Beth McDonald and the case for starting at the bottom

Beth McDonald had been reading about leadership when she found an idea she wanted to keep. Turn the organization upside down. Put the leader at the bottom, with the team above. She credited the author Cameron Herold, then supplied an engineer’s preferred accessory: a structure. Imagine a tree, she suggested, with a strong trunk supporting the growth around it.

It is an appealingly inconvenient picture for a chief executive. The higher the branches climb, the more weight the trunk must carry. There is no penthouse in this arrangement. McDonald shared the thought during a period of family time after her years at Pioneer Natural Resources. She intended to carry it into the way she led.

By January 30, 2026, she had a considerably larger organization to support. SM Energy completed its all-stock merger with Civitas Resources that day, and McDonald became president and chief executive officer. She also joined the board. The transaction brought two companies under the SM name, with the business continuing to trade on the New York Stock Exchange as SM.

The distance between that private reading habit and a public-company merger is the interesting part of her story. McDonald trained to work with reservoirs. She learned to manage operations, planning and marketing. Along the way, she kept returning to a question that does not fit neatly inside a production forecast: how do you help other people do their work?

The long apprenticeship in Texas

Texas A&M was an early anchor. McDonald earned her bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering there, and the university identifies her as a member of the class of 2001. Her professional life began in engineering roles at Total and Hess, before she joined Pioneer in 2005. She remains a registered professional engineer in Texas.

Pioneer occupied nearly two decades of her career. Her responsibilities eventually crossed the Permian Basin and South Texas, giving her experience in different parts of the same demanding business. A reservoir, a development schedule and a market for the product belong to one commercial problem, even when an organization assigns them to separate departments.

Her early Pioneer work was in reservoir engineering. By 2007 she was a business analyst for worldwide operations; in March 2017 she became vice president of the South Texas asset team. She had wanted to lead an asset team early in her career and had worked to acquire the knowledge for it. When the promotion arrived, she credited the people around her: “I did nothing alone.”

“I did nothing alone.”

Beth McDonald, reflecting on her Pioneer team, 2018

In 2018 she was included among Hart Energy’s 25 Influential Women in Energy. Her advice included recognizing one’s value, keeping one’s character and making deliberate choices about time. She also described the self-doubt that could hold women back, including herself. There is a useful candor in admitting that the person giving the speech sometimes needs to hear it.

Her responsibilities continued to widen. By 2021, her remit included subsurface field development, corporate reserves and marketing for Pioneer’s Midland and Delaware basin assets. She had also served as president of Pioneer Water Management. In June 2023, she became executive vice president for strategic planning, field development and marketing. The job put technical decisions alongside the decisions about where money should go.

Back to the place that taught her

One of McDonald’s contributions at Pioneer led back to Texas A&M. In 2023, the company supported nine scholarships, faculty fellowships and faculty development funds across five engineering departments. McDonald helped influence the decision to support those departments, extending the relationship beyond petroleum engineering to chemical, electrical and computer, industrial and systems, and mechanical engineering.

The breadth is revealing. An energy business needs many kinds of engineers, and the university relationship reflected that. McDonald spoke about the importance of student projects and capstones, connecting work done during a semester with the work graduates might later do across an industry. Education appeared in her account as part of the company’s future capacity.

She now serves on the industry board for Texas A&M’s Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering. On a later visit, she spoke with students at a fireside chat and stayed for individual conversations. Her account emphasized how encouraged she felt afterward. The executive had come to offer career experience; the students supplied some of the energy for the return journey.

There is a practical continuity here. The graduate becomes an employer of graduates, helps support their education and comes back to talk about the work. The loop takes years to close. It also gives a career something more interesting to do than accumulate job titles.

A new company, then a different scale

SM Energy hired McDonald as executive vice president and chief operating officer in September 2024. Herb Vogel, then its president and CEO, pointed to the range of her engineering, planning and marketing experience. He also identified a specific use for it: applying the company’s technical capabilities to newly acquired Utah assets alongside its Texas business.

That welcome carried a real operational assignment. Joining a company means learning its people and habits while taking responsibility for results. Two months into her time at SM, McDonald wrote appreciatively about the questions answered and conversations that had helped her settle in. For someone who had spent so long at Pioneer, beginning again was a substantial change.

In September 2025 she became president. Four months later, the Civitas merger closed and she became CEO. Blake McKenna took the chief operating officer role. The enlarged board had eleven members, including six representatives from SM Energy and five from Civitas, with Julio Quintana remaining non-executive chairman.

McDonald’s opening agenda was specific: integrate the businesses, generate additional free cash flow and strengthen the balance sheet. At closing, the company targeted $200 million to $300 million in annual synergies and at least $1 billion of divestitures over the next year. Those were objectives, with the work still ahead. A merger announcement is an introduction to a management problem, however handsome the announcement looks.

The arithmetic after the announcement

On April 30, 2026, SM closed a $950 million sale of certain South Texas assets. Net cash proceeds were approximately $900 million after preliminary adjustments and estimated transaction costs. The company tied the transaction to its effort to reduce leverage and announced plans to redeem $819 million of senior notes due that year.

The sale added an instructive detail to McDonald’s first year as CEO. Growing through a merger could coexist with selling assets. Her task involved deciding which holdings and obligations belonged in the combined company. An oil producer’s portfolio includes wells and acreage, but it also includes promises to lenders and expectations from shareholders.

The August second-quarter update offered another checkpoint. SM reported $467 million in adjusted free cash flow, a non-GAAP measure, after $42 million of one-time integration, transaction and capital costs. It returned $137 million to shareholders through dividends and repurchases. The company said it had actioned 95 percent of its targeted run-rate synergies, or $355 million.

That wording matters. Actions toward recurring savings and the cash ultimately realized have different clocks. The company also raised its second-half production outlook while maintaining full-year capital guidance. These were reported results and expectations for the business under McDonald’s leadership, produced by its wider team. They give her early tenure a set of things readers can measure.

As of October 22, the next scheduled checkpoint was the release of third-quarter results on November 3, followed by a November 4 conference call. The calendar leaves her story open at an appropriate place: the next account of what the combined company has done.

The hard hat has another use

There is another photograph worth keeping alongside that sequence of appointments and transactions. At a Habitat for Humanity of Metro Denver Executive Build, McDonald crouches inside the timber framing of a house. She wears safety glasses and an SM Energy hard hat and holds a nail gun. The corporate name has made it onto the helmet; the surroundings have declined to provide a boardroom.

She joined other business leaders to help build affordable homes and described being honored to represent SM Energy in that effort. The picture is a useful change of scale. A company can discuss community involvement in paragraphs. Here, the task has lumber, a tool and a place where somebody will live.

In June 2026, McDonald took part in an Oilfield 360 conversation recorded at the FossilFueled event in Houston. With hosts David de Roode and Victoria Beard Queen, she discussed the journey from field engineering to company leadership, including growth, acquisitions and integration. The conversation placed team building alongside capital allocation, keeping the people doing the work in the same frame as the financial decisions.

The themes fit the career without making it a fable. Engineering experience does not finish the work of integrating two companies. Good intentions do not retire debt. A leader’s description of how she hopes to behave acquires meaning through what employees, partners and shareholders experience afterward.

McDonald’s tree remains a useful image because it gives the leader a job. Support the branches. Make room for growth. Carry the weight. The next production report will require arithmetic, and the next team will require attention. Her career has brought those obligations together.