USAA is a sinking ship and Wayne is the captain. How Wayne has been able to remain CEO for this long in the midst of this dumpster fire he's leading is beyond me. Are all of USAA's issues his fault? Of course not, but Wayne knows how to play the game and has had his professional spinsters gaslight employees and members alike into thinking his own shortcomings are "problems in the market" or "industry trends."
Just think about what's occurred in the last few years:
- Bonuses in the high 18% range down to the low 10%
- Significant benefit and pay cuts
- Numerous rounds of layoffs, including leaders who lived and breathed USAA's mission
- A return to office strategy that is clearly intended to force people to leave, or at the very least was intentionally done at a time in the job market when employees had fewer employment options
- An ever-increasing workload with a simultaneous reduction in headcount
- Member satisfaction at an all-time low
- Employee morale at an all-time low
- The first loss in a century
Take a step back and think about this: This man has spent more than three decades at a single company. He becomes CEO, and in that time he decimates employee morale by cutting benefits, laying off employees, and implementing draconian RTO policies; he oversees the company while member satisfaction plummets from the 80s to the low 70s (and dropping); he fails to prevent several multi-million dollar fines from regulators; he leads the company through its first net loss year in a century. And he does all of this while giving himself a 157% raise.
All of this public information. None of this is hyperbole. If this doesn't set off every alarm bell you have, I don't know what will.
Whether he directly caused these issues or not is irrelevant. The fact is that he has been in a senior leadership role for a very long time, at least a decade. This makes him culpable; this makes him accountable. He should have seen the writing on the wall and made proactive decisions to avoid a disaster, yet every single one of his major decisions has been reactive.
That is because he is not a leader; he just holds a leadership title. Rather than truly leading and doing what's best for the membership and employees, he waits for CEOs at other companies to make decisions then follows suit. He has surrounded himself with former executives from publicly-traded companies like Wells Fargo, BoA, and others. These executives brought with them all of the toxicity and shortsightedness that comes with working at a place like that.
I would give a CEO some grace if they were hired from the outside and inherited this mess. There's no way that someone hired externally would have been able to know about the compliance and regulatory issues that USAA was facing, so at least in that scenario I'd cut them some slack. Not Wayne though. He should have known about these issues and planned accordingly.
Just think about how many outstanding leaders have left the company under Wayne's reign. From EVPs down to individual managers, hundreds if not thousands of leaders jumped ship because they saw that Wayne was leading the company directly into an iceberg. Instead of diverting course, Wayne decided to go full speed ahead. Now that the ship is sinking, Wayne is throwing people overboard to slow things down.
The Board of Directors needs to get this unequivocal failure of a CEO out of this position while there's still a company left to save.