When Christos Rethymiotakis joined DEVELOR Greece, he brought fourteen years of business experience, along with a strong desire to learn something new. After a career at Lidl and PepsiCo, he wanted to take his work in a different direction. Helping people develop, already an important part of his leadership roles, became the focus of that next chapter.
Christos recently joined the Greek team as Senior Consultant & Master Trainer. His curiosity and commitment to development have already set an example and earned him the Growth Ignition Award.
We asked him what he brings from his years in business, what he is learning as he builds his career at DEVELOR, and how he wants people to feel when they walk into his training room.
What does legendary quality in a training experience truly mean to you?
Legendary quality begins long before the trainer says the first word and shows up in every detail of the experience. It starts with thoughtful room preparation and a strong working relationship with the people behind the scenes, so details like hot coffee, water, snacks, or lunch arrive on time.
These things may seem small, but for someone who has traveled, left demanding responsibilities behind, and committed eight hours of their day, they show respect and create the conditions for them to be fully present and ready to learn. I want participants to feel welcomed, as I would welcome guests into my home, and to feel understood when traffic, severe weather, or simply a difficult day puts unexpected pressure on them.
At the same time, a trainer needs to know the content deeply, understand the audience beyond their job titles, and connect the learning to their everyday reality, while remaining humble enough to accept that a participant may offer an insight they have never considered.
When all of this comes together, you see it in spontaneous applause, genuine smiles, and quiet words of thanks that give a trainer the energy to continue, but above all in people leaving ready to do something differently.
Looking back, what key moments shaped you into the trainer you are today?
The moments that shaped me most were rarely the easy ones. Across 14 years in business, including senior leadership roles at Lidl and PepsiCo, I had the privilege and responsibility of supporting the growth of more than 350 colleagues in demanding operational environments.
Much of that development happened not in a classroom, but on the job, where I had to help people understand why changing an established approach would create value while they were managing customers, deadlines, and competing priorities.
Many of those colleagues were experienced, highly capable professionals who challenged my ideas directly and often, teaching me that credibility doesn’t come automatically from a title or past success, but is earned through relevance, listening, and results.
I also had to balance people development with clear organizational KPIs, which showed me that learning has real value only when it strengthens both human capability and business performance.
Looking back, the workplace was my first and most demanding training room, and those years prepared me to do what I now genuinely love: helping people learn, grow, and perform at their best.
What was one major professional failure that fundamentally changed how you work? What did this teach you that success never could?
One of my most important professional failures was entering a new organization with too many answers and not enough questions. After ten years with Lidl in Greece and Germany, I joined PepsiCo as a District Sales Leader with a great deal of experience and, without realizing it, too many assumptions about how processes, people, and decisions should work.
I worked hard, but trust developed more slowly than it should have because I interpreted the new environment through the logic of the organization I had left, instead of first learning how the new one worked.
That experience taught me that past success can become a blind spot when it replaces curiosity, and that credibility in a new context has to be rebuilt rather than transferred.
Since then, I have approached unfamiliar situations with an agile mindset by looking for evidence, asking more questions, listening before reaching conclusions, and staying genuinely curious about other people and the role I need to play.
Success taught me to trust my experience, while this failure taught me to hold it lightly enough to keep learning.
How do you work on your own growth today, now that you are seen as a role model?
Whether I am a role model is for others to decide, but I feel a responsibility to keep growing and to share what has genuinely worked for me in the hope that someone else may find it useful.
For me, growth begins with holding myself accountable, never treating any achievement as guaranteed or final, and remaining open enough to recognize a new idea when I hear one.
Growth is also a team effort, so I keep people close who will challenge me, give me honest and sometimes uncomfortable feedback, and expect me to act on it. Some of those people are the participants themselves, and a comment during a break, especially when I have asked for it, can tell me far more than a perfect evaluation score.
An NPS score shows me how the experience was rated, while a real conversation helps me understand why and what I need to change.
As my career has progressed, I have realized that I fear stagnation more than failure, because failure can teach me something while standing still cannot.
What are you currently striving for, and where do you still want to grow?
Right now, I want to understand every part of the learning and development business, from the first client conversation and diagnosis through to design, delivery, learning transfer and measurable impact. That understanding will help me choose the practices, methods and tools that genuinely fit each need and improve the quality of my work.
AI is central to that journey because I want to use it to save significant time and reinvest it in deeper thinking, better preparation, and higher-quality work.
I also want to become even better at building genuine trust with new clients. My ambition is to look beyond the first request, ask the questions that reveal what lies beneath it, and identify the need that will create the greatest value, even when the client cannot yet articulate it.
Ultimately, I want to go beyond delivering excellent learning and become a trusted partner who helps organizations understand what really needs to change and turns that insight into measurable progress.
What message would you share with training professionals who want to deliver legendary quality?
My advice is to prepare and approach every part of a training experience as if you were planning a very special dinner for the people you love. You would think carefully about their needs, pay attention to every detail, and never assume that what worked for one group will work for another.
A truly legendary trainer also knows that they are not the center of the experience, but the spotlight that helps participants see important parts of themselves more clearly.
The greatest risk comes with experience: familiarity can make us believe we no longer need to prepare, even though small details often make the biggest difference.
My message is simple: master your topic, adapt to every audience, and know yourself.
Christos brings years of leadership experience to his work at DEVELOR, along with a clear appetite for learning. He actively seeks feedback and is willing to rethink familiar approaches, qualities that make him a valued colleague and someone others can learn from.
We warmly congratulate Christos on the Growth Ignition Award. We are glad to have him in the DEVELOR community and look forward to learning alongside him.
