‘That’s when I got fixated’: Jose Minaya was told he wouldn’t make it on Wall Street — and now he oversees $1.1 trillion

Welcome to?Human Capital , an open exploration of the ideas and people moving financial services forward. In each edition, we feature a leader or rising star who’s changing the game in his or her own way. “Finance is an apprentice business,” one often hears in this sector. Here are some of the teachers. Click Subscribe above to be notified of future editions.

Jose Minaya was an outsider.

“We were in a bubble,” he says of the Hispanic community in which he grew up. Immigrant parents dreamed their children would become doctors, lawyers, or engineers — but it wasn’t as common as they hoped.

Minaya was different. He noticed things. For example, the immense pride that his parents took in working hard, his mother as a housekeeper and his father as a dishwasher. Or the fact that whenever he found something he enjoyed doing, he was good at it. And ultimately, the realization that if somebody told him he couldn’t do something, he did it even better.

Armed with those convictions, Minaya pierced his bubble and broke out. Starting at Manhattan University , then 摩根大通 , then The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth , he treated each experience as an exploration “in the pursuit of finding what excites me.”

Today, Minaya leads Nuveen, a TIAA company , one of the largest asset-management operations in the world, with $1.1 trillion under management as of Sept. 30. Previously its chief investment officer, he became CEO three years ago this week. We recently caught up to discuss the principles that have guided him since then, but also those that propelled him out of the bubble of his early life to the top of the investment management industry.

Below are excerpts from the conversation.

You’re coming up on three years as CEO. What are some of your leadership principles?

It’s always been about surrounding myself with strong talent. I try to surround myself with people who are smarter than me. I try to surround myself where I feel I’m lacking. I want to have that gut check on the table.

But I think what people would say is most consistent about my leadership style is it’s about establishing trust. I want to give as much accountability as possible. I like bringing teams to the table, agreeing on a strategic direction, but then empowering them with the tools and moving barriers out of their way. I want the ideas that drive the execution to be theirs, not mine. A lot of times, that means I’m mainly asking questions in a meeting, not directing the team based on which way I alone am leaning.

You really don’t tell people what to do. You may try to, but at the end of the day things are not effective until the people you lead actually believe in what they’re doing, trust you, and believe that you are going to have their back in the process.

So, bring your ego down, bring yourself to the same level as everyone, and lead from the front. I’ve always found that to be so effective in both my personal relationships and my professional ones.

What was your path into finance and investing?

I’m a first-generation American. I grew up in Washington Heights in Manhattan. Everyone spoke Spanish in my world; everyone around me had a very similar background. We were in a bubble. And while I had a terrific family life and really good parents and a community around me, what I did not have was the orientation of what to do.

Initially going to school, I was good at math. And in my family and community, the professional goals were to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. So, I set out to do engineering.

But one thing that really helped me was I’ve always believed that I have to have a passion for what I’m doing. I knew this first from sports — when I enjoyed doing something, I was going to be better at it. So, when I first got to school and started out in engineering, I knew it was wrong when I realized I wasn’t enjoying the lab stuff, despite loving the math.

I discovered finance because of the math connection, starting taking classes, and really took a liking to it. And I was good at it — again, because I was enjoying what I did. I enjoyed going to class.

Now, what do you do with a finance and econ degree? People told me all these different things, but at the top was always investment banking — Wall Street. They also told me those places don’t hire from Manhattan College. But in my mind, once you told me that, that’s when I got fixated on it.

Unfortunately for me, my only purview of Wall Street at the time was the movie Wall Street — which is not a great example. I showed up the first day of work at JPMorgan and I had suspenders on, which were called braces, and they had medallions on there. I had the blue shirt with white collar. I looked ridiculous, and it was pointed out to me very quickly. That was my introduction into finance.

From there, it was an exploration. The other analysts were talking about something called GMAT. I said, what’s a GMAT? Once I figured it out, I took the GMAT and applied to business schools like everybody else.

I went to Tuck at Dartmouth, where obviously I got a better feel for the finance community and my career options. I started out as an equity analyst. Then I went to the buy side and did private equity.

Then I started to get comfortable with taking some risks. At one point I was managing a $15 billion private credit portfolio — a position I had worked so hard to get in a competitive industry — but I agreed to go help my firm build out a new natural resources platform. Some people thought I was out of my mind doing that.

I’ve always tried to do different things in my career, in the pursuit of finding what excites me.

