March 7, 2025 • 13 mins
As a trailblazer and champion for women in banking, Smith held a number of senior leadership positions for Bank of America during her 34-year career with the company. Those included such roles as the head of Global Human Resources, where she transformed the bank’s hiring, employee benefits, and diversity and inclusion efforts and subsequently Chief Administrative Officer. Among her numerous recognitions include American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Banking, Business North Carolina’s Most Influential Business Leaders in North Carolina, and Charlotte Businesswoman of the Year by Queens University.
In 2021, Smith was named the Citizen of the Carolinas, the CLT Alliance’s most prestigious award given to a Carolinian who has made great strides in the betterment of the quality of life in the Charlotte region and the country through years of accomplishment in community leadership. She has been an ardent supporter of equitable economic mobility in Charlotte, including serving as the inaugural Co-Chair of the Leading on Opportunity Council. Smith is the chair of Bank of America Alumni Network and also sits on the boards of HCA, Every Mother Counts and is the Co-Chair of the Charlotte Sports Foundation.
Smith was also the Chair of the Executive Committee for the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce in 2017, one of the CLT Alliance’s two predecessor organizations. She currently serves as Interim President & CEO for the CLT Alliance.
In 2021, Smith was named the Citizen of the Carolinas, the CLT Alliance’s most prestigious award given to a Carolinian who has made great strides in the betterment of the quality of life in the Charlotte region and the country through years of accomplishment in community leadership. She has been an ardent supporter of equitable economic mobility in Charlotte, including serving as the inaugural Co-Chair of the Leading on Opportunity Council. Smith is the chair of Bank of America Alumni Network and also sits on the boards of HCA, Every Mother Counts and is the Co-Chair of the Charlotte Sports Foundation.
Smith was also the Chair of the Executive Committee for the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce in 2017, one of the CLT Alliance’s two predecessor organizations. She currently serves as Interim President & CEO for the CLT Alliance.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the iHeartMedia Charlotte Women of Impact, celebrating women
in our community, presented by the Carolina Ascent and New
Hope Treatment Centers.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hat's Chelsea here.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
I'm with Andrea Smith of the Carolina Ascent, your women's
professional soccer team.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Hey, Chelsea, it's great being here today. Tell us about
your background with the Carolina Ascent. I am so excited
about the Carolina Ascent and it's a relatively hopefully people
have heard of it, but it's a relatively new venture
in Charlotte, the first women professional team. And I got
involved about a year and a half ago and had
(00:36):
heard about the women's team coming here and began talking
to the owners and over time was able to get
together with ten other women and we formed an investor
group called Empower Her Fund, and so now we own
about twenty five percent of the team.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
That's awesome. Did you know any of these women prior
to forming the Empower Her Fund?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
I knew a couple, but they weren't good friends of mine.
And the woman that is our representative on the board
I had never met before in my life, and so
we had a gathering at my house and I invited
a bunch of people I didn't know, and she was
one of them, and we just hit it off and
we ended up using our networks and then they used there.
(01:22):
So it's really like three four degrees of separation. And
we have a really great, incredible group of diverse women,
including a woman in South Carolina, and which we think
is super appropriate because it's the Carolina's ascent.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yeah, you can drive right down the street and there
you are in South Carolina.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Thinking of empowering the next generation of women, which character
traits do you think have been the most instrumental to
your success?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Well, that's a great question. If I think back in
the totality of my career, I think there's probably a
few things that stand out. First of all, integrity. You know,
at the end of the day, that's you leave every
job that you go into with your integrity. So I
(02:10):
never wanted to compromise it. I always want to treat
people with dignity and respect and have a set of
values that I stayed true to. Curiosity, being curious, pulling threads,
understanding what I did how it added value, allowed me
to ask questions of how I can do it better. Courage,
(02:31):
just having the courage to try new things, and being
okay with failure. Some of the best learning opportunities I
had were when I failed, however uncomfortable that felt at
the time. I would say empathy has played a big
role in my career, and empathy meaning understanding other people's perspectives,
(02:54):
understanding what motivated other people, understanding how to lead. Throughout
my career, I learned that one size doesn't fit all,
and so it's really important to understand the different viewpoints
you have around the table and how you then bring
a team together around a common goal. I think you know,
communication is always a critical skill set, being able to
(03:19):
get people excited around a vision and then talk about
how you're going to get there. And you can never
over communicate, as something that I've seen throughout my career.
