Huiguis Silva is a strategy professional focused on solving complex business challenges and driving scalable performance improvements in fast-growing organizations. With experience at companies such as C6 Bank and iFood, he has led initiatives to redesign operating structures, identify product opportunities, and improve efficiency by connecting strategic analysis to execution. He holds a degree in International Relations from UNESP. He has further strengthened his leadership and project management expertise through global programs, including McKinsey Forward, Aspire Leaders, and an executive program at Ohio University funded by an LAIOB scholarship.

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 The hardest part of leadership is understanding people: how they think, what drives them, how they respond in challenging situations, and how trust is built across very different environments. What motivated me to join the Atlas Corps Leadership Institute (ACLI) was the desire to better understand leadership beyond the structured and analytical environment I was accustomed to in my professional career. Working with strategic projects and operational excellence taught me how to solve problems, manage performance, and make decisions under pressure. Still, it also made me realize that leadership is much more than delivering results or building efficient processes.

Over time, I became increasingly interested in understanding how leadership varies across cultural backgrounds, experiences, and values. That is why the multicultural aspect of the ACLI became so important to me.

I wanted to learn from individuals whose realities, cultures, and experiences were completely different from mine because I believe leadership cannot be fully understood from a single worldview.”

Listening to how different people navigate challenges, influence others, and define impact has helped me question many of my own assumptions and develop a broader, more human perspective on leadership.

For me, leadership is the ability to help people understand a shared direction and build the confidence to move forward with courage. It is not something I associate with authority, control, or having all the answers. I see it as the ability to influence how people respond to situations, especially when things become difficult or uncertain. What makes leadership meaningful to me is the positive influence it can have on people and environments.

Strong leadership creates trust, stability, and a sense of purpose that helps teams stay connected and motivated, especially during moments of pressure or change.”

In those situations, people naturally look for reassurance and direction, and I believe leadership becomes less about having perfect solutions and more about helping others remain focused and emotionally grounded as they navigate complexity.

To me, that is what makes leadership so powerful: the ability to build confidence and alignment in moments when uncertainty could easily overwhelm people and affect the way they think, behave, and move forward together.

The ACLI has helped me become much more intentional about how I approach leadership in my daily professional routine. Before joining the program, I was highly focused on execution, problem-solving, and operational efficiency. The experience pushed me to look beyond processes and pay closer attention to the people and dynamics behind them. It made me realize that sustainable results are often directly tied to communication, trust, and how leaders navigate change and uncertainty with others.

As I applied those reflections to my work, I became more proactive about questioning processes that no longer created value and proposing improvements focused not only on efficiency, but also on creating better experiences for both customers and internal teams. I also began paying much more attention to how different personalities respond to pressure, feedback, and change, which significantly improved my collaboration and ability to handle challenging situations.

One of the biggest lessons for me was understanding that leadership development often happens through small, everyday actions and attitudes.”

Looking back, I realized that many of those small changes in how I communicated, collaborated, and approached leadership gradually opened the door to greater responsibilities and eventually led to my promotion to Operational Excellence Coordinator. More importantly, the ACLI reinforced my belief that meaningful leadership is built long before it is reflected in a formal title.

The program reinforces a belief that has become very important to me throughout my professional journey: leadership should create value beyond numbers and results. In the future, I want to lead organizations not only by driving business growth, but also by building environments where people feel trusted, challenged, and encouraged to evolve. Working closely with strategic decision-making and operational excellence has shown me that the strongest leaders are those who create lasting change through teams.

Through the ACLI, I have strengthened my understanding of how values, resilience, adaptability, and cross-cultural collaboration shape leadership in global environments. It has also made me more aware of how leadership appears in everyday actions and communication. That is why my long-term goal of becoming a global leader is deeply connected to creating cultures where people, development, and performance can progress together sustainably.

One moment in the ACLI that had the greatest impact on me was a conversation with Ahmet Bozer about self-awareness and conscious leadership. What stayed with me the most was the idea that leadership becomes inconsistent when people do not fully understand their own reactions and communication habits.

It made me realize that leadership is not only about influencing others, but also about recognizing how your own behavior shapes the environment around you, especially during challenging moments.”

That conversation changed the way I think about personal accountability and the responsibility leaders have to shape the team environment. It also showed me that growth often comes from uncomfortable situations, difficult feedback, and moments that force us to rethink our assumptions rather than avoid them. More than discussing leadership theories, it reinforced the idea that self-awareness is one of the foundations of meaningful leadership.

What made the experience much more impactful for me was creating a personal action plan after each module, focused on applying at least one lesson to my professional routine or personal development. Organizing those lessons into short, medium, and long-term goals helped me become much more aware of how I was evolving throughout the program. Over time, I realized that the real value of the experience came from consistently applying those reflections in practice and becoming more conscious of the way I approach leadership in my life.

In addition, another piece of advice would be to remain genuinely open to perspectives and leadership styles that are very different from your own. Listening to how people from different cultures and realities approach communication, conflict, decision making, and teamwork pushes you to question assumptions you may not even realize you have. For me, that openness to learning from different perspectives was one of the aspects that made the experience truly transformative.