Leta keeps the gold hard hat her grandfather, Ernie Guetlin, wore while working at Weyerhaeuser on her desk at HQ, along with a photo of the two of them when she was a little girl.
Leta Smith, compensation program manager at our Seattle Headquarters, has a deep understanding of what it means to get a paycheck from Weyerhaeuser. In her role on the Compensation team, she manages compensation plans that involve the pay for nearly 85 percent of all company employees.
“I know the programs we manage and the work we do is reflected on people's paychecks,” says Leta. “It’s impactful to them, which means it’s important to me.”
As a fourth-generation Weyerhaeuser employee, Leta herself is no stranger to seeing the Weyerhaeuser name at the top of a pay stub. A member of her family has been on the payroll at Weyerhaeuser for all but a few years in our 125-year history, starting with her great grandfather, who spent his career working for Weyerhaeuser in Washington state in the early 1900s. Her grandfather began working for the company in the 1950s and stayed for 30 years. He started in the Everett, Washington, sawmill, then moved his family to Kamloops, British Columbia, then Plymouth and New Bern, North Carolina, before returning to Everett. Leta’s father began working at the Everett sawmill right out of high school. He moved to NORPAC, our previous joint venture with Japan-based Nippon Paper Group, in 1978 before retiring in 2022.
Leta’s Weyerhaeuser story started with three summers as a college intern in the NORPAC paper lab performing quality testing on the completed product. A year after graduating, a job opened in Weyerhaeuser’s corporate office in the Accounts Payable department. She jumped at the opportunity, knowing there would be room for movement and development.
“When I was hired on in 2004, I could tell this is where I was meant to be,” she says. “I remember sitting in our old headquarters in Federal Way, calling my grandpa to tell him I got hired. He was so proud. My grandma said he almost had tears in his eyes because he knew I'd be well taken care of and would have a good career with Weyerhaeuser.”
To this day, Leta keeps her grandpa’s old gold-colored hard hat at her desk — a symbol of her family’s proud history with the company.
“My corny joke is that Weyerhaeuser runs deep in the roots of my family tree,” she laughs.
Leta with her father, Michael Guetlin, who started his career at our former Everett sawmill in Washington
MEET LETA
Your title is compensation program manager. Tell us what you do.
I manage our variable compensation plans, which include the annual incentive plan (AIP), our long-term incentive plan (LTIP), and a non-qualified deferred compensation plan. In addition, I do the system administration for our hourly Gainshare plan for eligible Wood Products locations. I'm also the Compensation team focal for our staff functions. This means I help the team understand competitive salary ranges for new positions, I work on job ladders, and I help my HR partners answer questions from employees about any of our compensation plans.
What led you to choose this job?
I started in Accounts Payable a year after graduating from college, but a few months later I moved to Accounting, where I spent eight years. I did the accounting for many of our compensation and benefits plans before moving to the Compensation team in 2012. I love that Compensation is still very analytical, and the numbers are tied directly to employees, which hits a sweet spot for me in terms of where my talents and passions align. Compensation uses my financial and analytical skills, and those skills allow me to administer plans that have a meaningful impact on our employees.
Tell us what your day is like.
My day is a mix of computer work and meetings. I have meetings with HR teams around the country and work closely with some of our external vendors like Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Vanguard. From October to March, I’m generally ensconced in our annual compensation cycle, where we help HR and people managers recommend pay decisions for salaried employees. During this time, I also work closely with the Corporate Secretary's office in the Legal department to prepare the proxy statement. From April to September, our team works to complete our compensation surveys; they’re what we use to ensure we remain competitive with our pay plans and base salaries. Also, in late 2024 I joined the Aspire project as the lead for Compensation as we transform our human capital management system.
Leta, her husband Rob and their children in Barcelona, Spain, last year.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
I love the wide array of people I get to work with companywide. As part of our team’s work, we have the unique opportunity to learn a lot about what someone actually does in a particular role. Are they making the product? Moving the product? Are they out in the woods? There are so many opportunities to hear about peoples’ experiences in the company, which I love.
You must have some challenges. What are they?
Like so many people at Weyerhaeuser, our team is always trying to balance shifting priorities while ensuring we meet commitments to our customers. It's such a fast-paced environment.
What advice would you give people who want a job like yours?
Work hard and be someone who others can count on. Take a lot of pride in what you do. If you find something that interests you, ask questions and talk with the person in that role. One of the great things about this company is that people are passionate and happy to share their experiences. That’s how I ended up here. Moving from Finance to HR is not a ‘normal’ progression, but at Weyerhaeuser, nobody's going to tell you no when you raise your hand to try something new. We’re lucky to work in a company like this.
Leta and family at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, last year.
When you were young, what did you want to do?
I thought about various things, from being a psychologist to a teacher. But I had a great accounting teacher in high school, which led me to pursue accounting in college.
What do you like to do when you’re not at work?
My husband and I love to travel with our kids — our daughter is 17 and our son is 14. In 2024 we went to Spain in the spring, and then to Norway and Ireland in the summer to visit the places my mother-in-law's family immigrated from. We really value the opportunity to experience different places and cultures.
