that you have today. It is not about cutting, it's about efficient growth and creating better margins for the hotels and for our company by lifting the top line at the same cost line. And now, does that mean we're gonna rethink work in spots? Of course it does. Does that mean some roles could change? Of course it does. But all under the guise of optimizing. And as, as I've said, very openly to the team, if that change happens, welcome it. It's opportunity for growth for you. Now some people embrace that some people will be won't, will be a little freaked out by it. But I see it as, in this day and age, I started with the pace of the change. If you don't evolve, you become more relevant. And

Dorothy Dowling 32:24

yeah.

Andy Kauffman 32:25

I chose to rather than let one, let a centralized group develop AI solutions that can hand it to us. There'll be some big things that they do. We have that as a company, but I also wanted it embedded in my organization to say, how do we optimize just the workflow, the throughput, the efficiency of the organization overall.

Dorothy Dowling 32:46

Yeah. But I love that approach, Andy.'cause I think it's somebody that's looking at it on a micro level that can hopefully connect dots at a different way and really preserve a lot of the institutional capabilities, but hopefully look for those kinds of efficiencies. And I do think this whole element about staying relevant. That's a real conversation that we all have to embrace. And if you're not in it, I don't think you are relevant. So I do think that's, that it's a hard truth that everyone has to accept, but it's our job to remain relevant and to embrace that change.

Andy Kauffman 33:17

So it, it absolutely is. And in that regard. I think, just like I'm being right now, I've always led with transparency and humanity and I'm gonna continue to do that. And, people in these day and age, they feel a bit uncertain. And so I try and be very transparent. And then where I think I started with the plan on a page. Yeah, go back to your KPIs. We're doing these things because of these KPIs but also create safe spaces for people and team members to express and be anxious and express that openly and to find ways that they can be part of the solution. By, by, by being open and expressing their concerns. And so we do our best to create. Safe spaces for the organization. We have a big organization. I think we do it pretty well. And, I end almost every town hall I ever run with, with a q and a session. People aren't always comfortable voicing their vo, asking a question in large form. So I also say or slip a note under my door or text me or send me something. And rarely PE do people do that, but the invitation is always there.

Dorothy Dowling 34:26

Yeah. But I think that's speaks to humanity as a leader, Andy, in understanding. That everyone isn't gonna be courageous in a larger environment, but to create that opportunity for them. Yeah. And the space to ask questions, I think is a real hallmark of your leadership. Yeah.

Andy Kauffman 34:41

We, we've created, thank you. We've created something I'm proud of is this year, my team is dispersed around the country in Canada. My leaders and I, and Mary, it's a very collaborative organization. It's one of the things I love about it and. We love the coffee chats and the one-on-ones and things like that. But in a vir with vir, with a virtual team, a distribute team, that's hard to do. So we've created a this year I'm pretty proud of it. We created what we call the unfiltered series, and it's a playoff of coffee, right? So it's like a virtual coffee talk, but it's unfiltered because. It's literally an ask me anything session, and I do them once a month. My leaders do them once a month and it's 10 to 12, maybe 15 max people virtually, but it creates a very safe space and we've organized them also to be like levels of the organization. Because the thinking and the questions tend to be common at the similar levels. Yes,

Dorothy Dowling 35:37

of

Andy Kauffman 35:37

course. And we don't want someone in their room with their boss or something like that, so it creates very safe. Spaces and I think it's been a really good thing culturally for us.

Dorothy Dowling 35:46

Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that,'cause I think that's certainly something others can think about in terms of how they might employ it in their own space. So thank you Andy. And I know we're coming up to the end, so I just really wanna express my appreciation for you giving so much of yourself today and being so generous of your time and. I'm also grateful for the leadership that you bring to the industry.'cause I think you're just an amazing role model. I love the way that you still work from home and allow your teammates to do that. I just like the way that you invest in your people and the example that you set. So I just wanna say thank you and I have personally found this very inspirational and I think you've offered a lot of really good leadership TT tips to our audience. So thank you for making time. Thank you for doing this for us and thank you for being part of our its personal stories. Dorothy, let me

Andy Kauffman 36:38

thank you. Few months ago we were talking and I asked how things are going. You said you're it wasn't his words, but you're living your best life. And I can see that the glow, the enjoyment but also doing this for the industry and enabling many of us to share our stories across the industry. It's a real pleasure. So thank you.

Dorothy Dowling 36:56

Thank you, Andy. And if I may thank our audience for spending time with us today. And if you found this interview as. Inspirational as I did with Andy. I hope you'll join us where you'll hear other conversations with other remarkable leaders, people who are charting bold paths, building meaningful careers, and reminding us all that leadership at its core is deeply personal, so we hope you'll join us again soon. Thank you.