Richard E. Holbrook
Title: Chairman & CEO, Eastern Bank
Age: 64
Experience: 36 years
When asked about the path he took into banking, Eastern Bank’s Rich Holbrook jokes, “Everything I’ve done has been totally planned. Just none of those plans worked out.” In his early years, Holbrook thought he might become a doctor. But during a post-college stint in Yale University’s athletic department, a friend lured him into a meeting with Connecticut Bank & Trust executives with the promise of free shrimp – and he was sold. It was the ability to make a difference that appealed to him, and over his 36-year banking career, he’s done just that. Now approaching retirement, Holbrook sat down with Banker & Tradesman to talk about advocating for social justice, thinking about tech and looking forward to the bank’s new leadership.
Q: How did your 2010 acquisition of Wainwright Bank inform Eastern Bank’s advocacy on social justice issues?
A: Our advocacy position really grew after the Wainwright acquisition. The folks at Wainwright had been very active in this field. They had a lot of contacts with the advocacy groups that were doing work in these areas, and we were introduced to them and we realized we had not been doing all that we could to make a difference. So we decided we’d try.
Now there’s a risk to that, and every organization that’s taken a position on anything controversial has to be ready to accept that risk. The risk is all of our stakeholders, which includes your employees, may not necessarily agree with your stance. We try to be sensitive to that and we use one overriding principle, which is that everybody deserves respect. Are the things that we’re doing respectful of those opinions?
It’s not always related to LGBT issues, either. These are the same issues that hold with health care and education, which I think are the pillars of the stool that hold up our society: housing, education, health care. They all end up requiring people to have jobs, too. Job training is equally as important in helping us to have a vibrant, healthy local economy.
When social justice issues impact those pillars, we feel we should speak out. It will make for a better community for all of us, a better community for our bank to operate in, a better community for our employees to live and raise families in, better community for our customers and healthier for them to do well in. It all flows together.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about some of the thinking that went into launching Eastern Labs?
A: We were looking at how we could use our data better. We have millions of transactions that are flowing through – transactions with our customers, information with our calls that they’ve made to our call center. How can we use that to better understand what our customers want?
There may be things we can’t offer directly, but we have to figure out who we’re going to partner with to be able to offer it. We can’t build everything, but our mantra with Labs has sort of been to build cool stuff, buy cool stuff, but change the culture. Change the attitudes of our people towards understanding that we have to be continually thinking about the future and innovating. It’s not a sleepy business anymore.
Q: As you’ve approached retirement, how have you thought about succession planning, particularly with respect to Eastern Bank’s mutuality?
A: Well, I think about it on a continuum. When [former CEO] Stan Lukowski hired me as chief financial officer in 1996, he did so after a few interviews. He could read my resume and read about the things I did, but we talked mostly about values and things that are important and what we wanted to accomplish as a company. And by the way, when I joined, I had never really even thought about what a mutual institution was. I had worked for public companies and I didn’t know a mutual from anything. I thought, “OK, this is pretty interesting. No shareholders, eh? That might be nice.”
But it quickly became apparent in the first year or so that I was on board, what the value was in being mutual. There are some downsides. It’s harder to raise capital, it makes it harder to do a merger with somebody because you don’t create new capital the way you do with stock. But other than that, I loved the idea that it was possible to take a long-term view of the way that you manage the organization, that you weren’t focused on quarterly earnings, that you were able to do things for your stakeholders – your customers, employees and communities – by balancing their needs and not always worrying about that fourth element.
A year before [Lukowski] retired and I was going to replace him, I went looking for somebody who I thought had the capacity to become CEO eventually. You can never promise somebody what’s going to happen 10 or 15 years later, but I looked for somebody who I thought would have the capacity to do the work and who had the values that I think Stan instilled in me.
[President and COO Bob Rivers] and I are different people and we operate in slightly different ways, but we hold a lot of the same values of what’s important, and included in that is the idea that it’s much more important to make your customers and colleagues and communities better than it is to worry about yourself or shareholders. Earnings will come if you do the right thing.
Succession planning, like any other planning, is taking a long-term view. Ten years ago we thought we might have the right person and now we’re positive of it. Stan thought 20 years ago that I might be the right person. I hope he thinks he was right.
Holbrook’s Top Five Personal Values:
- Integrity
- Urgency
- Accountability
- Creativity
- Teamwork
