Luis Carlos Gouveia became aware of racism at the Faculty, a private engineering university, where his colleagues were mostly white and upper middle class. There, Gouveia joined the soccer team and, in his first match in the domestic league, heard a series of racist insults from the crowd, each time he touched the ball. “It took me a while to understand what was going on. It was hard to deal with looking around and seeing an entire crowd attacking me for free,” he says. Despite the pressure, the young student decided that, instead of being intimidated, he would play a great game and be accepted for his talent, to leave applauded - which in fact ended up happening. According to Gouveia, that was the moment when he decided that he would be the protagonist of his life and that he would never allow himself to be limited by his color.

It was only after two years of graduation that the young production engineer joined EDP, a multinational in the electricity sector, where he has been working for 20 years, that the executive wrote his professional history. One of the most admired leaders of the Company, Luis started his career at EDP in 1999, as a process analyst, to implement the SAP tool at EDP São Paulo, one of the Group's distributors. With the mapping, process vision and excellence in the execution of the service, he was chosen to participate in a pioneer project at the time, in the area of Business Intelligence, at the renowned business school HEC Paris to implement the Management Cockpit project (war room), with the definition of indicators for decision-making at emergency meetings - a solution subsequently successfully implemented at EDP Brasil.

As an analyst, Gouveia also gained recognition from his co-workers after a voluntary trip to East Timor, shortly after the end of conflicts in the country. The executive underwent training with a UN team for eight months, studied Southeast Asia and served for 30 days as a volunteer. For the executive, the trip was a watershed in his career: thanks to the knowledge acquired and the experience lived in this exchange, he took on the leadership of projects that made him grow quickly in the Company, becoming a manager in just five years.

At that time, thanks to the results ahead of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) implementation project in Brazil, which was subsequently replicated at EDP on a global level, the young executive was selected from 2,000 employees to participate in a training program in Coimbra, Portugal - country where the Company's headquarters are located. The learning gained during this period allowed him to create connections with young EDP leaders in Portugal and Spain, a networking that enabled the exchange of knowledge and experiences that directly contributed to his training as a leader. Thus, after four years, Gouveia became a director. From then on, he worked in several areas, such as Purchasing, Logistics and Infrastructure, up to the leadership of social projects at the EDP Institute, in addition to having held the prestigious position of Chief of Staff of two presidents of the multinational in Brazil.

The peak of Luís Gouveia's career, however, happened when he implemented the Cultura EDP project, a broad work that mobilized thousands of employees in the definition and subsequent multiplication of the Company's values and principles, as well as the purpose for which EDP is now recognized “Use our energy to always take better care”. Through the Culture project, EDP Brasil, which until then was in the last position in engagement among 14 subsidiaries of the EDP Group, started to occupy the leadership of the Group in terms of climate. That is where the hashtag #OrgulhodeSerEDP (#ProundToBeEDP) was created, today so popular between the collaborators.

At the head of the EDP Institute, Gouveia played emblematic projects, such as sponsoring the reconstruction of the Museum of the Portuguese Language and, more recently, EDP sponsoring the restoration of the Ipiranga Museum. More recently, his previous areas, the Organizational Transformation Board and the EDP Institute, merged with the HR and IT boards and, giving rise to the People, Digital and Society Board, led by him alongside director Fernanda Pires, in an innovative-shared management model. 

“I would not have gotten where I got if I hadn’t had the support of Allied leaders, who never saw color or race as an obstacle to my growth. They saw my potential, which is the same as that of so many black people in Brazil, but who rarely have the same opportunities that I had. Thanks to my leadership, I was able to shape the professional skills that led me to the position I currently occupy”, says Luis Gouveia. For the executive, changing the statistics that systematically exclude the black population from leadership positions requires awareness of the whole society.

“In this sense, I feel responsible for using my voice to stimulate and show that more black women and men need to reach positions like mine. We need to correct the inequalities of structural racism and show that race, gender, religion or sexual orientation are indifferent in the process of training and professional growth ”, says the executive.