Tan Su Shan on Redefining Leadership: From DBS Intern to CEO

Navigating Career Growth

• 💡 Deliberate "demotions" are strategic steps back for long-term career advancement, emphasizing that a career path is rarely linear.
• 🎯 Prioritizes impact over titles, believing that contributing significantly in a lower-grade role is more valuable than holding a high-status position with less influence.

Cultivating Leadership Presence

• 🔑 Overcomes self-doubt by identifying gaps in knowledge and actively learning from diverse sources, including junior colleagues and podcasts.
• 💬 Emphasizes clear and simple communication as crucial for effective leadership, ensuring understanding rather than using complex jargon.
• 🎭 Develops agility and humility, adapting leadership style to different situations (e.g., crisis vs. collegiate settings) and acknowledging what is unknown.

Driving Customer-Centricity

• ✅ Focuses on the customer as the number one priority in all business endeavors, aiming to deliver the best customer experience.
• 📊 Implements "managing through journeys" at DBS, organizing teams horizontally into scrums guided by data and feedback loops like Net Promoter Score.

Fostering Innovation & Teamwork

• 💡 Utilizes a "WRECKOON" mechanism to encourage junior staff to safely challenge senior ideas, promoting diverse perspectives and objective feedback.
• 🚀 Believes attitude (agility, flexibility, openness to learning) is the most critical leadership skill for the future, enabling continuous adaptation in a rapidly changing world.
• 🤝 Advocates for scorecards to align teams on common goals and emphasizes building trust by addressing distrust directly and assuming good intent.

Personal Investments & Lifelong Learning

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Highlights family and friends as the most important investments for staying grounded and fostering strong relationships.
• 😴 Stresses the importance of sleep for making good decisions and maintaining mental clarity.
• 🌱 Encourages a mindset of "learn, unlearn, relearn," emphasizing continuous learning and adaptability throughout one's career.