We almost called it something else.
Early on, the names we considered all sounded like tools: a dashboard, a coach, a tracker. Each one made leadership sound like a project you complete and move on from. The deeper we got into the research, the more obvious it became that this framing was the problem we were trying to solve, not the brand we wanted to wear.
So we sat with what leadership actually is, on the days nobody is watching, and the answer kept coming back to the same image. A garden. A grove. A small living thing that does fine for a week if you ignore it, and then quietly tells you the truth in month two.
That is the analogy this whole product is built on. It is worth explaining why.
You Cannot Water Your Plants Once
The first instinct of most new managers is to treat leadership like a launch. You read the book, you go to the workshop, you have the kickoff 1:1, you set the OKRs, and then you go back to doing your real job. The team is planted. The team is watered. The team should grow.
Except plants do not work that way, and neither do people.
Hermann Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, replicated in modern conditions by Murre and Dros in 2015, shows that we forget roughly half of what we learn within an hour and the majority of it within a month if we never come back to it (source). The leadership workshop on Tuesday is mostly gone by the next Tuesday. The values poster on the wall has stopped registering by the second week. The annual review is a single irrigation event in a field that needed steady rainfall.
The research on what actually moves a team is unforgiving on this point. Gallup's analysis of nearly two million employees concluded that managers account for roughly 70 percent of the variance in team engagement scores (source). Not the company. Not the perks. Not the brand. The manager. And not the manager once a quarter, but the manager in steady, present, ordinary contact. Gallup's follow-up work showed that employees who have received meaningful feedback in the past week are several times more likely to be engaged than those who have not (source).
In gardening terms, water on Monday does not get the plant through Friday. You have to come back. That is the entire job.
This is also why Deloitte rebuilt its performance management system around weekly team-leader check-ins after concluding that less frequent contact reduced the manager to a retroactive reviewer instead of a coach (Buckingham & Goodall, HBR 2015). Annual reviews are a fertilizer schedule. Weekly attention is the ecosystem.
Every Plant Is Different
The second mistake, and this one is harder to spot, is assuming everyone on the team thrives on the same inputs.
Anyone who has actually kept a garden alive knows this is absurd. Lavender wants sun and dry soil and gets unhappy when you smother it with attention. Ferns want shade and consistent moisture and will wilt within hours if you leave them where the lavender lives. The variation is not a personality test. It is a real, biological difference in what each living thing needs to grow.
People are not as far from this as we like to pretend.
Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, holds that all humans share three core psychological needs at work: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci 2000, American Psychologist). Those three needs are universal. The way they are best satisfied is not. One person's autonomy looks like a quiet morning with no meetings. Another person's autonomy looks like being trusted to run the room. The same gesture from a manager is a watering can to one person and a hose pointed at the lavender to another.
Hackman and Oldham formalized a version of this decades ago in the Job Characteristics Model. Their concept of Growth Need Strength holds that the same enriched, autonomous work that energizes one employee will produce a muted response in another (source). The work is identical. The person is different. The outcome is different.
Bernard Bass's transformational leadership research goes further and names the antidote directly. He calls it "individualized consideration", treating each follower as a distinct person with distinct developmental needs, and lists it as one of four core dimensions tied to leader effectiveness and team performance (Seltzer & Bass, Journal of Management 1990). It is the difference between giving a team feedback and giving a person feedback. The first is broadcast. The second is care.
Gallup's strengths-based research backs the same conclusion in a more practical way. Work units whose managers received CliftonStrengths feedback, the kind that pushes managers to coach each direct report differently based on what they are individually good at, showed 12.5 percent greater productivity than work units whose managers received no such feedback (Gallup CliftonStrengths Technical Report).
Generic leadership, the kind that runs the same playbook across the team, is the equivalent of watering every plant in the garden the same amount on the same day. Some thrive. Some drown. Some quietly die without telling you why.
What Neglect Actually Costs
Neglect in a real garden is forgiving for a while. A plant can go a week without water and look fine. By week three, you have lost it.
Teams behave the same way, and the cost is well-documented. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2024 estimates that low engagement costs the global economy roughly 8.9 trillion dollars per year, around nine percent of global GDP (source). That number is abstract until you scale it down to a single team. The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that replacing a single employee costs between 50 percent and 200 percent of their annual salary once you account for productivity loss, recruiting, and ramp time (source, drawing on the Center for American Progress 2012 meta-analysis).
A team of five with one disengaged person quietly heading for the door is, on a conservative estimate, a six-figure problem. The plant looks fine until it is not, and by the time you notice, you have already paid for the funeral.
The frustrating part of this math is that the input that prevents it is small. A weekly meaningful conversation. A piece of recognition that is specific to the person. A coaching task that takes five minutes. The water itself is cheap. What is rare is the consistency.
Eyes On, Hands Off
The clearest articulation of all of this we have found comes from General Stanley McChrystal. He spent his career running organizations where command-and-control leadership was the official doctrine, and concluded toward the end of it that the better metaphor for a modern leader was a gardener. "Eyes-On, Hands-Off," as he put it (Fortune 2015). The leader's job is not to grow the plants by sheer force of will. The leader's job is to maintain the conditions in which the plants can grow themselves, and to pay close enough attention to notice what each one needs.
David Hurst, writing in the Drucker Forum, framed the same tension as the difference between the engineer and the gardener. The engineer assumes the system is mechanical and can be specified. The gardener accepts that the system is alive and has to be tended.
Most modern management theory wants you to be the engineer. Most modern management research suggests you should be the gardener.
What a Grove Actually Is
A grove is small, deliberately so. It is not a forest. You cannot run a forest. You can only set policy from the edge of one and hope. A grove is at the scale where one human can know each plant.
That is the scale Grove is built around: one manager, one team, every day. Not a curriculum. Not a quarterly off-site. A small, living set of relationships that get a little water at a time, in the right places, by the person closest to them. Each task in Grove is a single, specific act of attention. Five minutes today. Fifteen minutes tomorrow. A check-in on Friday with the person who has been quieter than usual. The task is small. The compounding is not.
This is also why we do not believe in generic management content as a product. The lavender does not need the fern's care plan. The ten-year veteran does not need the same coaching as the engineer who got promoted four months ago. The diagnostic survey at the front of Grove exists for exactly this reason: it tells the manager what each part of the team is actually missing, and it routes the daily task to the place where attention is most needed.
The whole product, in the end, is one sentence.
Pay attention to your people. Do it in small ways. Do it again tomorrow.
How Grove Helps You Tend Yours
Grove gives you one evidence-based leadership task every morning. The task is matched to your team's current state, drawn from validated research on what actually moves engagement, and short enough to fit into the day you already have. Streaks build. The garden in the app grows or wilts depending on whether you show up. The metaphor is not decoration; it is the operating model.
You do not need to be a great manager already. You need to come back tomorrow.