Leadership series: Damian Tan

Your career has taken you from The Ritz-Carlton Millenia and Grand Copthorne Waterfront in Singapore, through Grand Millennium Abu Dhabi and Pan Pacific Serviced Suites Nairobi, to leading PARKROYAL on Beach Road. What did working across such different markets teach you that you couldn't have learned by staying in one country?

If I'd stayed in one country, I think I would have mistaken 'the way we do things' for 'the way things are done' — and those are very different things.

Singapore taught me precision. At The Ritz-Carlton Millenia and later Grand Copthorne Waterfront, the expectation was that every detail — the temperature of the coffee, the timing of a bag delivery — was non-negotiable. Guests here don't tell you when something's wrong; they simply don't come back. You learn to read the silence.

Abu Dhabi taught me patience and relationship-building. At Grand Millennium, hospitality moves at the pace of trust, not transactions. Deals and loyalty were built over long conversations, not quick upsells. I had to unlearn my Singapore instinct to move fast and instead learn to sit with people.

And Nairobi — leading Pan Pacific Serviced Suites there — taught me resourcefulness in a way no five-star market ever could. When your supply chain isn't guaranteed and the infrastructure around you is unpredictable, you stop relying on systems and start relying on people. My team's ability to improvise, to solve a problem with what was actually available rather than what the manual said should be available, made me a far better leader than any playbook could.

What ties it together is this: every market forces you to ask 'why do we do it this way?' instead of just following the standard. By the time I arrived at PARKROYAL on Beach Road, I wasn't bringing one country's version of hospitality — I was bringing a synthesis of what actually works when you strip away assumptions. That's the real gift of an international career: it makes you allergic to the phrase 'we've always done it this way.

PARKROYAL on Beach Road sits at the edge of the CBD and right by Kampong Glam. How deliberately do you use that location and the neighbourhood's culture as part of the guest experience, rather than just a convenient address?

I always tell my team: we didn't choose this address, but we absolutely choose what we do with it.

PARKROYAL on Beach Road sits at this fascinating seam — CBD glass towers on one side, and on the other, Kampong Glam, one of the last neighbourhoods in Singapore where you can still feel the old trading-port soul of the city. Sultan Mosque's golden dome, the textile shops on Arab Street, Haji Lane's shophouses turned into independent boutiques and cafés — that's not backdrop, that's identity. Treating it as 'just a convenient address near the CBD' would honestly be a failure of imagination.

So, we've made it deliberate. We point guests toward the family-run textile and perfume shops on Arab Street rather than just the malls. We work with the halal food stalls and heritage coffee shops in the area, so guests get an entry point into Kampong Glam that feels like a local's introduction, not a tourist pamphlet. Even our own food and beverage draws on the spice trade history of the district — it's a nod to the fact that this was once where ships from across the region unloaded cargo that shaped Singapore's culinary identity. We celebrate the locale and do things local. Create memories for our guests.

The CBD side matters too, of course — our business travellers need proximity and efficiency, and we deliver that without compromise.

The hotel has picked up back-to-back honours at the Haute Grandeur Global Hotel Awards, including your own Best General Manager award in 2025 and four property titles in 2026. Which of those wins meant the most to you personally, and why?

Honestly, the individual award — Best General Manager — meant the least to me personally, even though I'm grateful for it. It has my name on it, but nothing in hospitality is a solo achievement. If I'm being truly honest, the win that meant the most was watching the team win the property titles in 2026, because those are the ones I couldn't have manufactured myself.

An individual leadership award can, to some extent, reflect one person's relationships, visibility, or timing. But four property titles in a single year — that's not one person charming a judging panel. That's housekeeping, front office, F&B, engineering, and sales all independently being judged as excellent by the same external standard, in the same year. When that happens, it tells you the culture is real, not just something written on a values poster in the back office.

I remember when we started stacking up nominations, there was a moment where the team almost got complacent — expecting recognition rather than chasing it. So when the 2026 wins came in, what struck me wasn't the trophies themselves, it was watching some of our younger team members — some barely a few years into their hospitality careers — realise that their everyday work was being benchmarked against the best hotels globally, and it held up. That shift in their own self-belief is worth more to me than any plaque on my office wall.

