The Multiplier Effect: How Jerónimo Martins Is Owning & Scaling Leadership Development Sustainably

Client Profile & Challenge: The Risk of the Broken Chain

Jerónimo Martins faced a challenge common to global organisations navigating complexity at scale: How do you align leaders across functions, cultures, and geographies when the business is outpacing leadership readiness?

As the company redefined its values to meet a shifting competitive landscape, a gap emerged. Many leaders had advanced through functional expertise rather than formal development. The organisation needed more than a skills upgrade; it needed to reshape culture around shared purpose, values, and the capability to lead at scale. It needed to change how its leaders think, act, and grow.

In 2018, Jerónimo Martins partnered with the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)® to launch Be a Leader — a strategic, custom change initiative that aligned behaviours across leader levels with company values. Designed exclusively for managers, who represent less than 5% of the total employee population, each journey moves from building self-awareness to strengthening team leadership to developing the capacity for system-wide influence. Regional implementation managers support delivery across countries, adapting materials and facilitation styles to local context. Global cohorts further connect employees across geographies, reinforcing a shared leadership culture and enhancing collaboration.

Be a Leader delivered results — earning an award for Best Leadership Development Programme from Brandon Hall Group. And its success revealed a new challenge: sustainability at scale.

As acquisitions and new hires expanded the management ranks, external training costs scaled unsustainably. With its size and structure spanning multiple businesses and geographies, the organisation couldn’t rely on external vendors alone to reach every leader. And without a unified approach, individual businesses risked creating fragmented, unaligned development programmes — which could threaten the culture Jerónimo Martins had worked to build.

“Without a consistent development approach, you risk a broken chain in the way that leadership is seen,” says Paulo Jesus, Learning & Innovation Global Director at Jerónimo Martins. “You lose the guarantee that everyone is learning the same concepts and methodology. The clever solution was finding a way to use internal resources to be autonomous, while ensuring full alignment across every level of the organisation.”

The solution was Exponential Leadership, created in partnership with CCL to cultivate leadership culture from within. The Be a Leader programmes remain the backbone of their leadership development strategy. But by certifying a growing team of internal facilitators, and licensing CCL content, the organisation can extend that same quality of leadership learning to every leader, in every business, at scale.

“We believe that one person can change an entire organisation, which is why leadership must be cultivated from within and cascaded at every level,” says Catarina Holstein, Learning Director at Jerónimo Martins.

Solution: Cultivating Leadership From Within

Launched in 2023, Exponential Leadership is an intensive train-the-trainer programme that certifies internal practitioners to deliver CCL leadership content directly within Jerónimo Martins’ businesses. Today, a global network of 28 certified facilitators brings leadership tools into daily workflows across the organisation. The programme is hands-on by design.

On Day 1, participants immerse in core CCL frameworks — including:

• Direction, Alignment, and Commitment (DAC)™;
• Situation, Behavior, Impact (SBI)™;
• delegation; accountability; conflict management; stakeholder management; and influence.

On Day 2, they are already facilitating the content themselves. Every business unit within Jerónimo Martins can nominate facilitators, and the curriculum is shaped collaboratively, with frameworks selected based on the evolving needs of each business.

This internal model scales leadership in 2 primary ways:

1. Organic, demand-driven growth: As leaders identify gaps on their teams, they proactively request facilitators to design targeted solutions — from a single workshop to a full series — using licensed CCL content adapted to their context. Sometimes the leaders have been exposed to the frameworks and know what workshop they desire. Other times, they state their challenges and the Global Learning team creates a plan.
2. Integrated learning journeys: Exponential Leadership tools have also been woven directly into Jerónimo Martins’ broader learning ecosystem. When a region developed a new solution for logistics centers, for example, CCL’s research-based frameworks were licensed and embedded into the official journey and delivered internally.

“Most of our employees are in operations, and the biggest challenge they face daily is leading,” says Gabriela Leite, Learning Manager. “We needed to shorten the development curve to reach all of them, and we knew we had internal knowledge that we weren’t leveraging. Exponential Leadership gives the right tools to our facilitators, who can adapt them with our examples and our reality and take that to leaders across Jerónimo Martins.”

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Partnering to create Exponential Leadership was a natural fit. Consistent frameworks from Be a Leader and other programmes create a shared leadership language across the organisation, while the partnership’s research-based foundation ensures both quality and scale.

“Exponential Leadership will always complement the formal programmes delivered by CCL,” Holstein says. “That is a big part of our overall strategy.”

Results: A Richer, More Contextual Leadership Experience

Jerónimo Martins builds measurement into every stage of its leadership programmes. For Be a Leader, structured feedback loops capture data from end-of-module surveys through impact evaluations and Return on Leadership Learning reports — enabling rapid iteration and building trust in programme effectiveness.

Scaled through Exponential Leadership, the results tell a consistent story: Leaders are not only applying what they learned — they are seeing it make a difference. Participants described becoming more intentional in leading conversations, giving feedback, and developing their teams. Many reported a shift from reactive problem-solving to longer-term, coaching-oriented thinking.

“We hear congratulations for the courage of addressing real organisational challenges, like breaking down silos and navigating conflict, with such good examples of Jerónimo Martins’ reality,” says Elsa Dinis, Learning Senior Manager.

The impact extended beyond individual leaders. Teams showed improvements in productivity, alignment, and morale. Participants used program tools to navigate difficult conversations, redesign team structures, and build more open dialogue. In each case, learning moved into real work.

Impact Data

A key driver is the ability of Jerónimo Martins facilitators to contextualise the frameworks for the people and culture they know. This creates a meaningful “global–local” balance: core frameworks remain consistent, while each business and geography applies those principles in ways that suit their operational reality.

“We don’t simply deliver CCL’s frameworks — we bring them to life through our own culture and experience,” Holstein says. “Because we live and work here, we can adapt the content with real stories that are specific to our people and our reality.”

Just as Be a Leader is continually refined to meet changing needs, so too is the approach to internal facilitation. Jerónimo Martins is now formalising the facilitator community to sustain and grow the network with quality and frequency across all geographies.

“We’ve seen organic growth through designing, testing, and piloting because the content is very good, very relevant, and connected with what we need,” Holstein says. “But for this to continue scaling and being embedded in all our companies with quality and frequency, we must continue to create the structure, the processes, and the governance we need — a network of facilitators who are committed to deliver in all our geographies, in all our companies.”

To embed this model for the long term, Jerónimo Martins established a dedicated communities and facilitation function — focused not just on managing facilitators, but also on spreading a culture of leadership knowledge throughout the organisation.

“It’s a big change in the way we have been doing things, but we want to guarantee that our model is really sustainable,” Leite says. “To do that, we must guarantee that we have the right mechanisms to help our people.”

For Dinis, the logic is simple: an internal community of facilitators is how Jerónimo Martins has grown in other ways. Creating the community to scale leadership development makes sense.

“One of the lessons of leadership is that a leader makes a leader, with good partners and with the frameworks to have the right content structure,” she says. “This is a win-win moment for everyone.”

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