# Kavya | People Champion of the Year | Nomination video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYGwMye-vOY

[00:04] say for giving us this platform.
[00:07] It has always pushed us to raise our own bar
[00:10] not just for ourselves but for our teams
[00:12] and for the industry.
[00:15] Years ago, I started my career as a credit analyst at
[00:17] a leading banking institution.
[00:19] I had a business degree and a clear ambition.
[00:23] I always knew I wanted to lead.
[00:26] At that time I did not have the title, the team
[00:29] or the platform but I had determination.
[00:33] I believe that if I kept learning, kept
[00:35] working hard and kept proving myself
[00:37] through my work I would get there one
[00:39] day.
[00:42] And more importantly I knew that when I get there I wanted to bring
[00:44] others along with me.
[00:48] Seven years ago I joined Neo Group as a senior analyst.
[00:51] I did not arrive as a leader.
[00:54] I arrived, did the work, learned the bit business,
[00:57] built the trust and built my way out
[01:00] from senior analyst to lead financial
[01:03] analyst to team lead, assistant manager,
[01:06] operations manager and this month, director of governance services.
[01:08] Six roles in seven years.
[01:11] I did not climb by talking about my values.
[01:14] I climbed by delivering it.
[01:17] And the titles are still the smallest part of the story.
[01:25] In terms of sourcing world, it's changed enormously.
[01:28] Vendor portfolios scale faster than headcount.
[01:30] Financial governance has moved from year-end cleanups to realtime control.
[01:34] My view is simple.
[01:37] Governance is no longer back office administration.
[01:40] It's the system that protects the value.
[01:42] A sourcing deal promised in first place.
[01:45] Let me show you what that looks like for Abby.
[01:49] My team governs a pharmaceutical portfolio that grew like several times over years.
[01:54] We built a crossf functional team trained across contract, finance, performance, management, so we could flex any scope
[02:07] Group.
[02:09] Over years, $5.23 23 million in savings, zero missed governance cycle, 53% drop in overdue compliance action, and over 1,400 untracked records uploaded at zero.
[02:23] Just to restore accuracy, the client didn't know they'd lost.
[02:26] For Lenar, we resolved around $10.7 million variance across 190 aged purchase orders and closed every single one with a clean auditable position.
[02:35] We automated their credit reporting uh dashboard as well.
[02:41] We also did a 5 million in cost avoidance and also got their trust um that let us get let us get new businesses to Neo.
[02:46] But here's the part that mattered to me the most.
[02:58] None of that came from a tool I bought.
[03:00] It came from how I built people.
[03:02] I never built visibility for
[03:08] myself with words.
[03:10] I built it with the value I brought in and the boldness to speak up in any room no matter how senior they are.
[03:15] That's the boldness I hand to my team.
[03:18] Do not create noise but create presence.
[03:24] My approach to governance rests on cadence and structure that holds whether I am in the room or not like weekly invoice reconilation, monthly business reviews, heat maps, cottonly reviews, so on and so forth.
[03:37] Governance is a system so well built that it never goes wrong in first place.
[03:45] Also, one thing I've learned is I cannot build people by pushing harder.
[03:47] I build their confidence slowly.
[03:50] I let them on their own things in their own way.
[03:53] I give them room to explore, to be creative, to find the version of the answer that's theirs and not just mine.
[04:05] And I have spent nearly seven years making that investment quietly,
[04:09] Consistently, without needing credit for it.
[04:13] That's what a people champion looks like.
[04:16] Any day when I look back, I want to see me people mention that this is this was the kind of leader I worked with in my career.
[04:23] One I learned from, grew together and trusted the most.
[04:27] Thank you.