ORIENT: Roland Corpuz-Finding Room At The Top

Roland Corpuz: Finding Room At The Top
by Lita A. Martija

By his own admission, Roland Corpuz is a man driven. Every day, he wakes up at the crack of dawn to run at least five miles during weekdays before he goes to work. He said it renews his inner strength. On weekends, he goes biking 50 miles. The adrenaline is still pumping as he changes into his business suit to face another challenging day as general manager of Orlando Marriott Downtown. Promoted to the hotel's management helm barely nine months ago, he has indeed come a long way since his hotel dishwashing days in Hawaii at age fourteen.
A normal working day in the hospitality industry, he says, is unlike any normal day in any other business. You are hosting guests who expect all the nuances of service for their comfort-from fresh bedsheets to clean bathrooms to prompt room service, and such perks as wake-up calls for early morning flights and business appointments, or even the daily paper at their door. The atmosphere at the hotel is expected to be elegant but cozy in ambiance and hotel staff must continuously provide the right efforts to bring about the right results. One slight misstep and guests can be merciless. Or worse, they will not come back. Making sure this does not happen is one of Roland's tall orders for the day. The buck stops at his desk.
Part of his early morning routine includes daily rounds in all the service corners of the hotel--- from the kitchen (the floor, the cooking ranges, and the dishes must be immaculately clean), to the restaurant (the bar must be well-stocked and the menus exceptionally creative), to the lobby (the tile and marble floor must be polished, the vases filled with fresh flowers). Even the service elevators do not escape his scrutiny. He is known to return to the hotel past midnight to check on the clean-up work of the hotel's janitorial brigade, or to continue the paper work on his desk during some weekends.
Greeting the employees he meets by their first names, he listens as they tell him all their challenges for the day. He then holds a staff meeting with his department heads to discuss solutions to these problems. He always makes himself emotionally available to those working under him, extracting from them only the same hard work and loyalty he expects from himself. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Do not be afraid to rock the boat," he always tells them, "be continuously challenged, and break away from the mold."
He calls the mold the "comfort zone," a state when everything seems to be working fine so much so that one fears to upset the precarious balance by initiating or suggesting change. This breeds false security, he says, which can stagnate one's thinking, or worse, freeze not only one's professional but also the company's growth.
Roland should know. He has always been poised at the "forward mode." If he had not broken away from the mold years ago, he would still be pushing the plow at his father's field in Laoag, Ilocos Norte, Philippines under an intense and blistering summer sun. If he did not initiate changes in his life, he would not have crossed beyond, much less gotten anywhere near the corporate glass ceiling.
Born in the Philippines thirty-eight years ago of a Filipino father and a Hawaiian-born Portuguese mother, he began at age 7 helping raise livestock at his father's farm. His wake-up call was a cock crowing at dawn, and his tool, a farmer's plow. In a land where the father of the family is a farmer, the son is often destined to be a farmer, too. But Roland wanted a different destiny for himself. Someday, I will make it happen, he promised.
"My mother knew my restless streak," he recalled, "and told me to focus on something I would like to do and be good at it."
When he was twelve, his father moved their family to Hawaii. Two years later, Roland was hired as a dishwasher in a hotel where his older sister worked. That was when he also developed a passion for running, a sport activity he continued to do to this day. He ran two miles daily while in Hawaii. Six months later, while still in school, he was transferred to the hotel's restaurant and worked as a waiter. Waiting on tables brought him closer to the customers, and he found he enjoyed dealing with people. Little did he know but he had begun honing new-found skills in the hospitality business. He worked there for nine months. Nothing moved, though, and he got restless.
Young Roland's restlessness got him on another trail. Right after high school graduation, at sixteen, he ran away and left home for San Fransisco. His aimless haunts during those years taught him a lot about life, and about himself. But he also learned a lot about the restaurant business. He worked as a dishwasher and waited on tables. Not knowing anyone and without a place to go home to, he used to sleep under the restaurant's tables & chairs. Each day was a challenge as he tried to move ahead. To his dismay, many promotions are closed to minorities. He could not seem to break the glass ceiling. Many times he was told it could not be done, but as for him, Roland swore, he would not say so till he tried.
Roland returned to Hawaii seven years later, a much wiser man at 23. He met Jamie, a Korean national, and married her. Jamie would later jokingly comment that Roland really got married to the hotel.
Indeed, Roland has his eyes focused on the hospitality industry. He knew it was up to him now, he must learn to be good at it. Just like his mother said.
He again began working as a waiter in a hotel. Shortly thereafter, he met the owner of a 4-star hotel in Maui who offered him a job as a dining room supervisor at the Maui Surf Hotel. He took it. He was promoted to Restaurant Manager a year and a half later. He had begun his ascent to corporate middle management.
While running one day, he met another runner who worked with the Marriott Corporation. At his urging, Roland joined Marriott in Hawaii as a management trainee. Under the hotel's Individual Development Program, which took six and a half months, Roland learned more about being a restaurant manager, marketing and catering, and overall hotel operations. Possessed by an almost insatiable thirst to learn all facets of the industry, he began to challenge himself every step of the way. "No molds will grow around me", he said. He suggested innovative changes, which served him well. After his training, he was promoted Beverage Director to run the hotel's night club. Six months later, he was Director of Restaurants for the hotel, a job he handled for two years.
It is not surprising that his reputation reached another 4-star hotel which offered the young, enterprising, and innovative hotel worker a middle management position. Roland accepted. This time, he was looking for a room at the top.
Again, though, the glass ceiling got in the way. It was something his immediate boss at that hotel told him that ultimately changed the course of Roland's professional growth. The boss said, "Roland, you will never be anything more than you are now in the hotel business. You have reached the top of your career."
It was a challenge that Roland took very seriously. Although just a "sprout" in the hotel industry, he said, he cannot accept he will always be just a "bush." He wanted to be a "tree."
"I was thankful to him for having said that," recalled Roland, "He challenged me and I was forced to do my best. Soon after that, I was offered a bigger job at the Omni Hotel in Orlando which became the Orlando Marriott Downtown. It was a position my former boss said I would never have. Three years later, I was promoted to a position which was higher than his in the hospitality industry. I still call him once in a while to say hello."
Only this time, the former boss is still a bush, Roland has become a tree.
"It just goes to show that there are no limits to our opportunities," Roland said, "even if sometimes we have to create them, but once we have the opportunity, we must be prepared and have the persistence to immediately act upon it."
Nine months ago, such an opportunity came up. He was offered the manager's position at Orlando Marriott Downtown, a progressive company which promotes people from within. Roland was ready and took it. The glass ceiling became mere fragments at his feet.
Someone once said that the world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far less competition.
"What next?" we asked Roland.
"Perhaps my own hotel in three to five years," he mused, "just like Harris Rosen, who started as a waiter and now owns many hotels. He was lucky, he was eager, and he was at the right place at the right time."
Knowing him, it could be sooner than we think.
After all, there is, indeed, room at the top.

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