Women of Note 2024 – Charmaine Rice

Charmaine Rice was a bright-eyed, recent Wright State University graduate when she realized helping others along their professional trajectory would be a fitting career path for herself.

“I was sitting in a six-week management training course at Ohio Savings Bank, and there was this woman who was facilitating that training,” Rice recalled. “We were not being spoon-fed information for eight hours a day. Instead, we were doing case studies and slowly building up our knowledge to the point where we could be confident that, even if we didn’t know the answer, we could find an answer. … It astounded me. I just appreciated being able to support people with feeling more comfortable that they have the skills and abilities to do their job effectively.”

Today, Rice leads a 12-person team responsible for overseeing the learning and development of AmTrust Financial Services’ nearly 8,000 employees. She was hired initially in 2020 to oversee diversity and inclusion for the global insurance company but “kept sticking” her nose into learning and development while championing cultural competence.

“For many of us, the workplace is the first time we are in an environment with folks who are very different than ourselves, communicate differently, have different observances, different values, different world views,” she said. “So, part of learning to work and be successful at your job can be less about the technical skill and more about the relational skills.”

Rice spent most of her elementary years at a U.S. Air Force base in Germany where her father was stationed, though a brief move to to the Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, exposed the sixth-grader to racism from her classmates.

Rice said the family returned to Germany 18 months later, where they lived until she was 16 and a final reassignment landed her father at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton.

At AmTrust, Rice is proud of the work she’s done “to create a culture that really amplifies employees as individuals, as well as part of the community.” Under her watch, the company has launched an executive diversity council, seven different “employee networks,” including groups focused on abilities, families, military service and multiculturalism, and an internal career development tool that helps employees personalize their professional paths.

“Of course, I can’t take credit for these things alone,” she said. “I have an amazing team.”

She puts her development skills to work outside of the office, as well, from her longtime partnership with the nonprofit Heart to Heart organization in Akron to the 2019 establishment of Cleveland-based Rekindle Fellowship, which she co-founded with Matt Fieldman.

Rekindle is a program that brings leaders from the Black and Jewish communities together for meaningful dialogue and collaborative action. With 116 graduates to date, the program is expanding to Akron this summer.

Fieldman said Rice’s “superpower” is her ability “to get people to shed all those layers of identity and just connect as human beings.”

“We more leaders like Charmaine who can connect authentically person-to-person and create safe spaces to have real conversations,” he said.