So, if you're asking which one meant the most — it's the one where I got to stand slightly out of frame and watch my team take the credit they'd actually earned

You lead with what's been described as a 'holistic operational philosophy' — accountability, cost consciousness, and service excellence in every division. Where do those three pull against each other, and how do you decide which one wins?

People like to imagine those three sit in neat balance, but in practice they're constantly in tension — and pretending otherwise is how you end up with a hotel that's mediocre at all three instead of excellent at what matters most.

The clearest collision is cost consciousness versus service excellence. A guest doesn't care what your labour budget looks like at 11pm when their flight got delayed and they need a late check-in handled with warmth, not a policy recital. If I let cost discipline win by default in those moments, I save a few dollars and lose a guest relationship that might have been worth thousands over a lifetime. So, when the two genuinely collide at the guest-facing moment, service wins. That's not up for negotiation on my watch.

But accountability is the referee that keeps that principle from becoming an excuse for waste. Service excellence can't mean 'spend whatever, whenever, because the guest is happy.' It means: was this the right cost for the value created, and can you defend that decision afterward? I push my division heads hard on this — not 'did you make the guest happy,' but 'did you make the guest happy in a way you can explain and repeat sustainably.' That's the difference between generosity and carelessness.

If I'm honest about the hierarchy: accountability is the floor, non-negotiable in every division, every day. Service excellence is what wins in the moment, at the point of guest interaction, almost every time. Cost consciousness is what governs everything that happens before and after that moment — how we plan, how we staff, how we source — so that being generous with a guest doesn't quietly bankrupt the hotel over a year.

Manpower shortages keep coming up as a constraint on the sector's growth. What has actually worked for you in attracting and keeping frontline talent in a tight Singapore labour market, beyond pay?

Pay gets people through the door for an interview. It rarely gets them to stay three years later. If manpower shortages are a constraint on growth, I'd argue the real shortage isn't people — it's employers offering a reason to stay beyond the pay check.

The first thing that's actually worked for us is visible career pathing, not promised-but-vague 'growth opportunities.' I make it a point that frontline staff can see, concretely, who on this property started exactly where they are and is now a department head or above. Abstract promises don't retain anyone. Proof does. It's a live pipeline where young talent can see hospitality as a career with a ladder, not a stopover job.

Second is flexibility around how work fits into people's lives, especially for a workforce that increasingly includes caregivers, students, and people re-entering the workforce after a break. Rigid shift structures push good people out the door faster than low pay does. We've had to get more creative with scheduling than we would have five years ago, and it's paid off in retention more than any bonus scheme did.

Third — and this is the one people underestimate — is dignity in the day-to-day. Frontline hospitality work is physically and emotionally demanding, and staff notice immediately whether leadership treats them as replaceable labour or as the actual face of the brand. Something as simple as how a duty manager handles a staff member being unfairly blamed by a guest sends a signal that outlasts any engagement survey. People stay where they feel protected, not just paid.

None of this replaces the need for competitive wages — I'm not going to pretend otherwise in this labour market. But wages alone are a race to the bottom that any competitor can win by adding a dollar an hour. Career visibility, flexibility, and dignity are much harder to copy, and that's exactly why they work.

What skills or mindsets do you think the next generation of hospitality leaders in Singapore will need that your generation didn't have to develop?

I'll be candid — my generation could build a career on operational excellence alone. Learn the standards, run a tight ship, deliver consistency, and you'd rise. That's no longer sufficient, and I think the next generation of leaders here in Singapore knows it better than we did at their age.

The first mindset shift is comfort with ambiguity and technology moving faster than any manual can keep up with. When I came up through the ranks, a system stayed the same for years and you mastered it once. Today, my younger managers are expected to adapt to new booking platforms, AI-driven guest personalisation tools, and shifting guest expectations almost in real time. The skill isn't mastering a system anymore — it's being comfortable being a perpetual beginner, learning something new every few months without losing confidence.

The second is genuine cultural fluency, not just cultural awareness. My generation learned to be polite across cultures. The next generation needs to actually understand the values underneath the politeness — why a guest from one market wants efficiency above all, while a guest from another wants relationship-building before anything transactional. Singapore's guest mix has diversified faster than most training programmes have caught up with, so this can't just be a slide in an onboarding deck anymore.

And underneath all: the next generation needs to lead diverse, multigenerational teams with far more emotional intelligence than we needed. My generation could lead through hierarchy. Theirs will need to lead through influence, because the workforce simply won't respond to command-and-control the way it once did.

