I was hired in Sept 2019, and Stuart was the CEO. I was at the December employee meeting that year, and he talked about his excitement for leading the company into the 2020’s, then a week later, he is retiring to spend more time with his family. What the heck happened there? Is that when things started to get worse with the company??
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The thought of Wayne looking around and leading a chant of “nerds, nerds, nerds!” … pressuring the leaders in the room to join in just made me laugh out loud. I always felt like USAA was the second shot at high school popularity for many.
I agree it was after the pandemic and into 2021. It seems that it went really fast from caring about employees and the mission to a whole bunch of bat sh-t crazy knee jerking reactions. The professionalism from EMG went down fast. All my years here I never have seen this. There was a town hall I attended in Phoenix where I swear Wayne was talking like a bullying frat boy hating on a bunch of nerds. It is unreal.
In 2021. I actually admired the way WP handled the pandemic, and then all of the sudden it was like a switch was hit and the employee experience went to sh-t.
I started in October 2020. I was really excited to join USAA and as the daughter of a military veteran was proud to join.
Since I joined USAA I have become so sad and very conflicted about everything that's happened. I don't want to contaminate anyone else's experience so that has been really hard.
It's hard to know what to do anymore.
Living in the past, it will never be the same.
It's complicated. People love to look at Joe Robles' tenure through rose-colored glasses because his time as CEO was probably the peak of employee morale (I say probably because I didn't work at USAA under McDermott, but I imagine it was just as good if not better than Robles). The culture was outstanding. Employee morale was at its best. Members and employees alike loved USAA under Robles.
The problem, though, is that many impending issues were left unaddressed either intentionally or accidentally under Joe's tenure. USAA should have been doing regulatory and compliance work long before the "BCC" efforts started under Stuart in 2015-2016. I don't know or remember the exact details, but there was also something about a regulatory change from the Obama era that caused USAA to go from being classified as a small/medium bank to a big bank, and with that change came heightened regulatory scrutiny. (Don't quote me on the details, I may have misheard or misunderstood, I'm just repeating something I heard and can't find the details to back it up.)
The high levels of profit that USAA was generating masked the horrible inefficiencies and bloat of the company. Stuart was left holding the bag and wasn't able to get USAA on the right track during his relatively short time as CEO. It wasn't his fault that things were in the state that they were in, but he wasn't effective enough as a CEO to "do the needful." Perhaps this was because he didn't have the heart to do mass layoffs, maybe he didn't think it was necessary, maybe he didn't realize how bad things were going to get, or maybe he was just incompetent — we'll probably never know.
Things started to deteriorate under Stuart, but not necessarily because of Stuart. The proverbial can got kicked down the road under Joe because employees were on cloud 9 and Joe's mandate as CEO was to improve employee morale. I think Stuart is and was a good-hearted person who was promoted to CEO at a time that set him up for failure. Employee morale was generally good under Stuart and the company was profitable, but people were getting really burnt out and frustrated with the enormous pressure of BCC. The bonuses also declined year after year under Stuart, so while employee morale was still mostly good, it was trending downwards.
Then Wayne came along, and that's when things got really bad. Wayne didn't have any qualms with undoing decades of culture building, laying off thousands who lived and breathed USAA's culture, or bringing in leaders who only know how to focus on quarterly profits and who have no military affiliation. Those at the top continue to enrich themselves and put the money they save from layoffs into their pockets in the form of bonuses.
So, to put things succinctly:
- Under Joe, USAA's culture was at its peak, but USAA was headed directly towards an iceberg that the company may have been able to avoid with proper planning and more proactive practices.
- Stuart took over as the ship was nearing the iceberg. He tried to retain USAA's culture while making significant changes to how to company operated, but wasn't able to avoid hitting the iceberg.
- Wayne came along and decided the best thing to do after hitting the iceberg was to throw people overboard, dismantle the ship, and loot the cabins.
I really do think that Wayne shows textbook traits of narcissism and anti-social behavior (aka psychopathy). There is a noticeable lack of empathy and remorse in his behavior. His actions are myopic and manipulative. He is deceitful and two-faced. Everything he says is laced with doublespeak and subtext. Occasionally he'll slip up and say something that lets his true thoughts/feelings out. He has no issues laying off an employee who's dedicated their entire working life to USAA if it means furthering his agenda. He's done this his entire time as a leader in this company.
It will be a glorious day in USAA history when Wayne deploys his golden parachute, and it can't come soon enough.
The CIO was much better then as well...would hire leaders with some vision.
That’s when things went from bad to worse. Stuart was a bad CEO, but others on the EC had honor. The CFO, CLO, CHRO, and CCO were decent people who were devoted to the Members. The CAO (Admiral Jim Syring) and Chief of Staff (General Dana Simmons), having spent full careers in the military before coming to USAA, knew, really KNEW what it meant to serve. They helped make up for Stuart’s many, many, many failings. Wayne pushed each of them out as soon as he could, and replaced them with people who either refuse to acknowledge his self-serving and short-sighted destruction of the company (because they benefit from it, too) or are actively involved in helping him with it (Tamla, Neeraj, Amala).
The culture has been steadily declining for the past decade. Leadership has always been terrible, micromanaging and had a sort of “gotchya” mentality, but it’s never been as all around dismal as it is right now. They keep taking and taking, using ridiculous and impossible metrics to “grade” the front line, and then complain that employees are never happy. It’s so beyond sad.