Brenda Smith,

Chief People Officer

Brenda Smith, MBA, CPEC, is a veteran, executive coach with a passion to create authentic, masterful leaders who are both efficient with fiscal management and effective with people. Individuals are more confident, masterful and fulfilled; organizations are more profitable and productive. A former Wall Street Executive, Brenda had P&L accountability for multi-million dollar operating budgets and over $3 billion in assets. She capitalizes on this experience to transform executives and entrepreneurs in the direction of their goals. Using emotional intelligence to drive profound, behavioral change, leaders are able to give up their old, Working Strategy and demonstrate mastery of a new, Winning Strategy after the coaching experience. “Achieving traditional measures of business require mastery of the ambiguity of relationships, change and transition,” she is quoted. Brenda has a mission to embue leaders with emotional economics—the soft skills to produce hard business results in her Emotional Intelligence of Money & Profit—soon to be released as a book that integrates the left brained science of economics with the right brained skills of Emotional Intelligence.

Brenda works with CEO’s, entrepreneurs and executives—people who "have skin in the game" and want to confidently express their authentic leadership through their work. Having become a trusted confidante over the years, client demand called for an expanded scope of coaching, allowing her to create Peoplesmith Global, Inc., which has alliances with nearly fifty coaches on five continents. Collectively, the Peoplesmith Team can be deployed for integrating teams during merger, embarking on new growth strategies, facilitating cultural shifts or responding to economic changes and business opportunities. Individually, coaches impact engagement, retention and results by working with individual leaders to influence others with integrity.

Brenda has served as a vice president for Chemical Bank, PNC Bank Brokerage and Northeast District Manager for Merrill Lynch where she managed over 200 sales executives in business development and sales management. She also initiated executive coaching in the world renowned Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper Business School’s Executive Education program where she also serves as a Coach and teaches graduate students tools for efficient management and effective leadership in her "Professional Intelligence for the Enterprise Leader" Course. Formerly a coach facilitator for the Council for Excellence in Government, she has also served as a trainer for The Dale Carnegie Institute for Leadership and Human Development.

Brenda is a nine year veteran coach, certified by New Ventures West. Believing in the ethics, guidelines and superior results of the [regulated] coaching industry, she is the founding President of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the International Coach Federation (ICF) and served on the board of the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations (ICCO). The soft skills gained from her certification in Emotional Intelligence from the Institute of Health & Human Potential, Toronto, are framed in strategic thinking gained from her Human Capital Strategist designation from the Human Capital Institute. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Mass Communication from Boston University, her MBA from New York University, and has earned her certificate in positive psychology from Harvard Medical School.