GTF

Marcus Augusto Silva is a supply chain and operations leader with three decades of professional experience across agribusiness, natural resources and technology. As Supply Chain Director at GTF, he leads logistics, procurement, origination, engineering and environment. He holds a master's degree in Strategy and Innovation, is PMP-certified and completed executive education at Wharton. He is also a speaker and author.

Replacing Control with Leadership

In a vertically integrated food business, nothing stays local. A decision at grain origination surfaces weeks later in feed conversion, then flock performance, then the processing line and finally in the product, a family opens at home. By then, it had been traveling for some time.

For years, our instinct has been to manage that risk with more control: more approvals, more reports, more supervision. After three decades in operations across several industries, including agribusiness, I believe control is the least reliable protection we have. What protects an integrated chain is leadership.

Control teaches people not to report problems while they are still small. When a supervisor learns that raising an issue means friction, he waits until it is undeniable, exactly when it costs most to fix. The organization concludes it has a discipline problem. It has a leadership problem.

What Happens in the First Ninety Seconds

Many food operations give someone the authority to stop the line. It is in the procedures, the training and the certifications. The real question is not whether it exists on paper, but what happens in the first ninety seconds after someone uses it.

If a manager arrives visibly irritated and asks who authorized the stoppage, the team has learned which rule actually applies, and it is not the one in the manual. One such moment undoes a year of stated values.

If instead people move toward the problem and ask why, genuinely, until the answer is a process rather than a person, something different is learned. The next problem surfaces earlier. And the one after that, earlier still.

The Leader Plays No Instrument

In an orchestra, the conductor produces no sound. Yet with the same musicians and the same score, he is the difference between a mediocre performance and a memorable one. That is the most honest definition of leadership I know: producing results through and alongside others.

Leaders transform people. People turn companies into centers of results.

In an integrated chain. It is literal. No director works inside the operating procedures or at least should not. Everything we deliver passes through decisions made by others, each needing something different from us. The newcomer needs direction. The experienced hand who lost confidence needs support. The mature manager needs us out of the way. Leadership is literally situational. The same leader must be several leaders in one day.

Where Transformation Actually Happens

Two recent projects, together worth more than 18 million U.S dollars taught me a great deal and confirmed much of what I believed.

The first was automating a cutting room in our chicken protein operation — a decision few companies make comfortably. Shutting one of our plants, which processes 200,000 birds a day, for nineteen days, dismantling the manual cutting room and installing an automated one in its place.

Nineteen days of a plant standing still is not only an engineering problem. It is a test of organizational trust. Nobody could sit on a supplier delay, an environmental issue or a safety risk until the next meeting. For nineteen days, twenty-four hours a day, someone from the team was on that project.

The second was installing four IQF units (rapid freezing), two per plant, with multi-head weight graders and new packaging lines to expand our mix and add value. Several suppliers, two facilities, a punishing deadline. Real partnership is not a box on an org chart. It is people trusting another's judgment under calendar pressure, relying on many hands and strong leadership, technical and managerial.

Neither was won on technical merit alone, but by teams that spoke honestly under pressure, planned, followed through and moved fast through adversity. Systems do not create that. Leaders do.

Advice for Supply Chain Leaders

First, spend real time where the work happens: the mill, the dock, the plant floor, the supplier. Credibility in operations comes not from the title but from showing you understand the constraints your teams live with. Genuine presence creates empathy and is often the beacon a team needs to engage.

Second, watch your own reactions more closely than your indicators. Your team calibrates its honesty to what it sees in you. Consistency matters more than warmth.

Finally, make it visible that early bad news is valued. The supervisor who flags a problem three weeks before it becomes a crisis protects more value than most cost-reduction initiatives deliver in a year. I often say there is no problem in having a problem. The question is how and when you share it, so everyone can align and find solutions.

The companies that lead this industry will not be the ones with the most sophisticated controls. They will be the ones where a supervisor on a night shift, seeing something wrong, believes it is safe to speak up. Leaders transform people; people turn companies into centers of results. In our case, those companies put food on the tables of millions of families. The leadership we practice does not stay inside the plant. It reaches plates around the world.