#WeLeadComms: Susana Brito

Today’s #WeLeadComms honors go to Portuguese communication leader Susana Brito.

Susana is a Portuguese communications professional with an international career spanning Europe and Latin America, working across large organizations and diverse industries.

She has lived and worked in Spain, Ireland, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, holding roles at organizations including Estée Lauder Companies, Ryanair, Prosegur, and Suntory Global Spirits, where she is currently International Communications Senior Manager. These experiences have shaped her ability to operate in complex, multicultural environments and engage stakeholders across markets. 

Her work focuses on one of the core challenges in global communications: ensuring that corporate narratives remain relevant and meaningful across cultures and geographies. She pays close attention to how perspective, bias, and local realities shape how messages are framed and understood.

She also recognizes that every communicator operates through the lens of their own cultural background and experience. For that reason, she sees empathy as a strategic capability rather than a soft skill—essential to understanding local nuance, anticipating how messages will land, and ensuring they resonate in each market.

Among her key contributions, she highlights leading crisis communications at Europe’s largest airline during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as supporting major transformation initiatives within complex organizations.

Building her career across non-native languages has been a defining part of her journey. Working daily in English, Spanish, and Portuguese has often meant having to prove herself twice over. Rather than a barrier, she has turned this into a strength, developing resilience, credibility and a sharper sensitivity to how messages travel across cultures.

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