Business Etiquette: Speaking Portuguese in a Professional Setting

More formal than you are expecting

Portuguese professional life runs on hierarchy, titles and long relationships. If you have worked in London, New York or São Paulo, the pace and the register will both feel off at first, and the instinct to speed things up is the wrong one.

Most of what goes wrong for foreigners is not the Portuguese. It is being too casual too early.

Titles, and who gets which

In most of the English-speaking world "Doctor" means a physician or someone with a PhD. In Portugal it means you finished university, and it is used.

Title	Applicability	Social Requirement
Doutor / Doutora	Anyone with a University Degree (BA or higher)	Mandatory in initial/formal meetings
Engenheiro / Engenheira	Certified Engineers	High prestige; always used in address
Arquiteto / Arquiteta	Certified Architects	Specific to the profession
O Senhor / A Senhora	General polite address	Used when no specific degree is known

Calling Doutor Silva "João" is not friendly, it is a mistake. The move to first names comes eventually, and it is offered by the older or more senior person. Wait to be invited.

Email is still correspondence

Portuguese business email kept the shape of a letter. There are formulas, and using them is expected rather than stiff.

Openings
Estimado Sr. Doutor [surname]: first contact, maximum formality.
Prezada Dra. [surname]: formal and respectful.
Caro [name]: only once you know each other.

Closings
Com os melhores cumprimentos, the standard, works everywhere.
Atentamente, more formal again.
Cordialmente, once there is genuine warmth.

No "Hi", no "Cheers", no opening straight into the point. If you take one thing from this section, take Com os melhores cumprimentos.

The first twenty minutes are not wasted

Meetings do not open with the agenda. They open with the weather, the football, the state of the traffic, somebody's mother's health. Fifteen or twenty minutes of it.

This is the meeting. Portuguese business is built on knowing who you are dealing with, and the small talk is how that gets established. Listen to how it is done: warm, but with the pronoun dropped and the title kept.
Como está o Sr. Doutor? Passou bem o fim-de-semana?

Glancing at your watch during this is read exactly as you would expect. The room is deciding whether it wants to work with you for the next decade, not whether to sign this week.

Dress and distance

Corporate Lisbon, meaning Amoreiras and Parque das Nações, still runs conservative. Dark suits, and nothing you would need to explain.

Eye contact direct without being a challenge. Personal space somewhere between the North American bubble and the Brazilian one, which mostly means standing slightly closer than feels right and getting used to it.