Tami Smith had a plan. She fell in love with psychology in high school, discovered the then-new field of industrial organizational psychology, and finished her undergraduate degree in three years so she could head straight into a PhD program. With only nine or ten doctoral programs in the country at the time, she applied to all of them. Every one said no, and she had no Plan B.
What came next wasn’t a plan at all. A colleague at the I/O consulting firm where she was working asked whether she’d ever considered federal service. Tami said absolutely not, then handed over her resume anyway. It reached an HR director at the U.S. Department of Commerce, who brought her in. Within six months, she’d designed her own rotational program. She swore she’d never be a leader. She went on to spend 25 years across seven federal agencies, the last 15 leading enterprise HR and the last 10 at the executive level, with her final decade on the regulatory side of financial services.
In this conversation, Bernie and Tami connect the dots she couldn’t see at the time. She didn’t take the PhD highway, but she reached the same destination as a practitioner of the discipline she’d hoped to study. Now retired from federal service, she’s bringing that experience to The Wilderness Society, a 91-year-old conservation nonprofit of about 150 employees, where she’s learned that HR is HR, but every program has to fit the organization it serves.
Tami also shares how she raised four children while pursuing executive roles, why she tells women to "do it anyway," what she means when she says she brings her own weather into a room, and how she eventually returned to school for a master’s degree in leadership at Georgetown University. As she puts it, she got there. It was just the long route.
Connect with Tami Smith
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tami-b-smith
• The Wilderness Society: wilderness.org
Connect with Bernie Borges
• Website: fulfilledatworkacademy.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bernieborges
• Instagram: instagram.com/bernieborges
• TikTok: tiktok.com/@bernieborges
Resources:
• Download The Human Dividend White Paper: A Leader’s Guide to Human-Led AI Transformation
• Learn more about the Human Dividend AI Assessment
• Subscribe to the Weekly Fulfill newsletter
• Watch this episode (and all episodes) on YouTube
• Book Bernie Borges as a speaker at your next event
Music Attribution
• Old Bossa
• Twin Musicom
• Suno
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