You might think you've said something ten, twelve, fifteen times,
but not until another person needs to use or do
what you've said, does it really click. So I'm a
big over communicator.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Same and I said that exactly to somebody last week.
You cannot over communicate with me, but you can under communicate,
and that creates problem absolutely. I think often young people
struggle with what they want to do in their careers.
What are your thoughts on trying to figure it all
out in the beginning.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I say don't. I say it's too much. That's putting
so much pressure on young people. I have three children myself,
and I encourage them to try as many things as possible.
You're never going to know what you love if you
don't try new things. And there's a few people that
(04:16):
know what they want to be, you know, from the
very beginning, a doctor, a lawyer, astronaut. But my experience
has been most people don't. And if you pigeonhole yourself
right at the beginning, you could be losing so many
things that you could be great. And so I just
I try to unburden young people and say, you know,
(04:39):
try this, and so many skill sets are portable, get
some experience, and then take it to a job that's
totally outside of where you are. And it's kind of
surprising to people to see how portable skill sets are.
Whether it's relationship management, whether it's marketing, whether it's pr
whether it's communication, whether it's public speaking. There's so many
things that go from job job, and so I just
(05:01):
encourage kids not to feel that pressure and just to
try as many things as possible.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I went to Georgia Tech and now I work on
a morning show. So talk about not knowing. There is
that pressure to be, Like I've said out loud, like
if I just wanted to be a nurse, there's a
there's a path for that. But there I was, you know,
with all these different interests that didn't really add up
to a job.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Well. And it's funny though, I was pre med for
two years in college, and my grandfather was a doctor
and I would go on house calls with him, and
he lived in a really small town population two thousand,
and people would pay us with a chicken, a live chicken,
or a basket of vegetables or whatever, and I loved
(05:44):
it and I would go to his office. So I
was pre med, and then I was working at a
small bank the whole time in college. I'm like, I
cannot go to school for ten more years. I love
my customers. I was a little teller at a bank,
and so I'd always wanted to change lives. That's why
I want to be a doctor. So I just started
changing lives differently, working at a bank, helping people get alone,
(06:08):
get their first home, get their child, through college, buy
a car, and then started volunteering in the community, and
felt like I kept doing that in different ways. Nothing
I graduate with an ECON degree, and you know now
I'm an investor and a women's soccer team. So it
curious in giving yourself some grace and pushing yourself to
(06:28):
try new things, realizing that if you fail, it's okay.
Pick yourself up and you're not dying. You can try
something else.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
So similarly, based on the lessons you've learned from your experience,
what would you say if you could go back in
time and speak to your twenty year old self. Would
you do anything differently?
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Oh? Absolutely, I would not put nearly as much pressure
on myself to be perfect all the time. I felt
like everything had to be exactly right, stay up all
night working on every little piece of a presentation. I
would belabor anytime that something didn't go exactly the way
(07:09):
I wanted, how could I have fixed it? I would
go back and tell myself, let those small things go.
This is absolutely a marathon, not a twenty five yard dash,
and let's you know, enjoy it more. Instead of putting
all that pressure on yourself, I think I would have
told myself to have more fun not work so much.
(07:30):
You know, I was working eighty ninety hours a week,
and you know, all the time it worked out okay now,
And luckily I got those perspectives younger, so and I
had kids older, and so it became really important to
me to spend time with my kids. And so, having
(07:52):
worked so much in my younger days, I made it
a priority and I told everyone, I'm leaving, I am
going to spend time with my kids. I'm going to
the play, I'm going to the soccer game, I'm going
to the chess match, I'm going to whatever. I will
be online later if you need me, but put it
all on my calendar, so everyone knew where I was.
But that was really important to me. And because I
(08:13):
had done, you know, learned that growing up in my career,
I felt more empowered to do that later on.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Have you experienced barriers in your career and how have
you broken those down?
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, absolutely barriers When I started in my career. I
started at a bank when I was twenty one, right
out of college, and there were no women anywhere, no
women in senior leadership, no women on the board, no women.
And the men treated all the women like we should
(08:50):
be home with our children cooking dinner, and would say
things like that. I'll never forget one meeting I went into.
I went into the meeting, and this man came up
to me and said, I like my coffee with cream.