Eventually, any time something new and interesting was starting up, somebody would say, “See if Jose wants to take a look at it.”

How are you processing this economic and investment environment? What’s your focus?

I worry about what we can control, not the stuff we can’t. Like, 80% of the stuff out there is noise — we can’t control it.

We don’t know what the Fed is going to do. Whether they’re going to be right, wrong, too fast, too slow — we don’t know. We could try to guess, and that’s mostly what you see out there today. But there is only uncertainty in that.

What I do know that we can control is our engagement with our clients. Are our clients sticking with us? Are we adding more clients? Are we cross-selling more with existing clients? What is our investment performance?

What keeps me up at night is that we blink. The fundamentals have never let us down.

I’ve been through the cycles, and at the end of the day it’s always about cash flows. It’s about good companies. It’s about security selection. It’s about fundamentals.

So, my focus is: Are we staying disciplined in our investment process? We can control that. We can dig in more. I think active management is going to pay off more now than it did in the past. That puck has come to us, and we can lean in there.

I can’t spend a lot of time in meetings talking about whether the market is going to go up or down tomorrow, or whether the Fed is going to hike by 50 basis points, 75, or 100. That’s for hedge funds.

So-called responsible investing has been on the rise of late, but Nuveen has been associated with it for decades. Why?

First, this has been in our DNA for quite a long time. We made a lot of investments in real assets — things like farmland, real estate, bridges, forest lands. Those are all about sustainability. If you own an asset for 20 or 30 years, you have to maintain the integrity of it. Sustainability reports were in every one of our investment memos before others in the industry were even talking about it. Remember, it’s proper risk management. How do you make sure the value of a long-term investment is not degraded?

Second, there is client demand for it. We serve clients by creating products and wrappers. We now manage north of $40 billion in ESG-labeled products.

Then there are two reasons that this is here to stay. One, it’s alpha. There are very few people on the planet who can drive alpha purely from security selection — the market is so efficient today. But you can drive alpha from access to information; you can drive alpha from things that maybe are not as efficient in the market.

A lot of the headwinds you see today are another example that it’s here to stay. There is more scrutiny because people are realizing this is real. The regulatory scrutiny has already increased in Europe. You see the fines; you see the SEC getting involved. All of that is telling you that demand is growing quickly and now we need a better governance and transparency framework. That is coming.

Whether it’s your clients, your employees, or your shareholders — the trifecta — they all care about this.

I had an advisor say it pretty simply: Believe in it or don’t, you are just not getting the money if you don’t do this right.

You mentioned employees’ preferences — what else are you finding about the newest generations of the workforce, particularly about what they want and the skills they have?

It’s changing pretty dramatically. When I came into the workforce, I was just happy to have a job. I didn’t start interviews with, “Do you have a gym onsite?” or, “What does the firm do in the community?”

But there’s been a tremendous amount of progress in that way. Young professionals today are far more aware of their surroundings. They are more aware of what is happening in the world around them. And they are looking to join companies that share their values.

I always say that being a good investor, you have to be really good at knowing what you don’t know. It’s the same in the war for talent — we need to understand how this new talent pool, which is the future of our firms and the future of our society, wants to work and what’s important to them.

Today, with things like the transformation of how quickly technology is changing our industry, you need folks who are able and comfortable with adaptation. The language of business is changing. I think the person you will see in my job 15 or 20 years from now is going to have a very different background than the one that got me here.

I know your Hispanic heritage is very important to you. Do you bring it to work?

I do bring it to work in many ways, and in many ways, for a long time, I didn’t.

Where I’ve always brought it to work is in the foundation that grounds me and my family and community. One, it’s work ethic. I grew up around an incredibly strong work ethic. I worked with my dad in a kitchen for a bit, and if I took a five-minute break, that was the dominant storyline when we came home: “This kid had to go sit down where he worked.”

The second thing I grew up around was incredible pride and humility. My mom was a housekeeper at the Waldorf Astoria. My dad started as a dishwasher, then became a cook, then ultimately was a chef in a local restaurant. And the amount of pride that they took in their work always stuck with me.

So, when I come into work every day, I’m appreciative for the work that I get to do, and I’m humble in that I know where I come from. It grounds me. And that’s the counsel I give to a lot of younger folks:

Your power is what you — and by you, I mean your full self — bring to the table.

Join the conversation with your own take on these topics in the comments below.