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Why Zocalo Replaced "Manager" with "Director" in Every Job Title │ Clover Sharpe, VP of People & Brand Experience at Zocalo

Summary

Clover Sharpe holds one of the more unusual seats in multifamily. After over two decades in the industry, she’s now the VP of People & Brand Experience at Zocalo Community Development, a Colorado-based real estate developer. Today, she has ownership across people, brand, and technology adoption under one role. Jacob Kosior and Clover get into why Zocalo removed "manager" from every onsite leadership title and replaced it with "director," the mentorship program that helped one of her properties cut turnover from 36% to 13%, and why she thinks resident retention comes down to details as small as knowing a resident's dog's name. They also talk about what she believes actually separates the leaders and innovators moving multifamily forward, and her hot take on using AI as a thinking tool. This episode was recorded live at TechCon with the Apartment Association of Metro Denver.

I thought marketing was logos, colors, fonts, and websites. But at the end of the day, it's people. It's about the interactions with our people, our residents, and the lasting impact of how we make people feel.

In This Episode

Takeaways

The job title she replaced: "manager." At Zocalo, community manager became community director. Her reasoning: the job was never to manage people or their problems, it's to direct, coach, and partner with them. She wanted the title to reflect that from day one.‍
Leadership training before promotion, not after. Zocalo runs a 90-day mentorship program before anyone is promoted into a director role, pairing them with peers rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be in the office next to them. About half the people who go through it want the role even more. About half realize it isn't for them, before it becomes a costly mistake. Through tactics like this, she helped take staff turnover at one of her properties from around 36% to 13%.‍
Brand isn't a logo. Clover's bar for hospitality: does your team know a resident's name? Their dog's name? Their routine? In competitive markets, she's found small personal touches, including events built directly from resident requests, all add up come when it’s time for residents to renew. ‍
Curiosity, not credentials, is what she looks for in a leader. Asked what separates the leaders and innovators moving multifamily forward, Clover pointed to curiosity, calling it one of the best signals for whether someone is trainable, flexible, and going to seek out new opportunities to help the business.