How Directors In Tech Create Executive Impact That Leads To VP
- Maya Grossman
- Jun 3
- 5 min read
“You need to show more impact.”
It’s one of the most common pieces of feedback Directors in tech hear when they are trying to get promoted to VP, and one of the least useful.
Because most leaders never explain what executive impact actually means.
So high performers default to what they know: working harder, taking on more projects, responding faster, and increasing output. But executive impact is not about volume. It’s about whether your work changes business outcomes, scales beyond you, and increases organizational capability.
If you want to become the obvious choice for VP, you need to understand the impact scoreboard executives are actually using behind closed doors. I explain the broader promotion framework here.
The 3 Types of Executive Impact Leaders Actually Measure
1. Business Results: Are You Moving A Business Lever?
High Effort vs High Impact Work
This is the baseline. Without business results, nothing else matters.
But “results” does not mean “I finished a lot of things.”
It means your work materially influenced an outcome the business cares about:
Revenue. Retention. Margin. Cost. Risk. Speed.
Executives are not evaluating whether you worked hard. They are evaluating whether your decisions changed a business outcome the company cares about.
Early in my time at Microsoft, I spent over two months reorganizing our team’s SharePoint.
I reviewed every document. Cleaned everything up. Built a polished “source of truth.”
And then I realized something brutal:
No one used it. No one cared.
It didn’t change how we worked, how we made decisions, or what the business produced.
It was a perfect example of high effort, low impact.
Around that same time, I prioritized something else: collecting testimonials from past clients.
It took days to design the approach, and a few weeks to capture and edit videos.
Those testimonials were used in real sales conversations. They helped attract new clients and influenced revenue.
One initiative took months and created no meaningful business effect.
The other took a fraction of the time and directly supported growth.
That’s the point.
If you’re a Director aiming for VP, ask yourself:
Does my work tie to one of the company’s top 3 priorities?
If this initiative succeeds, what financial metric changes?
Would the executive team feel it if this disappeared?
Would a VP advocate for this work in an executive staff meeting?0
If the answer is unclear, you may be optimizing something that doesn’t matter at scale.
At the executive level, impact starts with ruthless alignment.
Creating business impact means:
Ruthlessly aligning initiatives to enterprise goals.
Killing projects that don’t tie to real business levers.
Elevating conversations from “did we ship?” to “did we move the metric?”
Business results get you credibility. At the Director level, they are expected. What separates future VPs is how consistently they create strategic leverage beyond individual execution.
If your work doesn’t move a business lever, it might keep you busy.
But it won’t move your career.
2. Strategic Leverage: Does Your Work Scale Beyond You?
Operational Work vs Strategic Work
Strategic leverage is what separates a strong Director from an executive-ready one.
Many Directors stay stuck because they operate as elite executors instead of architects of scalable systems.
It answers one question:
Does your work change how the organization operates going forward?
One of my Directors nailed this in her first week.
We had a project management tool. We were “using it.”
But in practice, it was the Wild West.
Everyone used a different language.
Different ways to prioritize.
Updates were inconsistent and hard to compare.
She could have quietly managed her own projects better and called it a day.
Instead, she built a workflow for the whole team:
Standard update templates. Shared prioritization language. A consistent operating rhythm.
She didn’t just improve execution.
She reduced friction. She made the system repeatable. She made the team easier to lead.
That’s leverage.
Leverage looks like:
Solving root causes instead of recurring symptoms.
Turning one-off efforts into repeatable systems
Building infrastructure that scales beyond you
Making future decisions faster and cleaner
Ask yourself:
Does this initiative reduce complexity long-term?
Does it scale beyond my team?
Will this still create value 12 months from now?
If your work requires your constant intervention to function, it’s operational.
If it compounds without you, it’s strategic.
Executives look for leaders who reduce organizational dependency, not leaders who become the dependency. This is one of the clearest ways to demonstrate executive potential before you have the title.
That’s executive impact.
3. Team And Organizational Growth: Are You Multiplying Capability?
Why Executives Watch How Teams Grow Around You
At senior levels, impact is not just what you personally deliver.
It’s what grows because you are there.
I used to have a leadership habit that felt helpful and decisive:
When someone on my team brought me a problem, I gave them my solution.
Fast in the short term. Terrible in the long term.
Because it trained the team to rely on me for answers instead of building their judgment.
So I changed one thing.
When someone came to me with a challenge, I started with:
“What do you think?”
If they truly had no direction, I’d offer a few starting paths.
But I stopped jumping straight to the answer.
The effect was immediate and compounding:
They built confidence.
They practiced decision-making.
They stopped escalating everything.
The team became more capable and less dependent on me.
That’s organizational impact.
Executives pay attention to whether you:
Build leaders and decision-makers
Increase ownership without constant escalation
Create a bench that scales
Improve performance through others, not just through yourself
If everything runs through you, you look important.
If performance improves without you, you look like an executive.
Why VP Promotions Are Really Bets On Future Impact
Executives don’t promote you as a reward for effort.
They promote you because they believe you can produce bigger outcomes, at bigger scale, with less oversight.
That’s why these three buckets matter.
Results show you can deliver.
Leverage shows you can scale.
Team growth shows you can multiply.
That combination signals readiness for executive roles more than any amount of effort you put in.
This is why many high-performing Directors feel confused when effort alone does not translate into promotion momentum. A big part of the answer is the emotionally uncomfortable work most Directors avoid.
How To Audit Your Executive Impact Scorecard
Before you change everything, audit your current work against the executive impact scorecard.
List your top five initiatives and evaluate each against three questions:
What measurable business outcome does this influence?
What long-term leverage does this create?
What capability does this build in others?
If an initiative doesn’t clearly hit at least one of these, ask:
Can I redesign it to create leverage?
Can I elevate it to connect to a business priority?
Should I delegate it? Or should I stop doing it?
Executive-level impact is not about doing more.
It’s about choosing work that compounds.
And that starts with how you spend your time each week. I wrote about that here.
The earlier you start choosing work through an executive lens, the easier it becomes for senior leadership to already see you operating at VP level before the title arrives. And if you're wondering whether continuing to pursue VP is still the right path for you, I unpack that decision here.
And that choice starts now.
I believe in you, and I’m rooting for you
Maya❤️