If I had to summarise it: my generation was trained to execute a known playbook flawlessly. Theirs will need to write new playbooks continuously and still execute flawlessly while doing it. That's a much harder job, and I have real respect for anyone stepping into it

You've been named among the world's Top 100 Hotel General Managers and taken Best General Manager honours regionally. What does an achievement like that change about how you lead the day after?

Honestly? The day after, almost nothing changes — and I think that's the actual answer worth giving, not a humble-sounding line.

The morning after any recognition like that, there's still a guest complaint to resolve, a rostering gap to fill, a budget line to justify. The hotel doesn't know it made a list. The recognition doesn't check anyone in faster or make a broken air-conditioning unit fix itself. If anything, the risk with an achievement like being named among the Top 100 GMs in the World is believing your own reviews — starting to lead from the award rather than leading from the floor. I've watched that happen to capable people, and it's usually the beginning of a slow decline, not a peak.

What it does change, if I'm honest, is the weight of the responsibility rather than the ease of the job. Once you're named in that company, people are watching more closely — your team, your peers, the next generation coming up through programmes like the ITE diploma I chair. They're not just watching what you do when it's convenient; they're watching whether the standard holds up on an ordinary Tuesday with no cameras and no judges. That's actually a heavier burden than winning the award itself. Recognition raises the bar for consistency, not just performance.

If there's a genuine shift, it's this: I've become more deliberate about using whatever platform that recognition gives me — not for my own visibility, but to open doors for people below me. A seat at an industry committee, a mentoring conversation, a chance to advocate for our sector's manpower and sustainability challenges — that's where an individual accolade actually becomes useful, when you convert it into access for other people rather than a line on your own biography.

So the day after? I go back to walking the lobby, checking in with my duty managers, and making sure the basics are still being done with care.

Looking back over more than two decades in the industry, what's the most pivotal moment that shaped how you lead today?

There's a temptation in interviews like this to reach for something cinematic — a single crisis, a dramatic turnaround, a make-or-break night. And there probably was a moment like that somewhere in two decades across different countries, different portfolios and now here. But if I'm honest, the moment that actually shaped how I lead wasn't a crisis at all — it was a quiet correction, early in my career, from someone who saw a flaw in me before I could see it myself.

I came up believing that being an excellent hotelier meant being the person with the answer — fast, decisive, hands-on, fixing things myself before anyone else could. It felt like leadership. What I hadn't noticed was that it was actually a bottleneck. There was a point, I think somewhere on my early years, where a mentor essentially told me: 'You're not building a team, you're building a dependency on yourself.' That landed harder than any guest complaint or budget miss ever had, because it was true, and I hadn't seen it.

That single observation rewired how I approached every posting after it — in Abu Dhabi, in Nairobi, and now PARKROYAL on Beach Road Singapore. In each new market, I made myself slow down long enough to ask: am I solving this problem, or am I building people who can solve the next ten problems without me in the room? Nairobi, in particular, tested that philosophy in the best way — resources were tight, systems weren't guaranteed, and if I hadn't already learned to trust and develop the people around me rather than control every outcome myself, that posting would have broken me instead of shaping me.

So if you're asking for the pivotal moment: it wasn't a five-star triumph or a five-alarm fire. It was one honest sentence from someone willing to tell me an uncomfortable truth early enough in my career that I could still change. Two decades later, the single question I ask myself most often as GM isn't 'did I solve it' — it's 'did I make my team more capable of solving it without me.' That's the actual inheritance of that moment, and it's shaped every hotel I've led since

What values or behaviours do you consider essential for leadership teams today?

If I had to strip it down to the values that actually matter — not the ones that sound good on a mission statement, but the ones I genuinely test for when I'm building a leadership team — I'd land on four: accountability, humility, empathy, and consistency.

Accountability comes first because everything else collapses without it. I need leaders who own outcomes without immediately reaching for an explanation of why it wasn't really their fault. The moment a department head starts managing upward instead of managing the actual problem, I know I have a bigger issue than whatever went wrong that day.

Humility is the one people underestimate most, especially in hospitality, where seniority can quietly calcify into ego. The best leaders on my team are the ones still willing to pick up a bag, cover a shift, or admit they got a call wrong in front of their own staff. The day a leader believes they're above the floor is the day they start losing the floor's respect.

