There's a question that every experienced manager eventually sits with: what is my job, actually?
Not the job title. Not the performance review criteria. The real answer to what produces the most value from the position you're in.
At the individual contributor level, the answer is fairly direct: you create value by doing the work well. At the manager level, it's more nuanced. You create value by helping your people do their work well, removing the obstacles in their path, and making good decisions about direction and priority.
But at the director and senior manager level, where you're managing multiple team leads and have significant organizational scope, the answer is different again. At this level, your highest-leverage activity isn't the work you do. It's the capability you develop in the people who work for you.
This is the manager multiplier effect, and most senior leaders dramatically underinvest in it.
The Math That Changes Everything
Consider the arithmetic of leverage at the director level.
If you have three team leads, each managing a team of six to eight people, your effective span of organizational influence is somewhere between 20 and 30 people. What you do directly, the decisions you make, the projects you personally drive, affects a fraction of that impact. What your team leads do affects all of it.
A team lead who runs great 1:1s develops their people faster. Develops them faster means they take on bigger problems sooner. Bigger problems sooner means the team produces more, with less attrition, over time. The multiplier compounds.
The inverse is equally true. A team lead who avoids hard conversations lets problems fester. Festering problems become disengagement. Disengagement becomes attrition. Attrition is extraordinarily expensive, research consistently estimates replacement costs at 1.5 to 2 times annual salary, and that's before you count the team morale cost and knowledge loss.
One team lead. A few conversations they didn't have. The math gets painful quickly.
Now consider what happens when you invest seriously in developing your team leads' leadership capabilities. You're not just helping them. You're multiplying their impact on the 24 people below them, and through those people, on your team's output, culture, and longevity.
This is not abstract. It's the highest-ROI work available to you.
Why Most Directors Don't Do This
Given that developing team leads is so clearly valuable, why don't more directors do it consistently?
The honest answer: because it's hard to schedule and easy to defer.
Developing a team lead isn't a task with a due date. It doesn't show up on the project tracker. There's no quarterly milestone for "made Marcus 20% better at giving feedback." So when the calendar fills up with planning cycles, escalations, cross-functional meetings, and the endless immediate-urgent work that fills a director's day, the development work gets squeezed.
The meetings with your team leads become status updates. The coaching conversations get replaced by direction-giving. The skip-levels get canceled. And slowly, invisibly, your team leads plateau, not because they stopped caring, but because nobody kept developing them.
Here's what makes this particularly dangerous: by the time you notice the plateau in your team lead's effectiveness, it's already been affecting their team for months. And that team's disengagement is now showing up in your retention numbers and your output metrics.
The problem wasn't the metrics. The problem was the development that didn't happen six months ago.
What Investing in Your Team Leads Actually Looks Like
Developing your team leads is not a program. It's a practice. Here's what it looks like when it's working:
Your 1:1s with your team leads are genuinely developmental.
Not status updates with a side of check-in. Real conversations about where they're trying to grow, what's hard for them right now, what they've tried, what worked, what didn't. At least a third of your 1:1 time should be in this territory.
You give specific, timely feedback.
Not performance review feedback. The kind of feedback that happens within 24 hours of a relevant moment. "In that team meeting, I noticed you shut down Jordan's concern pretty quickly. I don't think it was intentional, but I want to talk about the message it might have sent." That's development happening in real time.
You're explicit about what good looks like.
Many team leads are operating without a clear picture of what management excellence looks like in your organization. They know the business outcomes they're expected to hit. Do they know what great leadership behaviors look like? Do they have a model to work toward? If not, they're developing by trial and error, which is slow and uneven.
You create opportunities to practice.
Not just to perform. Give team leads opportunities to try things, to run a difficult conversation, to lead a cross-functional project, to give a presentation to leadership, in conditions where the stakes are real but the failure cost is manageable. Development requires iteration. Iteration requires reps.
You model what you're asking for.
This is the one that's easiest to forget. Your team leads are watching how you manage them and drawing conclusions about what management looks like in your organization. If you avoid hard conversations with your team leads, you should not be surprised when they avoid hard conversations with their people. The modeling is instruction, whether you intend it or not.
The Compounding Timeline
Here's the thing about investing in your team leads' development: the returns take time.
The manager you coach in Q1 will have better 1:1s in Q2. Better 1:1s mean more trust. More trust means earlier signal on team problems. Earlier signal means problems are solved before they become expensive. That impact lands in Q3 and Q4 of this year, and it compounds into next year.
This is not a this-quarter strategy. It's a two-to-four-quarter investment with sustained returns. Which means you have to fight the pull of short-term thinking, the quarterly metric, the immediate fire, and protect the time for development work that doesn't show its return until later.
The directors who build exceptional teams consistently are the ones who found a way to make this long-term investment while still managing the short-term demands. They're not superhuman. They built systems.
What a System for Development Looks Like
The directors and VPs who consistently develop strong team leads have a few things in common:
They have a clear model of what good management looks like and they communicate it explicitly, regularly, and with specific examples.
They use real-time data, not just annual reviews, to understand where each team lead is in their development arc.
They protect time for development in their own calendars the same way they protect time for business-critical work, because they treat it as business-critical work.
And they have a feedback loop. They know when team health is improving because they have access to team pulse data that doesn't rely on their team leads self-reporting. They know what's actually happening in the teams below them.
How Grove Supports This Work
Grove was built for exactly this moment in a manager's career, when you have the instincts and the experience, but the scale makes consistent execution difficult.
When your team leads use Grove, you get real-time visibility into their leadership practice and the health of their teams. Pulse data surfaces from their teams directly, so you're not dependent on secondhand reporting. You can see where engagement is healthy and where it's fading, in time to do something about it.
And when your team leads build daily leadership habits through Grove, the development work happens continuously, not just in the quarterly review cycle.
Your instincts are right. Grove gives you the system to act on them.