What to Do When Your Manager Says You Need to Be “More Strategic”

What should you do when your manager says you need to be “more strategic,” but cannot immediately explain what that means?

For an early-career professional, this feedback can feel less like guidance than a verdict. You may hear it after a project review, in a one-on-one, or during a performance conversation: your work is reliable, your execution is solid, but you need to think more strategically.

The phrase is difficult because it sounds like a personal quality. It is usually a compressed description of a work pattern instead. Your manager may mean that you bring issues without a recommendation, solve the request in front of you without checking the broader goal, wait too long to surface a dependency, or explain activity without explaining the decision it supports. Those are different problems. They require different changes.

Do not respond by trying to sound more senior, using broader language in meetings, or volunteering for a larger project before you know what is missing. Treat the comment as an incomplete requirement. Your first job is to turn it into observable behavior, a specific work situation, and one repeatable practice.

Separate the label from the work that prompted it

Consider Maya, an operations coordinator six months into her role. Her manager tells her that a launch tracker is accurate and carefully maintained, but says, “For the next level, I need you to be more strategic.” Maya leaves the meeting assuming she needs to become better at long-term planning.

That may be true. But it is not yet useful.

When the manager looks back at the project, the concern is more concrete. Maya noticed that a supplier approval had not arrived, added it to the tracker, and mentioned it in the weekly update. What she did not do was connect the delay to the launch date, identify the person who could resolve it, or propose a choice: move the launch milestone, use an approved substitute, or escalate the approval by a stated date.

The manager did not need a grand strategy document. They needed a decision brought forward while there was still time to act.

This is why vague feedback often produces bad self-correction. The employee tries to improve an identity label. The manager is reacting to a missing handoff in the work process: information arrived, but no one converted it into a decision, an owner, and a consequence.

Feedback is more usable when it is tied to a situation, an observed action, and an effect. The Center for Creative Leadership’s situation-behavior-impact approach is commonly used to make that connection explicit. You can use the same structure when asking someone to clarify feedback you received.

Try this:

“Could we look at one recent moment where you wanted a more strategic response? What did you expect me to notice or do differently, and what would that have changed?”

This is not a request for reassurance. It is a request for a usable specification.

Ask for a reference point, not a personality assessment

After Maya asks for an example, her manager points to the supplier delay. Maya could then ask several follow-up questions, but she should not ask all of them at once. The aim is to locate the decision point that she missed.

She asks, “When I saw that approval was late, should I have raised it sooner, investigated the options first, or brought you a recommendation?” Her manager answers: “Investigate enough to show the options, then flag it two days earlier. I do not need a perfect answer; I need to know what decision is approaching.”

Now the feedback has boundaries. Maya is not expected to solve every cross-functional problem alone. She is expected to recognize when a fact becomes a decision risk, do proportionate preparation, and make the next choice visible.

That distinction matters. Early-career employees sometimes react to broad developmental feedback by taking on hidden ownership. They see a problem and assume they must quietly fix it before involving anyone. This can create late escalation, duplicated effort, or decisions made without the people who own the tradeoff.

A stronger response is to ask what good judgment looks like at the handoff point. The questions below turn an abstract comment into a shared standard:

• Which recent deliverable best shows the gap you mean?
• What information did you expect me to connect that I treated separately?
• At what point should I have involved someone else?
• What options would have been useful to bring forward?
• What would a sufficient first recommendation have contained?

Specific questions make it easier for a manager to give specific answers. Guidance on asking for the feedback you actually need makes a similar point: the quality of the request affects the quality of the answer. “How am I doing?” asks someone to summarize an entire working relationship. “What should I have done when the approval slipped?” gives them a situation they can examine.

There is an important exception. If your manager cannot identify an example after reasonable prompting, do not spend weeks trying to reverse-engineer a standard from a label. Ask instead for a forward-looking test: “On the next project update, what would you want to see that would tell you I am improving in this area?” A future deliverable can create the reference point that the prior conversation lacked.

A developmental label becomes useful only when it points to an observable choice in real work.

Find the missing link in your usual workflow

“More strategic” often appears when an employee’s work stops one step before its wider consequence. The practical fix depends on where that stop occurs.