I said, really, I like mine black, and I went
and sat down. He thought, you know, I was the
(09:11):
coffee girl. So my point is for some of the
instances where I encountered barriers, I treated them with humor. Others,
I sat down with people and asked them, you know, why,
how'd you get here? How can you help me? How
can I help you? So tried to get perspectives and
(09:33):
build relationships. I also started sharing my power along the
way with some of these detractors. So my view was always, well,
all we can all boats rise, we can all be
more successful together. And I think when people saw that
I would help them even though they weren't helping me,
I always took the higher road. It sort of helped
(09:55):
them not worry that I was a woman and see
me more as a tea player. I always felt like
I worked harder than everybody else. I'll never forget a
time that I was in a job in my peer
who I was a definitely better performer than told me
his pay and he was making much more than I was.
And so I went into my boss's office. I said, hey,
(10:17):
you know, he just told me this, and I'm going
to leave if you don't match it because I know
my metrics are better than his. And the next day
I had a raise to equal his. So this goes
back to a lot of the coaching I give people
is around got to advocate for yourself. As people know,
I ended up running HR for a large company for
many years, and I always told people, you still have
(10:39):
to advocate for yourself HR. Other people aren't going to
do your bidding. And I role play with people. I
help people be confident to have these conversations. And you know,
I think it's really important that especially women talk about
uncomfortable topics like pay. Men don't have a problem talking
about that weirdly, nor do they have a problem raising
(11:02):
their hand when they're barely qualified and women are much
more qualified but or you know, don't raise their hand
as quickly.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
If you had the ears of young women in Charlotte,
which you do, what advice would you give them as
they set out on their careers well.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
First of all, I would say, just be yourself, don't
try to be anyone else. You know, lean into what
you do well, be self aware. Ask people to be
a mentor people that you respect that you look at
their leadership and you want to be like that. Ask
them for a cup of coffee. If they say no,
move on to the next one. But my whole career,
(11:39):
I was lucky to have people that would spend time
with me and be very honest with me and give
me feedback. I don't exactly love feedback, but you know,
it's an important way to develop. And I would also
tell people to get involved in the community. Don't just
go into a job and be all in on your job.
One of the best things I ever did was get
(12:00):
really involved in the community. Get other perspectives. You're able
to learn things as a leader when you're involved in
the community in a different place than your job. You
might be, I don't know, the president of the Toastmasters.
You might be the head of the audit committee of
a nonprofit. You might be doing something totally different that
is only going to enhance your skill set, but create
(12:20):
a new perspective for you to see other things in
the community. That can take back into your job and
be a better leader. I think all of those things
are extremely important, and I would tell people to take risks,
try new things, push yourself out of your comfort zone,
because that's when you're going to learn the most.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
This has all been amazing and inspiring. Is there anything
that we've left out that you feel like you want
to give as far as advice or anything that comes
up that was instrumental in your path to getting here?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I guess I would just end with one of my
favorite quotes that I've had on my desk for twenty
twenty five years, and it's by Maya Angelou in paraphrase,
to go something like this. People won't remember what you did,
people won't remember what you said, but they'll always remember
(13:08):
how you made them feel. And that's something that I
try to practice every day.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
I feel inspired. Let's go out there, Let's go get them.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
iHeartMedia. Charlotte Women of Impact celebrating women in our community,
presented by the Carolina Ascent and New Hope Treatment Centers,
This is the iHeartMedia Charlotte Women of Impact, celebrating women
in our community, presented by the Carolina Ascent and New
Hope Treatment Centers.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hat's Chelsea here.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
I'm with Andrea Smith of the Carolina Ascent, your women's
professional soccer team.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Hey, Chelsea, it's great being here today. Tell us about
your background with the Carolina Ascent. I am so excited
about the Carolina Ascent and it's a relatively hopefully people
have heard of it, but it's a relatively new venture
in Charlotte, the first women professional team. And I got
involved about a year and a half ago and had
(00:36):
heard about the women's team coming here and began talking
to the owners and over time was able to get
together with ten other women and we formed an investor
group called Empower Her Fund, and so now we own
about twenty five percent of the team.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
That's awesome. Did you know any of these women prior
to forming the Empower Her Fund?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
I knew a couple, but they weren't good friends of mine.
And the woman that is our representative on the board
I had never met before in my life, and so
we had a gathering at my house and I invited
a bunch of people I didn't know, and she was
one of them, and we just hit it off and
we ended up using our networks and then they used there.
