Leadership, Talent, and Culture in Consumer & Retail: Key Insights from the MU Executive Barometer 2025

This year’s MU Executive Barometer 2025, developed in partnership with Ipsos, surveyed senior leaders across the Consumer & Retail sector to understand how leadership, talent strategies, and cultural foundations must evolve to secure long-term growth.

The findings are clear: traditional approaches are no longer enough — and addressing leadership, retention, and talent identification in isolation will not be sufficient. They are deeply interconnected and must be rethought holistically.

Key Insights

Key insights from the study include:

• Talent identification is at a crossroads. While data use is rising, many organisations still rely heavily on intuition, creating risks of bias and missed potential.
• Leadership competencies are shifting. Strategic thinking, empowerment, adaptability, and a focus on results are critical—but empathy, an essential leadership skill, remains undervalued and underdeveloped.
• Retention challenges are intensifying. Competitive compensation still matters, but growth opportunities, a strong culture, and inspiring leadership are now decisive in why top talent stays—or leaves.

Over the coming weeks, we will share a series of deep dive articles from our consultants, each exploring a different dimension of these interconnected challenges — and offering practical ideas on how organisations can respond:

• You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure: How to balance data and human insight in talent identification — and why intuition, when structured and challenged, remains valuable.
  (by Floyd Havelaar)
• The Leadership Competency Gap: Why strategic thinking alone won't be enough — and why empathy must move to the center of leadership development.
  (by Tobias Stenzel)
• Rethinking Retention: Why competitive compensation alone won't secure loyalty, and how growth, culture, and leadership are becoming decisive factors.
  (by Caroline Taylor)

Each perspective builds on the others — because leadership, culture, and talent strategy are not separate conversations. Together, they define an organisation’s ability to perform, innovate, and grow.

We look forward to sharing these insights with you — and hearing your experiences and perspectives along the way.

Which leadership challenge is currently most urgent in your organisation — retention, identifying future leaders, or building new leadership capabilities?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or reach out directly.