Retail and Services in 2026
In retail and services, everything depends on a single link: the frontline, which smiles at the customer while translating strategy into daily execution. In large-scale, consumer-facing sectors, when this link accumulates demands without receiving adequate support, it quickly becomes the most fragile point in the system.
The transformations affecting these sectors are well known: persistent pressure on margins, increasingly demanding customers, accelerated technological adoption, and talent scarcity. What has changed is the pace at which these forces assert themselves – especially for those who must absorb them and convert them into action on the ground.
Over years of working in retail and services, in management and leadership roles and in team development, it has become clear that this link continues to be supported by models that do not keep pace with the complexity of the operational context.
In practice, pressure falls across the entire frontline. But it is primarily on operational leaders – of stores, branches, and other customer contact points – that responsibility converges for absorbing change, making rapid decisions, and ensuring operations.
This is where the paradox emerges. The system depends deeply on these leaders to function yet support for their development remains inadequate.
Subject to pressures coming from multiple directions – strategy, central structures, customers, and their own teams – these operational leaders become simultaneously the most demanded and the most vulnerable link. They are expected to demonstrate resilience, decision-making maturity, and delivery capacity precisely where pressure is greatest and support least structured. If we continue to ask for more execution without redesigning how leadership is exercised day to day, the system will continue to fail.
The strain of the role is neither inevitable nor solely the result of its inherent characteristics. It is deeply linked to how these leaders are – or are not – supported and developed. In this context, training ceases to be a complement and becomes execution infrastructure.
But why are current training solutions inadequate?
Because traditional training often remains disconnected from operational reality, with limited impact on daily practice. The result is a vicious circle – leaders promoted without adequate preparation, pressured to deliver immediate results, who ultimately underperform, burn out, or disengage.
The challenge, then, is to rethink the training model. Not all competencies are developed in the same way or in the same place.
Internally, it makes sense for organizations to ensure the transmission of their strategy, culture, priorities, and processes – what is specific to the business and its competitive context.
Externally, there is now a broad offering of leadership and strategy education, and rightly so. It is outside the organization that leaders gain critical distance, exposure to benchmarks, and conceptual frameworks to think beyond their immediate context.
What continues to be missing is capability-building truly designed for the reality of the role. Training oriented toward decision-making under pressure, team management, and the resolution of concrete problems, as well as the connection between strategy and operations. This is less about adding content and more about changing the nature of capability-building: fewer abstract concepts, more criteria for prioritization; fewer ideal models, more tools for imperfect days.
In short, what is needed is an integrated development ecosystem, closely linked to the day-to-day reality on the ground.
There is now growing consensus: there is no technological transformation nor sustained improvement in customer experience without a different approach to developing those who lead on the frontline. That is where a critical competitive advantage lies. The strategic priority is to redesign – starting today – how these leaders are prepared; otherwise, the link on which everything depends will continue to be the weakest.
Paula Hortinha, Director of the Retail and Services Operational Leadership Program at CATÓLICA-LISBON