Joana Machado worked at Deloitte, Mars and TAP before joining Semapa Group, where she leads Talent, Innovation and Sustainability. One of her medium-term priorities is to develop the Group’s culture – one that respects the legacies of different companies while finding common ground. In this interview, she discusses how to create environments where people can grow, why diversity matters, and how culture is built day by day.

It was unexpected. My name must have come up at Semapa, and they approached me to explore whether we could work together. At the time, I was at TAP, in an intense and very challenging role in the Human Resources Department, which I really enjoyed.

Semapa has a set of characteristics that really resonated with me. Being a Portuguese company, with private shareholders, and with a spirit that comes not only from Pedro Queiroz Pereira, but also from his daughters – a long-term mindset, solid business foundations, industrial focus. I must confess that I’m passionate about industry and felt this was the perfect opportunity to gain experience in this area.

I’ve had quite a diverse career path. I started in financial auditing at Deloitte, for five years, and it was an incredible learning experience. Then I took on a finance director role at Royal Canin, part of the Mars Group, where there was a lot to be done. I was responsible for cleaning up the accounts and structuring logistics operations for seven years, until the opportunity arose to transition to commercial management, which I led until I went to work for TAP.

I’ve enjoyed all the challenges in my career. If there were any less happy moments, they weren’t related to the challenges themselves, but to the teams and how they were organized. What I’ve learned is that good environments – where everyone knows what’s expected of them, where we can speak up and contribute our strengths, where we can even joke around and dare to try new things – these are the environments where teams excel.

I’m responsible for the areas of Talent, Innovation and Sustainability. These are three areas with something in common: culture. And culture is what we do every day.

When we have a culture of sustainability, we need to incorporate daily practices that align with our goals. If we want to be an innovative company, every day we need to challenge ourselves to think differently. We can’t stay stuck in ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ mode – we need to stimulate creativity and embrace the possibility of controlled failure.

Talent is the combination of the capabilities and energy within our people with the organization’s purpose and culture. It’s the potential to generate sustainable impact. It combines the soil and the seed, the context, the knowledge and the motivation. It’s companies’ duty to create good conditions. Going back to the parable of the talents, the gifts that were entrusted to us: they can stay safely tucked away in a box or be put to work serving society. That’s why working with talent means continuously developing talents, maximizing their potential.

We attract people to environments they recognize as fertile ground – where they have water, sunlight, all the conditions to bring their gifts and put them to work where they are. There are favourable characteristics: people knowing what’s expected of them, feeling that someone cares beyond the purely professional, having challenges that develop them and a support network within the organization.

The priorities are to build on what Isabel Viegas started – a very well-structured project. The Group is in a growth phase: we’ve gone through an early stage where things were set up, and now we’re in an adolescent phase where there are other things to rethink.

The priorities involve developing the Semapa Group’s culture. A culture where, despite all the work and strategy of each company, there is a greater entity. That’s my role. Beyond being a holding company managing subsidiaries, we want to create a Group culture, a culture that respects the cultures and legacies of the different companies but finds some common language and traits. The Group is a greater entity that has strengths beyond the sum of its parts.

It intersects in a behavioral trait we want to see more of in the organization. Organizations today can’t afford to stagnate. Innovating means having an open mind, looking at the world around us, thinking outside the box, leveraging what we have for more than just today. Having the ability to work towards the future, not just in the day-to-day but also for what lies ahead.

Working with talent means first and foremost working with our leaders. It’s our leaders, with different backgrounds and who may be more or less prepared to handle teams, who have the day-to-day proximity to teams to create a culture of innovation and development.

It’s an exceptional mechanism for collaboration between the various companies, for being attentive to our people and their potential. Our people are also paying attention to the opportunities that exist, and there are moments when they feel the need for a career leap and, faced with these opportunities, choose to stay within the group rather than leave. It’s a program that energizes this spirit of belonging to a group, of companies collaborating with each other, of being fertile ground for a diverse and meaningful professional career.

I think organizations should have a strong culture. Diversity, equity and inclusion are essential pillars for the sustainable success of any company. The way they do things should be known and clear, and I don’t see how not to embrace these three pillars in how companies operate. I believe diverse teams generate more creativity, innovation and ability to solve complex problems. Equity ensures that everyone has access to the same opportunities for development and recognition, regardless of their starting point. And inclusion is what transforms diversity into a true asset: it creates an environment where each person feels respected, heard and able to contribute fully.

The more diversity we have within the Group, the more we promote a comprehensive perspective. Companies that always look for the same type of people, from the same background, with the same way of being, have less capacity to innovate, less ability to adapt to the global market we operate in. For me, diversity is an asset for any company, because diversity brings different ways of thinking, different perspectives, different experiences. This is enriching, both individually and collectively.

It’s very important to be in a company whose management signs a diversity, equity and inclusion manifesto, committing so publicly to welcoming and respecting this way of being. Affirming that it’s not only welcome, but should be fostered within the Group, whatever form it takes. This is a wealth for any business. Living with diversity means we need to have very serious values regarding respect and equity, because from diversity come perspectives we don’t understand as easily.

I’d like to see Semapa successful, a company that carries forward its purpose of ‘Making it Better’. Successful investments, made in a way recognized by the market – whether through its way of conducting business, how it embraces and integrates new ventures, or how it establishes itself with a strong culture. What I aspire to is for Semapa Group to be a holding company where, by making things better every day through its approximately 8,000 people, it can achieve the goals it sets out to accomplish. And for it to be recognized by the market as a benchmark Group, with entities people want to work with, whether as an employee, supplier, customer, partner or investor.