Tag Archive for: Stephanie Smith

Voice of Experience: Stephanie Smith, Executive Vice President and Marketing COO, Wells Fargo

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Stephanie SmithBy Cathie Ericson

Success in your career can be determined by your network, which is why women can’t overlook the importance of building and maintaining relationships — not just in your company or department, but across a broad swath of the industry.

“Like many women, at the start of my career, I was very heads down on my work as I sought to perform at a high level,” says Wells Fargo’s Stephanie Smith. “While I created relationships in my company, I learned over the course of my career how critical it is to have those relationships across an industry, whether you’re trying to build a team or benchmark best practices.”

Capturing the Opportunities Available in Marketing

Currently Smith is COO for Wells Fargo Marketing, and her goal is to create a world-class marketing organization within Wells Fargo. The domain is vast, as marketing is a centralized enterprise function that supports every business in the company, as well as digital marketing and other functions.

Before moving into this role, Smith had spent a decade in leadership roles in digital channels at Wells Fargo and Bank of America, where she oversaw the online banking and electronic payments functions as well as digital marketing and sales.
Before joining the corporate world, Smith had been a political appointee in the Clinton administration, where she was the General Deputy Assistant Secretary for Housing; prior to that she had worked with national and regional non-profits that focused on affordable housing and community development.

While her career has encompassed very different assignments, Smith says that the connective tissue among all her positions has been her passion for thinking about how capitalism can help working- and middle-class Americans achieve their goals.
While it’s hard to choose just one professional achievement across a career that spans so many domains, Smith says that she is most proud of the role she has had in building high-performing teams no matter where she was.

Today she sees a number of opportunities and challenges, as the function of marketing is changing rapidly due to the impact of technology, as is every part of the business world.

Smith finds herself most excited about the work Wells Fargo is doing to apply robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, agile methodology and process reengineering to make marketing functions more efficient and effective. These new capabilities that are coming to market fit well with her background, which has been focused on the intersection of determining how you best serve customers and their financial needs using technology, along with the impact of digital technology on every aspect of marketing, including creating customized experiences.

In the operational centers of marketing, she sees that digital technology and automation are streamlining work that used to be highly manual. “Even five years ago we had a smaller set of capabilities to work with; the acceleration brought on by the expansion of marketing technology has been so constant,” Smith notes.

Seeing Diversity Across the Organization

Over the years, Smith has seen that women are given fewer opportunities for stretch assignments — partially because they aren’t offered to them as much, but also because women don’t tend to ask for them as often as men. She attributes this to women’s propensity to feel like they have to be 100 percent ready for a role before taking it, whereas men feel like they need to about 50 percent ready.

“I often share the message with young women that they don’t have to know everything on day one,” Smith says. She adds that mastering a steep learning curve will contribute to your competency and your career, supplemented by asking for support when you need it.

She relays one of her favorite pieces of advice, shared by her boss in her first job out of graduate school where she was developing affordable housing: “You don’t have to have all the answers; you just have to know the questions to ask,” which she has found helpful in a variety of new roles and challenges.

In addition she urges women not to assume that their work will speak for itself and get duly recognized since the reality is that you have to do the great work, but promote it as well. She appreciates when women in senior roles promote the work of other women, a strategy that is even more important in support of women of color.

Smith has been “out” at work as a lesbian since she left college, but acknowledges that it’s been a distinct advantage to live and work for most of her career in the accepting Bay Area. “For many others in the corporate environment, they may not have the benefit of geographic location as I do.”

Being out allows her to bring her whole self to work and not worry about expending energy on hiding her sexual orientation or her family, which makes her a better leader and team member. She also enjoys being an advocate for others as she knows how important it is to see people who are like you in the senior ranks.

As the former executive advisor to the LGBTQ employee group at Wells Fargo for a number of years, she has been proud to help lead productive discussions surrounding how the company can best support team members.

As an example, Wells Fargo’s decision to sign on to the amicus brief in support of the 2015 Supreme Court case on freedom to marry (Obergefell v. Hodges) was important, as it underscored that Wells Fargo is a company that supports the rights of its LGBTQ team members and customers. She finds this open support, combined with equal benefits for team members in same-sex relationships, to be an asset in attracting and retaining employees, and goes to the heart of Wells Fargo’s values of diversity and inclusion.

A Values-Driven Personal Life

With 17- and 15 year-old daughters, Smith and her wife structure their non-work time around their kids in a values-based way. The first is voluntarism, and they work together as a family at several homeless programs on a monthly basis; the second is education and they volunteer at the girls’ schools, which allows them to support education while also being around their daughters. And finally, they value cultural experiences so they frequently travel internationally as a family. “We structure our time around these three dimensions, which both lets us reinforce what we value as a family and gives us meaningful time with our children.”

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Voice of Experience: Stephanie Smith, Managing Director, Global Head Credit Operations, Goldman Sachs

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Stephanie SmithCuriosity and a willingness to say “yes” have been the driving forces behind Stephanie Smith’s successful career in the hypercompetitive Wall Street environment.