(01:22):
So it's really like three four degrees of separation. And
we have a really great, incredible group of diverse women,
including a woman in South Carolina, and which we think
is super appropriate because it's the Carolina's ascent.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yeah, you can drive right down the street and there
you are in South Carolina.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Thinking of empowering the next generation of women, which character
traits do you think have been the most instrumental to
your success?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Well, that's a great question. If I think back in
the totality of my career, I think there's probably a
few things that stand out. First of all, integrity. You know,
at the end of the day, that's you leave every
job that you go into with your integrity. So I
(02:10):
never wanted to compromise it. I always want to treat
people with dignity and respect and have a set of
values that I stayed true to. Curiosity, being curious, pulling threads,
understanding what I did how it added value, allowed me
to ask questions of how I can do it better. Courage,
(02:31):
just having the courage to try new things, and being
okay with failure. Some of the best learning opportunities I
had were when I failed, however uncomfortable that felt at
the time. I would say empathy has played a big
role in my career, and empathy meaning understanding other people's perspectives,
(02:54):
understanding what motivated other people, understanding how to lead. Throughout
my career, I learned that one size doesn't fit all,
and so it's really important to understand the different viewpoints
you have around the table and how you then bring
a team together around a common goal. I think you know,
communication is always a critical skill set, being able to
(03:19):
get people excited around a vision and then talk about
how you're going to get there. And you can never
over communicate, as something that I've seen throughout my career.
You might think you've said something ten, twelve, fifteen times,
but not until another person needs to use or do
what you've said, does it really click. So I'm a
big over communicator.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Same and I said that exactly to somebody last week.
You cannot over communicate with me, but you can under communicate,
and that creates problem absolutely. I think often young people
struggle with what they want to do in their careers.
What are your thoughts on trying to figure it all
out in the beginning.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I say don't. I say it's too much. That's putting
so much pressure on young people. I have three children myself,
and I encourage them to try as many things as possible.
You're never going to know what you love if you
don't try new things. And there's a few people that
(04:16):
know what they want to be, you know, from the
very beginning, a doctor, a lawyer, astronaut. But my experience
has been most people don't. And if you pigeonhole yourself
right at the beginning, you could be losing so many
things that you could be great. And so I just
I try to unburden young people and say, you know,
(04:39):
try this, and so many skill sets are portable, get
some experience, and then take it to a job that's
totally outside of where you are. And it's kind of
surprising to people to see how portable skill sets are.
Whether it's relationship management, whether it's marketing, whether it's pr
whether it's communication, whether it's public speaking. There's so many
things that go from job job, and so I just
(05:01):
encourage kids not to feel that pressure and just to
try as many things as possible.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I went to Georgia Tech and now I work on
a morning show. So talk about not knowing. There is
that pressure to be, Like I've said out loud, like
if I just wanted to be a nurse, there's a
there's a path for that. But there I was, you know,
with all these different interests that didn't really add up
to a job.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Well. And it's funny though, I was pre med for
two years in college, and my grandfather was a doctor
and I would go on house calls with him, and
he lived in a really small town population two thousand,
and people would pay us with a chicken, a live chicken,
or a basket of vegetables or whatever, and I loved
(05:44):
it and I would go to his office. So I
was pre med, and then I was working at a
small bank the whole time in college. I'm like, I
cannot go to school for ten more years. I love
my customers. I was a little teller at a bank,
and so I'd always wanted to change lives. That's why
I want to be a doctor. So I just started
changing lives differently, working at a bank, helping people get alone,
(06:08):
get their first home, get their child, through college, buy
a car, and then started volunteering in the community, and
felt like I kept doing that in different ways. Nothing
I graduate with an ECON degree, and you know now
I'm an investor and a women's soccer team. So it
curious in giving yourself some grace and pushing yourself to
(06:28):
try new things, realizing that if you fail, it's okay.
Pick yourself up and you're not dying. You can try
something else.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
So similarly, based on the lessons you've learned from your experience,
what would you say if you could go back in
time and speak to your twenty year old self. Would
you do anything differently?
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Oh? Absolutely, I would not put nearly as much pressure
on myself to be perfect all the time. I felt
like everything had to be exactly right, stay up all
night working on every little piece of a presentation. I
would belabor anytime that something didn't go exactly the way
(07:09):
I wanted, how could I have fixed it? I would
go back and tell myself, let those small things go.
This is absolutely a marathon, not a twenty five yard dash,
and let's you know, enjoy it more. Instead of putting
all that pressure on yourself, I think I would have
told myself to have more fun not work so much.
