Annie Steighner

I attribute my success to the relationships I've built over years of working in the business and in procurement with top hotel chains and luxury hotel brands. Every role I've ever had has been a role that somebody recommended me for. I wasn't looking to leave procurement or leave Avendra when my current opportunity came along, but a friend called and said they thought I'd be great at it. That's how my career has always worked. I am the most transparent and ethical person I know in business. I've always focused on doing what's right for the operator or the end user, especially on the sales side where you don't really find that often. I tell clients not to screw our brackets into their walls, to use tape instead so they can remove them one day. That's just not the business I'm in - that long-term business through stickiness. We should be able to win and keep business due to relationships and standards and quality, not because you screwed a bracket into your wall. I know how operators are affected by decisions, and I would never want to be in that position if I were an operator. It's really important for me to do right by the end user, not by the company I'm working for. I've always wanted to do right by my clients or my customers more than the person that signs my paycheck. I love my clients more than my job, no matter what job I've been at. My clients are my world. I've never lost a contract that I started, and I think that's because of this approach.

The best career advice I ever received was to remember to take a break and remember to take a breath. As you get into those higher titles, you have a work phone that goes everywhere with you. In sales, being available for a client is critical to your success. In leadership, when you're managing people, being available to them is critical to their success and their development. But at the end of the day, if you can't learn how to take that 5-minute walk outside, you're going to struggle. It's important that you give yourself a moment to breathe. I learned this at a women's conference put on by AHLA, Women in Hospitality, where one of the breakout sessions was about preventing burnout. After that conference, me and a few other female employees at Avendra started connecting once a week, and our only goal was to check in and ask, did you take that 5 minutes? For some people, it was walking away from their desk and going outside. For others, it was making sure they actually ate lunch away from their computer, not at their desk, because if you're at your desk, you're still working. For some, it was turning off the phone for 30 minutes a day. The real check-in moment was asking what 5-minute thing, what 10-minute thing, what hour thing did you do to make sure you didn't burn out. Those women held me accountable to it, and that breath keeps me from getting to burnout ever.

As a woman, first and foremost, take the risk. Listen and learn from the decision makers, whether they're men or women. Find a woman leader that you can use as a mentor. I've done that a couple times in my career, and you learn from them through osmosis by working on projects with them. If I'm forming a group of leaders to do a roundtable or brainstorm, there's going to be women on that panel. I think women look at things differently than men completely. Don't be scared to change your career. I started serving tables, and somebody said to me, you're so good at upselling, I want you to come sell fish for me commercially. I didn't even know that was a job. I didn't even know that procurement was a job. But selling seafood commercially taught me the skills of relationships. I would have never known who a procurement person was at a hotel until I sold to them. Then the procurement person reached out to me and said, do you want to get out of sales? If you don't take that risk and learn that new skill, you'll never know what you didn't know. So don't be pigeonholed to what you think you want to do. Take the experience, do something new, and watch yourself grow. That's the only reason I've excelled as quickly as I have. None of my jumps were for more money. None of my jumps were for toxic reasons to bounce to the next job. Every job was always because it was a skill that I wanted to hone in on and improve.

I see that in my industry, so many companies are starting to focus on diversity and inclusion, and women ownership is very important. But even then, it's still not 50-50, and women are more in the workforce now. I mean, granted, 50 years ago, women weren't in the workforce the way that they are now. Now you have to have two incomes to provide for a family, so women are working more. After 30 years of having an equal workforce, there's no mom of my generation, not me being a mom, but my mother's generation, that didn't work. That was the generation that started pushing women into the workforce. So now that we're into 3 generations later, we should see more women leaders. At my last company, only 34% of C-suite employees are women, and they just changed that in the last 5 to 10 years, focusing on that. But before that, it was something like 8%, and they're one of the largest companies in the world. In my current company, all C-suite are men, all of them. And I think for VPs, it's something like 20% are women. In the wet amenity space, in the shampoo and conditioner and all that, there's actually a lot of CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs that are all men. In this industry, it tends to be men in the higher leadership positions.

In business, transparency and honesty are most important to me, along with doing what's right for the operator or the end user. I am the most transparent and ethical person I know in business. It's really important for me to do right by the end user, not by the company I'm working for. I've always wanted to do right by my clients or my customers more than the person that signs my paycheck. Outside of work, my passion is my child and my faith. I volunteer at my church nearly every Sunday, and I make sure that I say yes to things that get me more time with my daughter and more time volunteering with others. Even though I may be working on a project late at night, I'm just gonna instead say yes to the thing that gets me more time with my daughter and more time volunteering. I try to balance it so that I remember life exists outside of work. As women, especially once you start to get older and you have a family and kids or a spouse, we tend to over-manage things and not take a breath. I learned at a women's conference that you gotta take a breath, even if it means walking outside during a workday and taking a small walk. It gives you back that reality that it's just work, right? Life exists.