Maya reviews how she handled the launch tracker. Her existing routine is sound: collect updates, verify dates, flag missing inputs, and publish the status. The weak point sits between flagging an issue and deciding what the issue requires.

She adds a short decision layer to her updates. For every item marked at risk, she writes four lines:

1. What changed: The supplier approval is four business days late.
2. What it affects: The planned launch date depends on confirmation by Friday.
3. What remains unknown: Whether the substitute supplier can meet the same requirement.
4. What needs a decision: Confirm a substitute path or accept a one-week launch move by Wednesday.

This is a modest change, but it alters the value of the update. People no longer have to infer the consequence or discover the impending choice themselves. Maya is still doing coordination work; she is doing it in a way that prepares others to act.

Your missing link may be elsewhere. If you work in customer support, the issue may be reporting repeated requests without identifying the product behavior that produces them. If you work in marketing, it may be presenting campaign results without explaining which audience or message decision they support. If you work in finance, it may be finding a variance but not stating whether it changes a forecast, a spending choice, or a timing assumption.

Do not add analysis merely to make routine work look bigger. Add it when the next person needs help choosing, prioritizing, or allocating attention.

Do not ask how to become more strategic; ask which decision you should have made visible sooner.

Run one small test before changing your whole style

After the conversation, Maya should resist turning every update into a long memo. That would replace one problem with another. Her manager asked for earlier decisions, not more words.

For the next two weeks, she selects one recurring artifact: the launch tracker. On each weekly update, she includes no more than two decision prompts. She sends the draft to her manager before the meeting and asks one narrow question: “Do these show the kind of connection you meant when you said I should be more strategic?”

This creates a feedback loop with a visible input and output. Her manager can respond to actual work rather than trying to define a trait in the abstract. Maya can then adjust the format, the timing, or the amount of investigation she does before raising an issue.

Regular, timely feedback focused on improvement is a central recommendation in the CIPD’s performance-management guidance. For an employee, the useful implication is simple: do not wait for the next formal review to find out whether you interpreted developmental feedback correctly. Put a small, reviewable version of the new behavior into ordinary work soon.

At the end of the test, Maya should review two things. First, did the new decision prompts help her manager or partners make a choice sooner? Second, did she identify the right decisions, or did she elevate routine issues that did not need attention? The first question tests usefulness. The second prevents unnecessary escalation.

A recommendation can be provisional. Waiting for certainty is often a decision of its own.

Use a visible learning record rather than a private promise

Development feedback often disappears because it is stored as an intention: be more strategic, communicate better, show more ownership. Intentions are hard to inspect. A brief learning record makes the work easier to revisit without turning it into a self-surveillance exercise.

Maya keeps a note with three entries after each important update:

• The decision or tradeoff she identified.
• The evidence she used to frame it.
• What her manager or partner said was missing, unnecessary, or particularly useful.

Over time, patterns become clearer. Perhaps she identifies risks early but frames too many as urgent. Perhaps she has sound evidence but waits for certainty when a provisional recommendation would be enough. Perhaps she brings options but does not name who owns the final call. Each pattern points to a more precise skill than “strategy.”

This record also gives you material for a better follow-up conversation. Instead of asking, “Am I being more strategic now?” you can say, “In the last three updates, I started naming the choice, owner, and timing. Is the remaining gap how early I identify it, how I frame the options, or something else?”

That is a much easier question for a manager to answer honestly.

Use the next ordinary deliverable as the test, not a future promise to work differently.

Prepare the next conversation

Before your next one-on-one, bring one recent example rather than a general request for feedback. You do not need to prove that you have mastered a new skill. You need to make the change visible enough for someone to correct it.

If the feedback concerns a work product, bring the earlier version and the revised version. If it concerns meetings, identify one decision you surfaced earlier than usual. If it concerns stakeholder management, describe the moment you involved someone and why. Keep the discussion attached to an actual sequence of work.

Use this short preparation list:

1. Choose one recent project, update, meeting, or handoff that relates to the feedback.
2. Write the observable behavior you tried, not a label such as “more strategic.”
3. Name the decision, risk, dependency, or stakeholder consequence you surfaced.
4. Ask whether the remaining gap is timing, analysis, recommendation quality, or ownership.
5. Agree on one upcoming work artifact that can serve as the next test.