(07:30):
You know, I was working eighty ninety hours a week,
and you know, all the time it worked out okay now,
And luckily I got those perspectives younger, so and I
had kids older, and so it became really important to
me to spend time with my kids. And so, having
(07:52):
worked so much in my younger days, I made it
a priority and I told everyone, I'm leaving, I am
going to spend time with my kids. I'm going to
the play, I'm going to the soccer game, I'm going
to the chess match, I'm going to whatever. I will
be online later if you need me, but put it
all on my calendar, so everyone knew where I was.
But that was really important to me. And because I
(08:13):
had done, you know, learned that growing up in my career,
I felt more empowered to do that later on.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Have you experienced barriers in your career and how have
you broken those down?
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, absolutely barriers When I started in my career. I
started at a bank when I was twenty one, right
out of college, and there were no women anywhere, no
women in senior leadership, no women on the board, no women.
And the men treated all the women like we should
(08:50):
be home with our children cooking dinner, and would say
things like that. I'll never forget one meeting I went into.
I went into the meeting, and this man came up
to me and said, I like my coffee with cream.
I said, really, I like mine black, and I went
and sat down. He thought, you know, I was the
(09:11):
coffee girl. So my point is for some of the
instances where I encountered barriers, I treated them with humor. Others,
I sat down with people and asked them, you know, why,
how'd you get here? How can you help me? How
can I help you? So tried to get perspectives and
(09:33):
build relationships. I also started sharing my power along the
way with some of these detractors. So my view was always, well,
all we can all boats rise, we can all be
more successful together. And I think when people saw that
I would help them even though they weren't helping me,
I always took the higher road. It sort of helped
(09:55):
them not worry that I was a woman and see
me more as a tea player. I always felt like
I worked harder than everybody else. I'll never forget a
time that I was in a job in my peer
who I was a definitely better performer than told me
his pay and he was making much more than I was.
And so I went into my boss's office. I said, hey,
(10:17):
you know, he just told me this, and I'm going
to leave if you don't match it because I know
my metrics are better than his. And the next day
I had a raise to equal his. So this goes
back to a lot of the coaching I give people
is around got to advocate for yourself. As people know,
I ended up running HR for a large company for
many years, and I always told people, you still have
(10:39):
to advocate for yourself HR. Other people aren't going to
do your bidding. And I role play with people. I
help people be confident to have these conversations. And you know,
I think it's really important that especially women talk about
uncomfortable topics like pay. Men don't have a problem talking
about that weirdly, nor do they have a problem raising
(11:02):
their hand when they're barely qualified and women are much
more qualified but or you know, don't raise their hand
as quickly.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
If you had the ears of young women in Charlotte,
which you do, what advice would you give them as
they set out on their careers well.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
First of all, I would say, just be yourself, don't
try to be anyone else. You know, lean into what
you do well, be self aware. Ask people to be
a mentor people that you respect that you look at
their leadership and you want to be like that. Ask
them for a cup of coffee. If they say no,
move on to the next one. But my whole career,
(11:39):
I was lucky to have people that would spend time
with me and be very honest with me and give
me feedback. I don't exactly love feedback, but you know,
it's an important way to develop. And I would also
tell people to get involved in the community. Don't just
go into a job and be all in on your job.
One of the best things I ever did was get
(12:00):
really involved in the community. Get other perspectives. You're able
to learn things as a leader when you're involved in
the community in a different place than your job. You
might be, I don't know, the president of the Toastmasters.
You might be the head of the audit committee of
a nonprofit. You might be doing something totally different that
is only going to enhance your skill set, but create
(12:20):
a new perspective for you to see other things in
the community. That can take back into your job and
be a better leader. I think all of those things
are extremely important, and I would tell people to take risks,
try new things, push yourself out of your comfort zone,
because that's when you're going to learn the most.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
This has all been amazing and inspiring. Is there anything
that we've left out that you feel like you want
to give as far as advice or anything that comes
up that was instrumental in your path to getting here?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I guess I would just end with one of my
favorite quotes that I've had on my desk for twenty
twenty five years, and it's by Maya Angelou in paraphrase,
to go something like this. People won't remember what you did,
people won't remember what you said, but they'll always remember
(13:08):
how you made them feel. And that's something that I
try to practice every day.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
I feel inspired. Let's go out there, Let's go get them.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
iHeartMedia. Charlotte Women of Impact celebrating women in our community,
presented by the Carolina Ascent and New Hope Treatment Centers,
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