Shared leadership framework is helping connect workforce development across a diverse, cross-country organization of approximately 220,000 employees
When Mark Coulter, Director of Talent Development at Loblaw Companies Limited in Toronto, joined the organization in June 2025, one opportunity he and the broader team identified was to create greater consistency around leadership expectations. Across a workforce of approximately 220,000 employees, according to a 2025 company release – spanning grocery retail, pharmacy, e-commerce, and corporate services – different parts of the organization naturally had different perspectives on what effective leadership looked like, he says.
"We saw an opportunity to create greater clarity and consistency around what effective leadership means at Loblaw," says Coulter. "What we found was there was an opportunity to establish a more common language across HR and leaders throughout the organization."
The opportunity was also relevant to broader talent processes, according to Coulter. A clearer and more consistent set of leadership expectations could provide an additional common reference point for talent discussions, development and succession planning across a large and diverse organization. Before further evolving its talent programs, the team saw value in strengthening that shared foundation, he says.
Designing a leadership framework at scale
According to Coulter, the team developed a four-stage model that distinguishes leadership expectations by level. The stages – leading self, emerging leader, experienced leader, and an executive tier – are each built around five consistent categories: shaping strategy, building talent, fostering collaboration, driving performance, and demonstrating what the company calls its blue culture.
"The leadership expectations look different by leadership level," Coulter says. "We wanted to make sure that individuals who come into an organization and are frontline leaders have expectations that are clear and important for them at their role, but the expectations are going to look different as you move through the organization."
Aligning this framework across Loblaw's multiple business units – which include grocery retail, e-commerce, and corporate functions – required considerable collaboration across the organization, he says. With that shared definition now in place, the organization is working to embed leadership behaviours into hiring, performance assessment, succession planning, and development diagnostics.
"Now we have built, I'll call it the foundation of the house, which is clarity on what effective leadership actually looks like," says Coulter. The programs that will build on that foundation are continuing to evolve – but having a common standard, he says, is itself a significant shift for an organization of Loblaw's scale and complexity.
Development as a shared responsibility
With the framework in place, the team is continuing to evolve how leaders and employees approach growth. The approach assigns accountability for talent development in two directions: employees own their development, and leaders own the conditions that make development possible.
"It can never be just this, ‘Hello, employee. I hope you develop next year,’" he says. "The leader needs to be accountable for ensuring that that individual has the right tools, but ultimately the individual is accountable for the development outcomes. That shared accountability is really critical."
Loblaw is also connecting performance management and talent development more deliberately, according to Coulter. Development targets at Loblaw are now framed as enablers of performance goals – helping connect development more directly to employees' day-to-day priorities and performance.
"We look at developing performance goals as one half of the equation, and then how are you developing your leadership capabilities or your other development areas in conjunction with that, with the goal of increased performance?" he says.
The measurement standard is evolving accordingly. "It's not about completion anymore. It's about did that learning intervention have a measurable impact?" adds Coulter.
Building capability inside a transformation
Loblaw is simultaneously managing continued change and evolution across the organization – digital expansion, health services growth, supply chain modernization, and the rapid integration of AI into its operations, according to Coulter. For talent development, that pace creates an important opportunity: building capability for roles and tools that are evolving faster than traditional approaches alone can address.
The organization's approach balances enterprise-wide consistency with flexibility across a broad and diverse organization. Common standards and tools are established at the enterprise level, and functional areas – digital, supply chain, retail operations – determine how to apply them based on their own needs, he says. A broader opportunity is to continue anticipating emerging skills requirements and building a resilient workforce as those needs evolve.
"How do we proactively, at the speed of business, bridge those gaps is going to be an opportunity for us moving forward, which I think a lot of organizations are still trying to get in front of because AI is changing faster than we could have even remotely predicted," he says.
Part of the answer lies in redesigning how learning is delivered. As organizations look for ways to translate learning into applications more quickly, learning and development needs to be embedded in the flow of work, says Coulter. "The more and more that we design and deploy learning experiences that just become part of people's everyday work, the better," he says. "The easier it will be for people to uptake it and the easier it will be for people to leverage those tools and new learnings in their actual day to day."
It’s even more essential in a large, national business like Loblaw that has a diverse portfolio ob businesses, he says. “Each business has different needs and different environmental or business challenges and opportunities,” he says. “So for us as an organization to provide an infrastructure to make sure that we’re agile, businesses can adapt quickly. and that we can bridge those gaps, is an important opportunity.”
An increasingly complex role
Coulter holds a Chartered Human Resources Leader designation, a certified executive coaching credential, and a Master of Industrial Relations – a background that informs his perspective on the HR leader role evolving. "HR has never been more complex in my life," he says.
The skills he sees as increasingly important aren't only content expertise – they're operational. He believes project management, change management, and data-informed decision-making are essential for translating strategy into programs deployed at speed. “The talent manager or the functional expert really needs to have a clear understanding of what that problem is they're trying to solve and solve it in a simple way, because the simple will trump the complex,” he says.
Coulter also argues for a systems view of the talent function. Adjusting one element of the ecosystem can have implications for other connected talent processes. "Everything is connected and I call it levers and dials," he says. "You turn something on, how is that going to impact your other talent programs downstream? And if you're not looking at them as an interconnected system, a change in one area, such as performance, can have implications for another, such as succession planning."
That integrated perspective is increasingly important as organizations seek to connect talent programs more effectively, and Loblaw is continuing to evolve an interconnected talent ecosystem, says Coulter. "We've got a strong foundation to start with," he says.