Smith joined Goldman Sachs in July 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom. Though her background was in marketing, she was drawn in by the interesting work that Goldman was doing in e-commerce and spent five years developing strategy for the business. Then, in 2004, she leveraged the many internal relationships she had formed through networking to pursue a new opportunity in the firm’s Operations Division.

While Operations was not necessarily an expected career change, she was immensely curious about the space. Smith was offered an opportunity to join the Client Onboarding team, which is responsible for creating new accounts for clients across all products traded by the firm. “I was quickly catapulted from being a team member working on projects to leading a team of 20,” she recalls. “I was out of my comfort zone, but loving every minute of it!”

Her next “yes” was to the Credit Operations group. “Again, I had no background in this specific industry but was curious about the product and the business. I realized that even if I didn’t have direct experience, I was highly motivated to learn and excited to dive into the opportunity to try something new,” Smith says. “Ultimately I felt supported by the firm that if it didn’t work out, they would redeploy me. Trying something new was 50% fun and 50% challenge.” She soon rose from her initial regional oversight to managing the global team of over 400 people.

In her current role, Smith is excited to be constantly challenged to learn new regulatory rules, partner with her peers and team to develop implementation strategies and develop ideas that will build operational efficiency in the support of fixed income and derivative products.

She relishes a role that enables her to think strategically about issues such as how the firm should build its technological architecture, what consortiums it should join, and what its response should be to proposed rule changes. “We are working with industry partners and leaders internally on how to scale this business and what technological infrastructures we should put in place to help us in the future.”

She says that many of the current changes are driven by the changing regulatory environment and also because of client demand. “Our clients are looking for more creative ways of generating and preserving revenue, and at Goldman Sachs we continually challenge ourselves to develop solutions that meet their needs.”

Just Say Yes

Smith’s advice, especially for women, is simple. “You have to take a chance and speak up, ask questions and expand your network.” Smith says women have a tendency to opt themselves out – after achieving academic success in school, they tend to withdraw when surrounded by a team of smart people. This manifests itself in staying quiet if you don’t have the perfect answer or know 100 percent about a product or solution.

“I was guilty of opting out early in my career, but by working with mentors over the years I’ve learned that we’re all just trying to figure it out,” Smith says. “The beauty of success is harnessing the power of the team — I bring something to the table, you bring something and collectively we develop an answer.”

And that is the advice she believes young women need to hear as they start their career: to jump in with both feet; take risks; and say yes.

“Even when I didn’t know all the details of what I was asked to do, I trusted my managers and said yes, in spite of the butterflies in my stomach. It wasn’t always easy, but it was always worth it.”

This “yes” mentality, combined with her curiosity, is what has led Smith up the ladder.

Along the way, she has learned valuable lessons about perspective and pivoting. Each success and setback is part of a broader journey and should not be evaluated in isolation.
Smith acknowledges she had roles in which she performed well but didn’t feel sufficiently motivated. However, she notes, “I learned something through every experience that led me to my next step, whether it was because I met new and interesting people or learned about a new line of business.”

She says she is most proud of her opportunity and ability to change course in her career. Smith remarks, “I joined the firm in the Securities Division headed in one path, then pivoted to Operations where I was heading down the path of being a strategic individual contributor, and then I pivoted again to management. That’s the beauty of Goldman Sachs — it doesn’t matter where you start, you have the ability to remake yourself multiple times throughout your career.”

Mentoring Emerging Leaders

Smith is active in the firm’s Emerging Leaders Program, which identifies up-and-coming diverse leaders within the firm and offers a network where they can receive coaching and establish informal and formal mentoring relationships.

While she is now able to speak about successfully navigating the firm, she didn’t arrive understanding the rules of the road, some of which she attributes to her background as a first generation immigrant.

“I didn’t know what to expect or how to navigate Wall Street,” she says, adding that although she worked extremely hard during her first couple of years and achieved success, her exposure and impact were limited because she kept her head down. “I assumed that if I worked hard, someone would recognize me, but it wasn’t until one of my managers challenged me to be more vocal and develop my network that my career took off.”

Smith is sure to share her advice across the spectrum of diversity found at Goldman Sachs, be it racial, gender, sexual orientation or cultural. “By celebrating our diversity, we create a more cohesive firm that makes us more effective in our day jobs.”

Goldman Sachs also values diversity outside of work. The firm sponsors and partners with several successful organizations that promote the development of diverse talent. Smith currently serves on the board of one such organization, Council of Urban Professionals (CUP). Founded in 2007, this non-profit’s mission is to connect, empower and mobilize the next generation of diverse business and civic leaders in financial services, legal, media, entertainment and both non-profit and public sectors.

“I love CUP because it allows us to supplement our leadership development as a firm. We can create networks and informal connections between Goldman Sachs professionals and our peers in the industry.”

Outside of work, Smith spends time with her husband and two sons, whom she says keep her grounded and focused.

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