She defines herself as a high-performance executive, with the soul of an artist. She is passionate about painting, traveling, but, above all, people. Inês Rocha de Gouveia, president of Fundação Santander, is a people person. He enjoys listening to them, challenging them, disturbing them and watching them grow. One day, on a trip to Kenya, he was told that if he were an animal, he would be a lioness. Review: “sor an opportunity identifier, very protective of mine and challenging. I really want my team to be able to make mistakes, test, move forward”, he says.
Graduated in Management and Business Administration, Inês Rocha de Gouveia began her career in multinational companies, in the area of mass consumption. He also worked in the telecommunications sector before entering banking, at BPI and, later, at Santander. He started managing cards and accounts, but would end up leading multicultural teams and driving transformation strategies in areas such as daily banking, payments and retail banking.
Over the more than three decades he has had in his career, he has come to realize that true impact is not measured in euros, nor in complex indicators. It is measured in the opportunities we open to others.
Inês Rocha de Gouveia, president of Fundação Santander, during the recording of the podcast “The CEO is the limit”
Nuno Fox
At Santander since 2007, where he has worked in Portugal and Brazil, he has focused his work on the financial institution’s social impact strategy, leading purposeful projects in the pillars of education, employability and entrepreneurship, building bridges between the financial sector, academia and society.
Convinced that “education is the pillar capable of recovering the social elevator”, she argues that “the older we are, the more on the crest of the wave we have to be”. Training, he says, has no age limit and also has no place in the company hierarchy: “it’s for everyone, especially for leaders. You gain more by knowing more.”
And in terms of management and leadership, he argues that there is a lot to change in Portugal, starting with the culture of error. “It’s good to make mistakes in a safe environment to start again. In Portugal we are ashamed of making mistakes, we are afraid of making mistakes, we don’t admit that we have made a mistake. And not assuming that you made a mistake is not assuming that you have to start over, with strength and with learning”, he notes.
Cátia Mateus podcast The CEO is the limit
The CEO is the limit is Expresso’s leadership and career podcast. Every week, journalist Cátia Mateus shows you who the Portuguese managers who marked the past, those who direct today and those who promise to shape the future are, how they started and what they did to reach the top. Inspiring stories, told in the first person, by those who dare to make things happen. Listen to other episodes: