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When Tiffany Andras was in high school, she’d show up to class with a bag of coffee in her backpack. Her teacher let her use her personal coffee machine because she understood how hard Andras was working to stay afloat. She was playing competitive softball, working nearly full-time at Krispy Kreme (which necessitated her getting home from work at 11 p.m.), attending high school with an AP courseload, and staying financially afloat. Hard work was engrained into Andras as a first-generation American whose parents came to the United States as political refugees from the former Yugoslavia.
Andras was going into her freshman year of high school when her family faced a major upheaval. Her father was struggling with alcoholism, which led to his incarceration and the end of her parents’ marriage. It left her mother, freshly moved to Arizona, a single parent of two children.
Despite all the challenges of her high school years, Andras would earn her way to Princeton. She was the first person in her family to attend college, earning a spot on Princeton’s varsity softball team, but by that point she was well-practiced at balancing academics, athletics, and work-study.
“When we ask how people’s weekends are, it’s not just a formality.”
Tiffany Andras
After graduating from Princeton, Andras worked the next two years learning the ropes of Financial Reporting at Abercrombie & Fitch’s home office before attending law school at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. She then spent the next eleven years as a litigation attorney at Greenberg Traurig.
Today, the assistant general counsel at Kimberly-Clark has spent the last year learning the in-house ropes, a learning curve she says has been steep.
“The first six months or so, I was worried I’d made a terrible mistake,” Andras says, laughing. Because it’s not the first time she’s felt this way in her career. Her first year or so as a lawyer, Andras was pretty sure she was going to give it up. She hated being a new associate and when she and her new husband moved to Chicago, she promised him she’d give practicing law six more months before calling it quits. She’d spend another ten years at the firm. All that is to say, “a terrible mistake” in Andras’s experience might just mean, “I can’t perform my best right now and need a little more time to get my bearings.”
“I wasn’t sure I could handle this kind of change and thought maybe I should go back to the law firm,” Andras recalls about going in-house. “I went from being the person that people came to for institutional knowledge to having to learn it from scratch.”
But a year in, Andras is starting to feel at home. She believes she’s become a better lawyer because of the challenge and is putting a lot of work into fostering collaboration. At a law firm, action is much more decisive and top-down driven, whereas being in-house offers the chance to drive more consensus-driven and collaborative decision-making. It’s an adjustment, but it’s one Andras has leaned into.
Andras also put a lot of intentionality into authenticity. Especially with employees working remotely across the globe, the attorney says speaking openly and honestly about where people are in their lives is a great way to start a meeting.
“When we ask how people’s weekends are, it’s not just a formality,” the AGC explains. “I know some people think that it might be wasted time, but sometimes you had a really bad weekend and your kids had soccer all day and it was raining and you came into work feeling more tired than you went into the weekend. That’s an important conversation to have, and we have them.”
Andras’s focus on authenticity, her resolve, and what feels like an unshakeable spirit haven’t been without their serious tests over the years. Last year, Andras was blindsided by the discovery that she had a rare adrenal gland tumor that was the size of a baseball that required immediate surgery. Her diagnosis was so niche and unpredictable that the tumor’s true nature evaded pre-op testing, leading to unforeseen post-surgery complications that nearly killed her.
After six weeks of recovery, an opportunity in the form of an in-house position at the iconic consumer goods company Kimberly-Clark came to her attention. Great opportunities have had a way of popping up in her life at the conclusion of great challenges.
Being at Kimberly-Clark makes sense for an attorney who says she gets made fun of by her friends and family for her focus on sustainability at home.
“I’m the ‘reusable-paper towel lady’ who works for a paper company,” Andras says with a smile. “We do personal knowledge shares here, and I did an entire presentation on my sustainability ‘swap-outs.’ What I have learned about this industry is that we can be part of the solution. Our choices today can have long-term positive outcomes in the future. It may sound strange, but coming to Kimberly-Clark has been the single biggest point of inspiration in my own sustainable journey. I really believe it’s possible, and I see here how we are fulfilling our company motto of ‘better care for a better world.’”
In private practice, Andras defended oil and gas, Big Pharma, and other product manufacturers in both environmental and product liability litigation, but she says that’s exactly the point. She knows what it takes for large organizations to create positive change in the face of emerging science. And she believes sustainability does not have to come at the cost of profitable business.
If there’s anyone who understands overcoming a serious challenge, it’s Andras. It may take a pot of coffee or a few weeks of recovery, but the attorney will keep coming up victorious.
“Tiffany is a valued client and former GT team member whose leadership and dedication to excellence continue to shine in her work at Kimberly-Clark.”
–Frank Citera, Shareholder
