About Michelle
Michelle Kaufus has served as the 45th mayor of Provo, Utah since December 5, 2017, and is the first woman to hold the office. She was born and raised in Provo, one of seven children, and earned a B.S. in Geography from Brigham Young University on an academic scholarship. Before becoming mayor she served on the Provo City School Board and in other civic roles. She is a mother of five and is now running for a third term. Under her administration, Provo has been named a national "Best-Performing City" multiple years in a row.
As mayor her oversight has included major infrastructure projects, fiscal responsibility, public safety, and smart growth. She leads roughly 1,400 city employees under a mission statement that did not exist before she took office: "exceptional care for an exceptional community." The night she first won she could not sleep, so she wrote a single-spaced, two-page list of her own weaknesses and used it to pick a deputy mayor who thinks differently and knows more than she does. Her motto for constituents is "I go to them," because nobody wants to walk into a government building to be heard.
On The Franklin Planner Podcast, she sat down with John Harding and George Wright III for a conversation about grit, trust, and what values-driven leadership looks like inside a city hall. She talked about a childhood shaped by her father's drinking and her mother's graveyard shifts as a nurse, the neighbors who paid her to read to their children because they knew she needed the money, and the counselor at Provo High who handed her a four-year list for getting across the street to BYU. She also explained how maternal instinct settles a conference room full of arguing directors.
Key ideas from Michelle’s conversation
Write down your weaknesses before you hire anyone.
The night she won, Kaufus could not sleep, so she wrote a single-spaced, two-page list of everything she was bad at. She used that document to choose a deputy mayor who thinks differently and knows more than she does, rather than someone who mirrored her.
Pick one word as your standard and measure the work against it.
"Exceptional" has stuck with her since seventh grade, and it became Provo's mission statement: exceptional care for an exceptional community. She uses it daily as a bar — not average, not good enough, but a notch higher than what would pass.
Go to the people instead of waiting for them to come to you.
Her motto is "I go to them," because nobody wants to walk into a government building. Her internal gauge for trust is a living room with 25 concerned neighbors: hear them, let them speak, then tell them exactly how you will handle it.
A hard childhood recalibrates what counts as overwhelming.
Kaufus had already lived overwhelming by age 12, when all seven kids were working and the family pooled money on the table Sunday nights. That reset her threshold, which is why she keeps saying "let me lead this and see if I can get us there."
Maternal instinct is the most-used skill in her job.
When eleven men in a conference room fight over the why, she thinks of her sons fighting over swords in the backyard and uses the same skills. Her message to women who feel unproductive at home: everything you do now will serve your future.
