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Something uncomfortable is happening across UK retail. Organisations are asking their people leaders, area managers, store managers, department heads, to coach, develop and guide their teams through a period of extraordinary change. And those same organisations are, in the main, not doing the same for those leaders themselves.

You cannot ask someone to be a brilliant developer of others if no one has invested in developing them. You cannot expect someone to lead a team through uncertainty with confidence, clarity and skill if they have never been shown how, or experienced it from the other side.

A sector under unprecedented pressure

The scale of disruption is stark. Retail's mid-level leaders are absorbing the impact of:

  • Over 17,000 store closures in 2024 — a 30% increase on the previous year
  • ~170,000 retail jobs shed in 2024, the highest since the pandemic
  • Rising National Insurance costs, persistent inflation and accelerating AI transformation
  • Continued restructuring as retailers revise operating models under margin pressure

The sector still employs around 2.6 million people and generates £517 billion in annual sales. But it is doing so with a leadership layer that is structurally underprepared for the moment.

The mid-level manager is the hinge. Through every redundancy announcement, technology rollout and restructure, they are the ones translating strategic decisions into something their team can understand, absorb and act on, fielding the questions, managing the anxiety and maintaining performance at the same time.

They are doing this, in most cases, without having had any meaningful development in how to do it.

The 'Accidental Manager' problem is especially acute in Retail

The Chartered Management Institute's research is unambiguous: 82% of UK managers who enter management roles have had no formal management or leadership training. They are 'accidental managers'.

In retail, this problem has particular force. The dominant promotion pathway runs from the shop floor upwards:

  • You become a team leader because you were a good sales assistant.
  • You become a store manager because you were a strong team leader.
  • At no point in that journey are you necessarily taught how to lead people, develop talent, or guide a team through change.

The productivity cost is significant. The CMI attributes up to 50% of the UK's productivity gap with comparable economies to management capability and service industries, retail chief among them, are precisely those most dependent on the quality of their human leadership.

For HR and L&D in retail, this is not simply a training issue. It is a business continuity issue. The people most responsible for executing your change agenda have, in most cases, never been taught how to do it.

The middle manager squeeze: Expected to develop others, rarely developed themselves

Middle managers in retail already operate under exceptional pressure — more direct reports than counterparts in most other sectors, labour churn running at 41.6% (well above the UK average), and constant operational demands that crowd out any space for reflection.

Add to that the expectation that they will lead their teams through change — and the data on their own development makes sobering reading:

The development gap in numbers

  • Only 37% of middle managers receive any training when promoted into their role
  • 74% report having had no ongoing training since taking up their management position
  • 59% of UK managers feel unsupported or only somewhat supported in coping with current demands
  • 65% say they lack the resources to manage change effectively
  • Trust in managers dropped from 46% to 29% between 2022 and 2024

When the people expected to guide others through change have not themselves been guided, that gap shows — and teams notice when their manager is improvising under pressure.

The human cost is real too. 91% of retail line managers have seen an increase in mental health issues among their staff. 90% of retail workers report verbal abuse from customers in the past year. The manager is absorbing all of this — without being supported in how to do so.

Change is decided at the top. It lives or dies in the middle

Seven in ten UK organisations lead change top-down — a small group of executives guiding a much larger workforce through the transition. The mid-level manager is expected to be the translator, the reassurer, the champion.

Yet the disconnect in that handover is consistent across the research:

  • 74% of senior leaders say they involved their people in building the change strategy
  • Only 42% of employees feel included
  • Only 25% of organisations have employees who say managing change is a major strength of their senior leaders

Somewhere between the boardroom and the shop floor, the story falls apart. And it usually falls apart at the tier that was never properly equipped to tell it.

The CIPD is direct: change management needs to be a core leadership competence at every level — focused not just on process, but on the psychological and emotional dimensions of change. Most change initiatives fail not because of poor strategy, but because of poor implementation. And poor implementation traces back, almost every time, to underdeveloped leadership at the point of delivery.

