Carla Pereira: Sharing Her Vision as a Human Management Expert
From a childhood shaped by resilience to becoming a trailblazer in HR and leadership, Carla Pereira’s journey is one of determination, passion, and impact. Born in Portugal and raised between two worlds, she overcame early challenges to build a thriving career in recruitment, coaching, and leadership development. Now known as “Mrs. Toolbox” for her practical, results-driven training approach, Carla empowers executives and teams with actionable tools for success. Her mission? To transform workplaces by fostering supportive leadership, and implementing a sustainable teams’ performance culture.
You’ve had a very unique upbringing, spending several years apart from your parents while living with your grandparents in Portugal. How did that early experience shape your perspective on responsibility and independence?
My mum has always told me that I was a very mature child from an early age, so I guess I had it in me.
However, due to life circumstances, I had to grow up quickly and take care of my younger sister too. This period certainly strengthened my sense of responsibility and taught me to make independent decisions early on.
I mostly educated myself by observing the behaviours of others and drawing lessons for myself. Looking back, I realise that this accountable attitude is probably the reason I have been given many responsibilities at an early stage of my career. So, I guess this early experience, albeit difficult, helped shape my journey.
You started your career in Human Resources in the banking sector. What drew you to HR, and how did your role evolve in your early years?
As far as I remember, I have always been drawn to helping people. There are many ways to help people and all I knew was I wanted to be useful to others but didn’t have yet a clue of how.
To be honest, I wasn’t specifically looking for an HR job but after an interview with the Head of HR at a bank, I was immediately inspired by her confidence, independence, and leadership. I told the recruitment agency, “I want to work for that woman!” Luckily, she also wanted me to work for her! LOL
That’s how I landed in HR and I quickly realised I wanted to specialise in the field to contribute to building a strong and positive corporate culture for people.
As I wanted to learn more and become a professional HR, I asked my boss to register for a brand-new certification, the Swiss Federal HR Diploma. Not having an HR certification herself, she didn’t support my initiative. I was so motivated to learn that I financed the course myself.
I share this story to illustrate how important it is to follow your vocation and invest in your education against all odds because it has been decisive later in my journey.
After obtaining my HR diploma, I joined Lloyds TSB Bank as a recruitment officer. Within six months, I was promoted to Head of Recruitment for EMEA & LATAM and Deputy Head of Learning & Development. Being part of a large global group gave me invaluable international exposure.
My passion for recruitment drove me to work hard, and I was fortunate to build a high-performing dream team. To reflect my increasing responsibilities, I was promoted to Deputy Director at age 32, which was an unprecedented move for a young HR professional in the bank.
During this period, I also joined the Geneva Coaching Roundtable, a new group of HR professionals interested in coaching. I felt that I wanted to provide advice and coaching to candidates, and that’s how I decided to venture into entrepreneurship by creating a recruitment agency with a business partner in 2005.
You founded Career Advisors Geneva in 2010. What motivated you to go solo into entrepreneurship, especially with a young child and amid a business separation?
My experience with my business partner was challenging from a human perspective as we didn’t share the same values, which made collaboration difficult. After returning from maternity leave in 2009, I considered going back to the corporate world.
My husband, also an entrepreneur, encouraged me to start my own company. He believed in me more than I believed in myself.
However, I created Career Advisors Geneva because I felt I could do more to help people and companies have a more efficient and benevolent approach to recruitment—making it not just a selection process, but a positive experience for both companies and candidates.
Initially, some clients were wondering if I was still offering recruitment services. The company name anticipated my future vision: I didn’t just want to recruit; I wanted to become: a global career advisor for talents not only from a recruitment perspective but throughout their careers.
So I quickly expanded my services to career counselling, interview coaching, and training for managers and HR to improve their recruitment process and interview structure with one goal in mind: Improve candidates’ experience and employer branding
I launched ICBI® recruitment training in 2013 and the positive feedback I received confirmed that I was on the right path—and inspired me to keep learning, evolving, and training others.
I cumulated several certifications over the years and in 2017, it is thanks to my initial HR Diploma that I was eligible to enrol for the Master in Human Management at the University of Geneva.
How has your Neurocognitive and Behavioural Approach certification influenced your approach to HR and leadership training?
It changed everything—not just my professional practice, but my personal life as well.
Understanding how my brain functions and how it impacts my thoughts and my behaviours was life-changing for me. I learned how to shift from automatic, stress-driven responses to intentional, adaptative thinking—dramatically reducing my stress levels.
