Leadership
December 17, 2025
People-centered leadership: an applied analysis
For Santiago Franco Jaramillo, CEO of Cibra, effective leadership has four fundamental pillars: the leader, the culture, high-performance teams, and the humanized company
Throughout the period that began in 2012, Cibra Fertilizantes underwent a consistent process of expansion and consolidation in the market. In that year, the company had registered a revenue of approximately R$ 70 million, with a staff of about 70 employees. It was then that the new CEO took over and, by 2024, these indicators had already evolved to a revenue close to R$ 8 billion and a team of 1,300 professionals. The management of this process was entrusted to Santiago Franco Jaramillo, a Colombian executive based in Bahia for over a decade, which is why he calls himself a “Columbian”.
Under his command, Cibra was also recognized, for seven consecutive years, as an excellent company to work for. With so many positive results, the big question asked of him is: what’s the secret? For Santiago, there is no secret, but a lot of hard work, focus on people, and a question that all leaders should ask themselves: what sustains those who sustain organizations? From this reflection, he structured his conception of effective leadership into four fundamental pillars , which place people at the center of management: i) the leader, ii) the culture, iii) high-performance teams, and iv) the humanized company.
These pillars were built throughout his professional career, which began in 1990, totaling over 36 years of experience. And he recognizes that his consolidation as a leader did not occur linearly; on the contrary. At the beginning of his leadership career, he acted more closely to the role of a “boss,” learning through trial and error, in a context where management training was predominantly focused on process management and not on management of people. From these experiences, he understood the need for constant balance between the four pillars he identified.
Within the scope of the first pillar, leadership, Santiago maintains that the badge does not turn anyone into a leader, only into a boss, when the management style is based exclusively on command and control. He himself acknowledges having exercised this style at a certain stage of his career, later understanding that such an approach does not generate sustainable results.
According to your vision, many people are promoted to leadership positions due to their technical excellence, but they come to occupy roles that essentially require human skills, for which they were not prepared. The effective leader, from this perspective, is one capable of simultaneously managing three fundamental processes: strategy, people, and processes. While the boss focuses on the operation and execution of tasks, the leader influences, inspires, and mobilizes people so that results are achieved sustainably.
The leader, as conceived, acts as a link between strategy, understood as the organization’s vision, purpose, and future direction, and the processes necessary for its realization. Without this alignment, operational excellence alone does not guarantee the achievement of strategic objectives. At Cibra, the organizational values of transparency, courage, and collaboration guide the teams’ actions, focusing on reducing organizational silos and strengthening relationships of trust. Leadership, in this context, is exercised primarily by example, not just by discourse.
Another central aspect highlighted by Santiago is the leader’s ability to conduct difficult conversations. Excessively “well-liked” leadership can, according to him, avoid necessary confrontations, failing to position the right people in the right places and to face situations that impact results. The leader, therefore, must sustain both care for people and responsibility for results, a fundamental link for the credibility of their performance.
Communication is presented by Santiago as a structuring competence of leadership. The leader needs to be, essentially, a communicator, capable of talking about values and organizational culture, exercising what he calls “PPP”: patience, persistence, and “parrot,” that is, the ability to repeat the message strategically. Sending an email, for example, does not guarantee that the problem is solved.
When a leader communicates with a team, a large part of the people do not fully understand the message for different reasons. Therefore, the leader must have patience and persistence to repeat the same idea in different ways, considering different learning styles (visual, auditory, written, and kinesthetic). Over time, people start to speak the same language as the leadership. Being a “parrot” in this context is not just repeating words, but reinforcing the message through continuous example in practice.
In the field of organizational culture, Santiago states that “the essence of the company is what guarantees the execution of the strategy”. Without a strong culture, the strategy does not hold. Culture is understood as the set of attitudes, beliefs, and values that guide people’s behavior within the organization. In this sense, the company does not exclusively reward the achievement of results, but prioritizes the recognition of behaviors aligned with institutional values. The management of culture, therefore, is intrinsically linked to people management and the construction of trusting relationships.
He reports that, a few years ago, when acquiring a company, he needed to hire a large number of people and prioritized resumes and technical knowledge. The organization grew rapidly, but the results plummeted. The conclusion was that there was a mixture of cultures incompatible with Cibra’s values, generating behaviors such as sabotage, internal competition, silo formation, and problem concealment.
Faced with this scenario, Santiago made a difficult decision: he personally laid off the professionals he himself had hired. About 40 people out of a total of 100 were dismissed, including two directors, as the company would not be able to sustain itself by maintaining that operating model and, after these difficult decisions, the organizational climate improved significantly, leading him to understand that people management is definitely not HR’s job.
Currently, he directly participates in interviews for all positions at Cibra, except for factory operators, conducting an average of five interviews per week, prioritizing the evaluation of behavioral aspects over technical knowledge. Hiring and dismissal criteria are based on transparency, congruence with values, and behavioral competencies. This model has contributed to maintaining controlled turnover levels.
For Santiago, organizational culture is understood as a dynamic phenomenon that demands continuous care and reinforcement. To sustain it, Cibra holds daily meetings of approximately 15 minutes, which function as a structuring ritual of the culture. In these meetings, the President’s Manifesto (understood as a guiding document) is frequently revisited, allowing its principles to be continuously remembered and reinforced, which systematically strengthens the organizational culture. In crisis contexts, a strong culture acts as a cohesive element, maintaining people’s engagement and their willingness to contribute to overcoming adverse scenarios.
The third pillar consists of high-performance teams, which are defined as those capable of consistently generating extraordinary results over time. In this configuration, exaggerated individual protagonism is discouraged at Cibra, as the logic of the “hero” compromises team cohesion. Furthermore, Santiago highlights the importance of ambitious goals for increasing team potential. Goals need to provoke initial discomfort in teams. Those accepted as easy to achieve (“leave it to me, I’ll deliver”) are not effective and do not take people out of their comfort zones.
The initial discomfort stimulates the team to outline strategies and alternative ways to achieve the proposed objectives, provided, of course, they are coherent proposals. Santiago recognizes that the goals are not always achieved within the originally established deadline, potentially requiring more time or different paths. However, he emphasizes that the essential thing is to maintain the goal as a horizon, even if deadlines and delivery formats are adjusted.
These goals are not tied to individual compensation, as the logic adopted at Cibra is that of collective compensation, based on organizational results, with the aim of avoiding internal competition, political disputes, and dysfunctional practices. For Santiago, ambitious goals are more linked to purpose than to financial reward.
Humanized leadership , the fourth pillar, presupposes awareness of one’s own privileges and the responsible use of power to mobilize people and resources for a greater good. The higher the position, the greater the responsibilities and the impact of decisions, which requires greater ethical vigilance so that this power is not used for personal gain. From this perspective, the exercise of leadership shifts the focus from individual rights to collective responsibility.
In Santiago’s view, the keyword for these pillars to work together is “engagement”. While motivation is often circumstantial and transient, engagement sustains the genuine desire to offer the best performance, not out of obligation or exclusively for remuneration, but out of identification with the purpose of the work. Engagement occurs when people are emotionally connected to the organization’s culture and values, and leadership plays a fundamental role in this process. Oriented towards people, leadership constitutes the main foundation for building extraordinary and sustainable results for an organization.
Who wrote this column
Denise de Moura
