Late yesterday afternoon, Peconic Landing CEO Robert Syron stepped out of a ballroom where he’d just been honored — named by the International Council on Active Aging as one of the top five wellness executives in North America.
The organization also recognized Peconic Landing itself, for the second year in a row, as one of North America’s top five senior living communities.
As Syron emerged, residents seated at a half-dozen overflow tables just outside the doors of the packed ballroom broke into spontaneous applause.
Walking behind him, you got the sense that if it weren’t for the advanced ages of many cheering him on, they would have sprung from their seats for a Hollywood standing ovation.
Such is Syron’s reputation at the 144-acre waterfront community in Greenport.
“He has a heart and a compassion and an intuition that is extremely rare,” said resident H. Patrick Leis III, a former assistant district attorney and retired Suffolk County administrative judge. “And what I have seen, in my experience, is that what he does here is not an intellectual exercise. It’s not a leadership skill. It is a deep feeling for what is right and what is wrong.”
After Syron’s brief speech, Leis said his humility is what most clearly defines him.
“The most exceptional thing was the brevity of his speech. He’s being honored. He’s the guy. And yet he didn’t speak about himself, and he didn’t speak long. He let credit go to everyone else and to the organization. His speech was the shortest of all. To me that is the indication of who he really is.”
Dr. Jan Harting-McChesney, a longtime Peconic Landing community member and a former professor in the education department at St. Joseph’s College, said Syron has earned residents’ trust because he blends resolve with respect — a particular challenge, she said, in a place filled with former executives and institutional leaders.
“Part of the transition here is you have to get in your head that you’re not the one in charge anymore,” she said. “And quite honestly, I think that’s the toughest transition for everybody who moves here, because — for the most part — those of us who live here come from either owning or running a company, or being the superintendent or whatever. So there’s a lot of leaders here — pretty much everybody.
“For someone in Bob’s position, who is a ‘buck stops here’ leader — he’s the one who has to manage it all. For him to deal with all of us takes a special personality.”
She said Syron “doesn’t roll over,” but can disagree without shutting people down, and that his leadership is reflected in his daily behavior.
“Bob truly means what he says. You know, you heard the line, ‘it is my privilege and my honor to serve’ … that’s a line that he uses frequently, but he means it. So it’s not a line for him.”
In an interview after the ceremony, Syron said he arrived at Peconic Landing 21 years ago.
“They brought me in here to ‘fix this and leave’, but I fell in love with Long Island and my wife did too.”
Over time, his professional commitment morphed into something more personal. When his wife Kathy died in 2017, he said, “these members took such sincere care of me,” describing the overwhelming support he received when he returned to work after her death. That experience deepened his commitment to the community.
He said Peconic Landing is structurally different from most senior living communities because it operates as a cooperative, with a governance culture built on resident leadership.
“I meet with them every week,” he said of his resident representatives, senior vice president and chief operating officer. “I’d be a fool not to listen to them.”
Syron said he sees leadership as intentional transparency and frequent, direct contact.
“We work with the members. We work for the members. We involve the members.”
Candor is vital, too.
“I gave an answer today at a town hall. They didn’t want to hear it… and I said, ‘Folks, you know [I’m] straight with you, but no, we can’t do that, and this is why.’”
That same plainspoken frankness carries over into Syron’s management of his own team.
Every year, he has his senior staff set out a series of goals: one to make your department better, one that makes the company better, one to correct something within your area — and a personal goal, “something you want to do for yourself.”
Some executives, including Greg Garrett, Peconic Landing’s chief operating officer, initially assumed the personal goal portion was just aspirational.
“One year early on, I made the mistake of saying that the goal was going to be to run a half marathon,” Garrett said at the ceremony. “I had no intention of doing that, [but] with Bob, he’s like, ‘You know, you have to complete this. It’s part of your evaluation.’
“I trained really hard for three months and ran a half marathon in Philadelphia,” said Garrett. “Bob … always wants us to better ourselves.”
Syron laughed as he recalled another example, from about a decade ago, when a senior staffer floated a colorful personal goal: stand-up comedy. Like Garrett, the young executive thought it was all just small talk.
“He came back and said, ‘Yeah, I’m not gonna hit that goal.’ I said, ‘That’s a quarter year bonus.’ He said, ‘Are you joking?’ I said, ‘No.’”
Syron gave him an assignment that pushed him further than he ever intended to go.
“At the next leadership retreat, I want you to roast me,” the boss intoned.
When the staffer finally took the stage, Syron recalled, “people were crying” with laughter. “It was awesome,” he said. “It was a great moment.”
Humor seems to be a part of how Syron keeps people engaged, challenged and seen.
“I’ve always liked seniors,” he said. “People get older, but they’re still people, right? We treat them like people here.”