Caroline Giron

Caroline Giron has built her career around a conviction formed early in her professional journey that working with people and helping them grow requires a deep understanding of the business they are part of. At Portobello Grupo, that perspective has evolved into a broader view of People and Culture as a strategic capability, connecting culture, leadership, management practices and business execution.

From her early decision to pursue a career in Human Resources to her experience across large organizations, retail, startups and scale-ups, Giron has increasingly worked at the intersection of people and business. Today, she sees herself first as a business executive whose field of expertise is people, culture and organizations.

Connecting Culture to Customer Value

For Giron, culture is the “invisible operating system” of an organization. Strategy defines where a company wants to go, while culture shapes how people behave, make decisions, collaborate and take accountability. That is why she believes culture must move beyond stated values and become visible through leadership practices, management systems, observable behaviors and business decisions.

Her experience at Portobello Shop brought her even closer to this relationship between people and performance. In retail, leadership quality, engagement, staffing, incentives and training quickly become visible in customer experience and sales performance. This direct connection reinforced the importance of understanding business economics and operations well enough to identify the people levers that can improve results.

As her responsibilities expanded from Portobello Shop to Portobello Grupo, her involvement extended into organizational design, governance, commercial performance, leadership effectiveness and transformation. Although different businesses may require different structures and capabilities, Giron recognizes the need for a common organizational foundation that connects them.

For Giron, the key question is no longer simply which HR practice to implement, but what business problem needs to be solved and what must change in the organization to deliver the result. She sees the management model as a bridge that turns strategy into priorities, accountability, everyday behaviors and results. In a market-driven company like Portobello Grupo, this foundation enables the organization to consistently deliver the experience and value promised by its sophisticated and innovative brand. Ultimately, the customer experience created externally depends on the organization built internally.

Developing Leaders through Trust and Accountability

As her responsibilities have grown, Giron has placed increasing emphasis on trust, proximity and accountability. She believes leadership is less about controlling everything and more about creating clarity and strong relationships so people can make decisions and own their consequences. Listening, in her view, means understanding what people are actually experiencing while remaining willing to have courageous conversations.

Her entrepreneurial experience reinforced another principle: growth ambitions cannot be sustained without the organizational capabilities to execute them. A strong investment or growth thesis may provide opportunity, capital and ambition, but execution can still break down without a clear strategy and an organization equipped to support it. She learned to work backwards from strategy, first understanding the business ambition and then identifying the organizational capabilities needed to support it.

Making that strategy executable also means taking it beyond the boardroom, so people at every level understand where the company is going, their role in getting there and the choices they need to make along the way.

Developing people remains equally central to her leadership. Giron believes young professionals grow through a combination of trust, challenge and support, particularly when they receive meaningful responsibility, honest feedback and opportunities to participate in real business discussions. Seeing people she helped develop become leaders has become one of her most meaningful measures of leadership.

As Portobello Grupo enters its next chapter, Giron’s focus is on building an organization that can match the ambition of its sophisticated, innovative and design-driven brand. She aims to make the company simpler, more agile, integrated and customer-centric, while developing leaders who can translate strategy into meaning, simplify complexity and develop others. The culture she seeks to strengthen gives people the clarity and autonomy to act, take ownership of results and place the success of the Group above individual or functional interests.

For Giron, the outcome is clear: build an organization whose operational excellence is as strong as the promise of its brand.