Empathy is non-negotiable because this is fundamentally a people business on both sides of the equation — the guest and the team member. A leader who can read a stressed colleague or an unhappy guest and respond to the actual human need underneath, rather than just the stated complaint, will always outperform someone who's simply following a service script.

And consistency — doing the right thing on an ordinary Tuesday with no one watching, not just when there's a VIP in-house or an awards panel evaluating the property. That's the value that's hardest to fake and easiest to spot when it's missing.

If I'm being honest, none of these four are unique to hospitality or unique to today. What's changed is the tolerance for their absence. Teams and guests alike are far quicker now to notice — and call out — leadership that doesn't embody these values consistently. So the bar hasn't shifted in what's required; it's shifted in how quickly the gaps get exposed.

What innovations, technological, experiential, or operational, excite you the most right now?

There's a lot of noise right now about innovation in hospitality, and honestly, half of it excites me less than people expect. Novelty for its own sake — a gimmick robot at the front desk, a flashy app feature nobody asked for — doesn't move me. What genuinely excites me is innovation that quietly removes friction so that human hospitality can actually show up more, not less.

On the technology side, I'm most interested in how AI-driven personalisation is starting to let us anticipate a guest's needs before they have to voice them — not in a surveillance-y way, but in the sense of a returning guest not having to repeat their pillow preference or dietary restriction for the fifth time. When technology handles the repetitive memory work, it frees my team to spend their energy on the moments that actually require a human touch — a warm welcome, reading a guest's mood, handling something unexpected with genuine care. That's the innovation I want: technology that buys back time for hospitality, not technology that replaces it.

Operationally, I'm excited by how much smarter energy and resource management has become — the kind of real-time monitoring that lets us cut waste without guests ever noticing a difference in comfort. Sitting on the SHA Hotel Sustainability Committee, I've seen how far this has come even in the last few years. What used to be a trade-off between sustainability and guest experience is increasingly not a trade-off at all, and that shift matters enormously for an industry that runs 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

Experientially, what excites me most isn't a specific gadget — it's guests wanting hyper-local, culturally rooted experiences over generic five-star sameness. That plays directly into how we think about our own location near Kampong Glam. Guests increasingly want a hotel to be a gateway into a neighbourhood's actual character, not an isolated bubble that could be dropped into any city in the world. Meeting that expectation well is less about a new piece of technology and more about curation, partnerships, and genuine local knowledge — which, if anything, makes the hospitality skillset more important, not less.

So if you're asking what excites me: it's not the innovations that try to make hospitality more automated. It's the ones that make it more human, more local, and more sustainable — because those are the three things guests are actually asking for, whether or not they use those words.

What advice would you give emerging leaders who want to shape the future of the service industry?

If I only had one piece of advice, it would be this: master the basics before you chase the vision. I see so many emerging leaders eager to talk about disruption and transformation before they've actually stood at a front desk during a difficult check-in or handled an upset guest at midnight themselves. You cannot lead what you haven't genuinely understood at ground level, and guests can tell the difference between a leader who's read about hospitality and one who's lived it.

Beyond that, I'd tell them three things. First, stay curious about markets and cultures beyond your own comfort zone — my time across Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Nairobi taught me more about leadership than any single property ever could, because each market forced me to question assumptions I didn't know I had. Don't optimise your career for comfort; optimise it for range.

Second, measure your leadership by what your team can do without you, not by what you personally accomplish. The emerging leaders who will actually shape this industry's future are the ones building capability in others, not the ones collecting personal wins. That's a harder metric to put on a resume, but it's the one that actually compounds over a career.

Third, don't wait for permission to care about the things that will matter most for this industry's next decade — sustainability, manpower development, genuine cultural experiences over generic luxury. Those aren't side projects to pick up once you're senior enough. The leaders who get ahead of these shifts now, while they're still coming up the ranks, will be the ones setting the agenda later rather than reacting to it.

Ultimately, this industry doesn't need more people chasing titles. It needs people willing to do the unglamorous, consistent work of taking care of others — guests and colleagues alike — day after day, long after anyone's watching. Get that right, and the leadership, the recognition, and the influence to shape the industry's future will follow. Chase the recognition first, and you'll likely end up with neither.