This newfound knowledge transformed the way I coach, train, and guide people. I now help executives and teams identify and change some behavioural patterns that hold them back. This neuroscience-backed approach remains central to my practice today. And since neuroscience continues to evolve, I continue to learn—and learning is my lifelong passion.
The concept of “Supportive Leadership®” seems central to your philosophy. Could you explain what this leadership style entails and how it improves organizational performance?
I have worked for many years as an external career reorientation coach for Swiss Invalidity Insurance and I have supported many people who went through heavy health issues amongst which exhaustion or, worse, burnout. In most cases, complicated relationships in the workplace were the seed that led to exhaustion. As an increasing number of people suffer from it, I started thinking what are the root causes?
Alongside, I have been working with team managers for more than 20 years, I often hear them complaining about top management decisions, company culture, etc. They feel powerless, exhausted and disengaged and can’t see how to act upon their non-sustainable environment.
I understood then that the 2 aspects were linked. So, I combined everything I have learned through my experiences, knowledge and studies to create a SUSTAINABLE team performance training and coaching program. It’s 2019, and I have found my purpose and mission: give team managers the tools they need to feel empowered to act on their environment to the benefit of their people, their company and themselves.
Supportive Leadership® is the 1st training of the program, it sets the ground for the other modules by focusing on:
understanding our own and others’ behaviours through the lens of the Neurocognitive approach
Engaging the team around shared values to ensure social & emotional security
Tackling inefficiency by rethinking the way they do things
Encouraging them to lead difficult conversations to address negative behaviours and performance issues
Reducing performance killers to a minimum
Realising that some of their behaviours are often part of the problem they have the power to act on themselves to find solutions
Feeling empowered to somehow act positively on their environment
Defining a tailor-made action plan
Most people might know this, but what was missing was a practical toolbox with ready-to-use tools that helped them implement micro-actions with their teams. That’s why they call me Mrs Toolbox!
When they understand that there are always some areas where they can take action to improve their leadership style and teams’ performance, most of them do it and organisational performance rises. I have incredible feedback from team managers, team members and HR saying how this changed their approach to leadership and sustainably impacted performance.
What do you believe is the connection between strong human relationships and sustainable business performance?
Many academic researchers have demonstrated that companies that have a higher performance are those where people are willing to take spontaneous positive actions and trigger certain positive behaviours. To trigger these behaviours, we need emotional and social security.
Indeed, if we fear something and/or someone, we feel stressed, and when we are stressed, we react or overreact with defensive, aggressive or other negative behaviours.
During my studies for the Master in Human Management, everything became clear: difficult human relations are one of the most important performance killers.
Negative behaviours create tense human relations which cost a lot of time and energy, take a lot of room in our thoughts and keep us awake at night, creating even more stress and fatigue. Neurobiology shows that higher levels of stress prevent our brain from functioning properly, decreasing our cognitive abilities and thus our ability to perform. It’s a vicious cycle.
What some studies have also demonstrated is that people can learn how to change their behaviours through proper training and coaching. In teams where the leadership style instils respect, trust, justice, recognition, self-efficiency perception, autonomy and empowerment (power to act), it creates a better performance. It’s not an opinion, it’s research-based evidence that positive human relations correlate with higher business performance.
This leads me to say, that appropriate training and coaching is never a cost, it’s an investment with a high fast return.
What advice would you give to someone looking to transition into HR, coaching, or entrepreneurship, especially someone facing challenges similar to the ones you’ve encountered?
As general advice, I would recommend investing in yourself. Never stop learning, and training yourself in areas you have already experience in or a passion for.
As an entrepreneur, I’ve made so many mistakes that I could provide a long list of don’ts! My biggest? Relying solely on word-of-mouth marketing. Don’t get me wrong, referrals from happy customers are invaluable and I thank them all. But if I could go back, I would take ownership of my marketing strategy from day one.
At the core of any career transition is self-awareness. Whether you want to succeed in HR, coaching, entrepreneurship, or even become a rock star, I encourage you to work on your fears and insecurities that impede us from getting out there and marketing our added value in our field. Get professional or inspiring help to understand how your brain is wired, and how limiting beliefs are costing you time, and energy and are preventing you from achieving your goals.
Someone who can give you the right tools to practice how to “rewire” and become a better version of yourself. A version is more aware of your natural motivations that trigger pleasure and energy to better cope with challenges we all face sometimes.
Last but not least, join a professional community that inspires you and keeps you abreast of the latest trends in your field, so you keep yourself at the top of your expertise.