The problem is not that retail organisations lack people willing to lead change. It is that those people have rarely been shown what good change leadership looks and feels like — from the inside.

Senior leaders aren't off the hook

It would be easy to frame this as purely a middle management problem. It is not. The development gap extends upwards.

Post-pandemic, senior retail leaders have faced relentless transformation, economic volatility, digital disruption, ESG pressure, AI adoption, often without commensurate investment in their own leadership development. Berwick Partners, drawing on 20+ years of senior retail search, notes that the expectations placed on retail leaders have transformed dramatically:

  • From operational execution to strategic transformation
  • From managing a single channel to leading omnichannel complexity
  • From people management to cultural stewardship and change leadership

The skills required have expanded significantly. The development to match them has not kept pace.

Deloitte's Retail & Consumer Trends 2026 is explicit: organisations need to support their people during a period of unprecedented change and build resilience across the entire workforce. But resilience cannot be declared. It has to be modelled. Leaders who have not experienced good development cannot credibly model it for those below them.

The operational trap: No space to learn while everything's on fire

Even where the will exists to invest in development, retail's operating reality creates real barriers:

  • Store managers already carry more direct reports than counterparts in most other sectors
  • High churn means perpetual onboarding — there is always someone new who needs support
  • Fragmented HR systems create administrative burden that crowds out thinking time
  • Taking a manager off the shop floor for even a day creates genuine operational problems

Traditional one-off training models compound this. A standalone training day — disconnected from the manager's actual work, with no follow-up and no peer support — does not develop a leader. It provides information, at best.

Development is something different. It requires time to absorb new thinking, honest conversation with peers who understand the same pressures, and the chance to try, reflect, adjust and try again. This is not a luxury — it is the minimum that effective development demands.

What good development looks like — and why leaders need to experience it first

Here is the point that gets lost in conversations about training budgets and programme design: the most powerful thing you can do for a retail leader who is being asked to develop others is to let them experience genuinely good development themselves.

When a leader moves through a well-designed learning arc, something shifts. They do not just learn new skills. They experience what it feels like to be well supported, well challenged and genuinely developed.

What a well-designed development arc delivers

  • Blended pre-work gives leaders time to engage with ideas before gathering together — reducing pressure to perform and creating space for genuine thinking
  • Cohort learning creates peer relationships and honest conversation that retail leaders are rarely given access to — the relief of being in a room with others facing the same pressures is, by itself, developmental
  • Reflective practice — the structured opportunity to stop, name what is happening and consider how to respond differently — is perhaps the rarest gift in a sector that almost never stops long enough to ask whether it is doing things well

The programme itself models what it is asking leaders to go and do. The journey a leader takes through good development becomes the template for the developmental journey they create for their own team.
That experience changes how they lead. They start to recognise what good development looks and feels like. They understand — from the inside — what it means to be brought along a journey rather than just told what to do.

And when they go back into their organisations, they do not just have more knowledge. They have the belief that investing in development is worth it. That is the precondition for developing others.

What this means for HR and L&D

The research points consistently in one direction: the development gap is not a frontline training problem. It sits in the middle and upper tiers of the leadership structure — and it is expensive.
The business case is clear:

  • CMI research puts the performance uplift from investing in management development at 23%
  • Companies investing in leadership development see 25% better business outcomes
  • The cost of not investing shows up in failed change initiatives, disengaged teams, high turnover, and managers who quietly burn out doing a job they were never taught how to do

The priority is to develop the developers. Not to design more programmes for frontline teams while leaving their managers underdeveloped. Invest in the middle and upper leadership tier first — because they are the ones who will create the conditions for everyone else to grow.

The goal is not managers who know more. It is managers who have experienced what good development feels like — and can now create it for others.

The question for retail HR and L&D is a simple one: if you are asking your leaders to develop others through change, who is developing them?

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