Ira Robbins grew up at Valley Bank. When he became CEO, he replaced the people he grew up with. He admitted; it was tough.
“I felt like I was back in high school again,” he said. “I felt like I was breaking up with a girlfriend. I was like, ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ right?”
He’s done it twice. So has his friend Joe Damiano, who credits Robbins with pushing him to do it a second time.
Robbins, Chairman and CEO of Valley Bank, and Damiano, CEO and Managing Partner of SAX, are longtime friends who each spent decades rising through the ranks before taking the top job. They spoke on the keynote panel, “Leading Without a Playbook,” at the recent SAX Symposium, held late last month at MetLife Stadium.
This is the first of a three-part series on what they had to say. It details how both described turning over the leadership of their companies.
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Straight talk
Two longtime New Jersey CEOs, Ira Robbins of Valley Bank and Joe Damiano of Sax, were candid — and blunt — on key issues in the workplace during recent SAX Symposium. Here are their thoughts:
- Part 1: On cleaning house — and why loyalty can’t stop change
- Part 2: On private equity, growth — and keeping your culture in the process
- Part 3: On AI — what it will replace and what it can’t
Robbins joined Valley in 1996 and became CEO about eight years ago. The bank was 92 years old then. It had never had a losing quarter and served a couple hundred thousand clients.
He still wasn’t sure it would stay relevant.
“You feel like there’s loyalty to not just sort of the roots of what the organization is, but to the people that you grew up with and really began to work with at Valley,” he said. “And the real view was: Were we still going to be relevant to that community as things about us evolved? And when I really looked in the mirror, I said no to myself.”
So, he turned over the entire leadership team right away. In his first year, Valley let more than 600 employees go. About a year and a half ago, he brought in a brand-new leadership team again.
“It’s difficult at times to sort of separate that feeling that you have towards people,” he said. “But I think if you’re really doing the right thing for your clients, you’re doing the right thing for the community and for your associates. You really always have to be looking forward and make difficult decisions.”
For Robbins, the hardest part wasn’t the strategy. It was the people.
He said the conversation came down to a different vision of where the company needed to go, and helping people see they weren’t part of it, he said.
Today, Valley is one of the 25 largest banks in the country, Robbins said, with about $65 billion in assets and 3,600 employees.
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Damiano is a 31-year SAX lifer. He started out of college, made partner and spent about 10 years on the firm’s executive committee before becoming Managing Partner in 2015. He knew the people in the C-suite well.
He also knew they had to change.
“If I was going to take it on a different growth trajectory, which is what I wanted to do, we needed to elevate the team and really drive different people so that they could help me grow the practice,” he said.
He and Robbins talked it through over dinner, and Damiano replaced his C-suite. Revenue grew from $25 million to $100 million.
Then came another dinner, about two years ago.
“He’s like, ‘How many of those folks do you still have left?’ And I’m like, ‘I think I have most of them left,’” Damiano said. “And Ira says, ‘I’ve already replaced 10 out of 12.’ I’m like, ‘… I’m behind the times here.’”
So Damiano started having what he called “very candid conversations” with his leadership team.
“All right, we’re at 100. I want to go to 200,” he said. “Maybe these candidates have kind of hit the ceiling.”
He admitted loyalty had kept him from moving sooner.
“I know there’s a loyalty thing, and we do have it, which is why I was probably still sitting with those folks,” he said. “But if you want to continue to see the firm grow, you can’t stay stagnant.”
SAX is now on pace for about $190 million in revenue, Damiano said, with 500 employees, up from about 100 when he took over. He isn’t declaring victory.
“It’s a continuing evolution,” he said. “You can’t just sit back and say, ‘All right, now I’m good.’ In two or three years, it might change again.”
