“I often reference Maya Angelou’s quote, ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel’,” says Karelis Barrios. “It’s the resounding philosophy of who I want to be as a leader.”

As Global Head of Wholesale Lending Operations at Citi, Barrios leads with a rare mix of humility and resolve, shaped by a path that began far from Wall Street. She shares how her immigrant journey, an early leadership misstep, and a lifelong pursuit of “optionality” have shaped her approach to leading teams, mentoring others, and defining success by her own measure.

Widening the Aperture of What’s Possible

Born in Cuba, Barrios moved to the United States while in middle school, arriving with little to no English proficiency. While ESL classes helped her pick up the language, she struggled with pronunciation, leading her father to send her to a four-week immersion program in Tennessee focused purely on diction.

“I was upset at him at the time about going, but I wonder if some of the opportunities I received would still be the same if I hadn’t gone,” she reflects now. It’s a small, formative example of a theme that runs through her career: the compounding value of decisions made early that widen the aperture of what’s possible later.

That aperture kept widening. Barrios went on to study at the University of Miami and, despite never having set foot in New York, accepted a job there with Morgan Stanley the moment it was offered. She admits she was drawn in as much by the romance of the idea of living in New York as by the opportunity itself. Twenty years, several institutions, and a role building an organization from scratch at Capital One later, she joined Citi a little over four years ago to become the Global Head of Wholesale Lending Operations.

“I love lending,” Barrios says. “When you look at even the most complicated products in a bank, at their foundation, almost everything comes back to it.” What sealed it for her was Citi itself, not only its scale, but also the people she met along the way.

“Citi is the most global bank, and that’s not by accident,” she asserts. “You’ll meet people sitting in offices all over the world, and you can walk into an office and hear a dozen different languages being spoken. It’s really impressive.”

Learning to Lead by Failing First

The moment that most shaped Barrios as a leader is not a triumph, but rather a formative challenge during her first leadership role.

“I had this idea that leadership meant I had to take responsibility for everything, and make sure I was personally the one doing everything,” Barrios recalls. That approach ultimately proved unsustainable and led to an adjustment in her scope. It was, by her own account, a sobering experience. She came to realize that as a leader, success was no longer measured by how much she alone could produce, but by how well a team around her could perform without her hands on every piece of it.

“It was an adjustment to get to a place where I realized it’s not about highlighting what I’m doing but shining a light on the work that my team is doing.” Recognizing her team’s work, rather than completing it herself, she learned, was what moved people to contribute. Later, that same manager who had been part of the earlier scope adjustment gave her another opportunity, reinforcing that the experience was not an endpoint but part of her development as a leader.

“A step back in leadership does not have to be the end of the story. Sometimes it creates the space to grow, and strong leaders recognize when someone is ready to be given another opportunity”

Mentors at Every Level

For Barrios, the best mentors are the ones who show you a different perspective on what’s possible. One mentor, a now retired executive she still considers a friend, gave her an opportunity she wasn’t fully sure she was ready for. “He saw potential in me that I wasn’t yet seeing in myself,” she says. “We all need someone to give us that next big opportunity.”

Barrios also believes that guidance doesn’t always have to come from people with more experience, it can be equally powerful coming from someone more junior. She recalls one colleague, roughly a decade younger, who helped her reframe a moment of anxiety before a new role.

“She just looked at me and said, ‘What are you so worried about? The imposter never thinks they’re the imposter.’ And it hit me: I was overanalyzing something I was genuinely excited about. I have learned to trust my gut, and recognize that sound advice can come from many directions, not just from those with the most seniority.

Responsible Leadership, and the Will to Win

In considering what leadership will require in the years ahead, particularly as AI reshapes the industry, Barrios emphasizes responsible leadership: balancing growth and innovation with integrity and being honest with teams about how technology will change roles while committing to building new pathways for people affected by that change.

That sense of responsibility doesn’t dampen her ambition, if anything, it sharpens it. “I want to win,” Barrios says. “I want my team to win. I want Citi to win.” For her, winning isn’t disconnected from responsibility; it’s the mechanism through which a bank makes good on its role in the broader economy, “the fabric of how money and commerce move.” Not every innovation cycle produces winners, she notes, drawing a comparison to past waves of transformation.

“Think about the railroad, or radio — hugely innovative ideas, but not every company that invested in them survived. It’s going to be the same with AI. Not every AI company is going to be a winner. The work we do, the careful analysis and attention to numbers, matters because it helps maintain liquidity and stability in the markets, in ways that impact people more than they may realize”

Success and Optionality

If there’s a single word Barrios would hand to her younger self, it’s optionality. “The truest measure of success is how much optionality you have,” she emphasizes. “You work hard for the options that success provides you.” It’s a principle she’s tried to instill in her own children: that choice itself, not any particular choice, is what builds self-worth and reduces stress.

For Barrios, that optionality shows up in the everyday. It’s what lets her carve out the time to make her kids, her greatest passion outside of work, a priority. Every Sunday, she cooks, pre-making lunches and snacks for the week from scratch, and explains, “it’s my way of showing them love.”

However, Barrios is careful to note that none of this optionality was hers alone to build. She recognizes that her parents and grandparents gave up far more than she initially understood in order to give her options she didn’t yet know she’d been given. When she made managing director, a milestone celebrated across the financial services industry, she called her parents, and her father said simply in Spanish: Nos ascendieron. “They promoted us.”

“That story still warms me,” Barrios says with a smile. “It’s not about being an immigrant. I work with plenty of people who are the first in their family to go to college, or the first to make what they make. Those are big, powerful moments people carry in different ways.”

That kind of inheritance, she says, never felt like weight. It felt like a cloud of love surrounding her, proof that she could have ended up somewhere very different, and instead, gets to do this.

By Jessica Robaire