What “Be More Strategic” Actually Means at Senior Levels

Your review is strong. Your manager says you are trusted with complex work, anticipate problems, and consistently deliver. Then comes the development point: at the next level, you need to be more strategic. You ask what that means. The answer is some version of “get out of the weeds,” “think bigger,” or “operate at a higher level.”

But look at the work you are already doing. You are the person asked to evaluate the options, rescue the initiative, identify the risk, or turn an executive decision into something the organization can actually execute. You may already be connecting decisions across functions, anticipating downstream consequences, and challenging assumptions. You may already know how to think strategically, while your strategic thinking is entering too late in the decision process.

A leader can be highly strategic and still be brought in after someone else has defined the problem, narrowed the options, established the priorities, and decided which tradeoffs are acceptable. In that situation, the useful question is where your thinking enters the decision process. Before you respond to “be more strategic” by changing yourself, you need to determine which problem you actually have: a thinking gap, an operating gap, or a position gap.

Strategic thinking and strategic position are not the same thing

Imagine you are asked to evaluate three options and recommend the strongest one. You examine cost, risk, dependencies, implementation complexity, stakeholder impact, and long-term consequences. You challenge the assumptions behind the numbers. Your recommendation is thoughtful and strategic. But you were not involved when someone decided those were the three options.

You are helping the organization make a better decision inside an existing frame, after the framing decision itself has already been made. Strategic thinking is about the quality and range of your reasoning. Strategic position is about where that reasoning enters the organization’s decision process. The farther downstream you enter, the more likely you are to be working inside assumptions, priorities, and tradeoffs someone else has already established.

In banking and technology, I spent decades doing this work myself and watching talented leaders turn broad direction into something that could survive contact with budgets, infrastructure, risk, people, regulators, deadlines, and competing priorities. That work requires judgment. But there is a meaningful difference between being trusted to make a consequential initiative succeed and being included when the organization decides whether that initiative is the right bet in the first place. If you are being told to “be more strategic,” that is the first distinction to examine.

Why the usual advice is incomplete

There are legitimate reasons someone may need to become more strategic. The Center for Creative Leadership describes strategic leadership as broader in scope, more future-focused, and more oriented toward change than day-to-day operational leadership. A leader who remains absorbed in activity, reports what happened without explaining what it means, or solves the problem presented without considering wider business consequences may genuinely need to develop greater strategic range.

But “be more strategic” often fails as useful feedback because it does not tell you where the gap sits. Research on performance feedback has found that women can receive feedback that is less specific and less actionable than feedback given to men. In Research: Vague Feedback Is Holding Women Back, Shelley J. Correll and Caroline Simard examine how that lack of specificity can make advancement harder. That research does not establish bias in every instance of “be more strategic.” Its relevance here is narrower because the phrase can be too imprecise to act on without further diagnosis.

How to think strategically at senior levels starts before the recommendation

Some of the highest-leverage strategic work happens before anyone begins comparing solutions. It begins with defining the problem and testing which assumptions are being treated as fixed. It also requires deciding what outcome matters most, what the organization is willing to sacrifice, and which risks are acceptable.

In To Solve a Tough Problem, Reframe It, Julia Binder and Michael Watkins cite research examining 350 decision-making processes at medium-to-large companies. More than half failed to achieve their desired results, often because perceived time pressure caused people to examine the problem too narrowly before moving toward a solution. The same principle applies to strategic tradeoffs. In How to Make Strategic Trade-Offs, Mark Seidler, Florian Methling, and Rüdiger von Nitzsch argue that when senior leaders establish multiple objectives without making the tradeoffs between them explicit, people farther down the organization end up making those choices themselves.

Senior leaders become more strategic by moving across levels while influencing the assumptions, tradeoffs, and priorities that shape what the work becomes, without losing contact with operational reality.

Three different problems can produce the same feedback

Once you separate strategic thinking from strategic position, “be more strategic” becomes easier to diagnose.

The thinking gap

Sometimes the feedback is accurate. You may be excellent at solving the problem in front of you but less practiced at asking whether it is the right problem. You may know your function deeply but struggle to connect its priorities to enterprise economics, customer consequences, risk, or long-term direction. You may bring detailed analysis when the decision requires a clear tradeoff. In that case, the issue sits primarily in the range of your thinking. The developmental work is real.

The operating gap

A different leader may already see the larger picture. She understands the weak assumption, sees the business implications, and knows where the tradeoff sits. But the organization only encounters that judgment after she has converted it into a finished recommendation, project plan, risk strategy, or answer.

That matters because organizations classify leadership partly through what they repeatedly experience. If your strategic judgment becomes visible only after it has been translated into execution, the organization may experience you as an exceptional executor even when the thinking behind the work is more senior than the role it is being credited to. The shift is to let the organization encounter your judgment earlier, while assumptions are still movable and the decision can still be reframed.

The position gap

Then there is the structural case. You may already think strategically and already know how to operate upstream whenever you are given the opportunity. But your role, reporting line, meeting access, decision rights, or organizational history consistently bring you in after the frame has been set. Someone else decides what deserves investment, which constraints are fixed, what success means, and which risks are acceptable. Then you are asked to make the decision work.

Here, personal development alone cannot solve the problem. The relevant question is whether your role actually gives you access to the decisions you are being told to demonstrate readiness to influence. I explored a related structural problem in Organizational Flattening: What Really Happens When a Management Layer Disappears. That article looks at what happens when responsibility moves downward without equivalent changes in authority, access, or career value. The mechanism here is different, but the diagnostic principle is related: consequential work and consequential authority are not automatically the same thing.

This can be especially difficult to recognize when the organization genuinely values you. You may be trusted with the hardest problems, called when something has gone off the rails, and have extraordinary credibility. That still does not tell you how early your judgment enters.

What the organization learns from where your judgment enters

Organizations learn what kind of leader you are partly through what they repeatedly experience you doing. Over time, they learn whether you are the person who improves the answer or the person who helps define the question.

That distinction becomes more consequential at senior levels because the organization is no longer evaluating only whether you can handle complexity. It is evaluating whether your judgment belongs in the conversations that determine what should happen before anyone begins working out how to make it happen. You can become known as exceptionally good at solving strategically important problems without becoming known as someone who helps determine which problems deserve to be solved. That is the career consequence.

The first reputation can make you indispensable, respected, and trusted with increasingly difficult work. The second changes the level at which the organization experiences your authority. If “be more strategic” keeps appearing in your feedback, do not immediately assume you need another leadership framework, communication technique, or delegation strategy. First determine what the feedback is actually describing: whether there is a genuine gap in the range of your thinking, whether you are operating in a way that keeps your strategic judgment hidden until it has already become execution, or whether you are being evaluated for strategic authority while consistently positioned downstream of the decisions where that authority is exercised.

Those are different problems, and the question I would start with is this: Which decisions am I expected to influence before the options are set, and do I currently have access to that part of the work?

The answer tells you much more than “be more strategic” ever will. If that answer is still difficult to separate, the SoulFIRE Career Diagnostic can help identify what is actually constraining your career now, including whether the issue sits in the work you are doing, the authority surrounding it, or the path available from here.