The Pinnacle of Useless Leadership Feedback: Be More Strategic

Read Time: 4 minutes.

"Be more strategic."

I was on a call this week with an alum of one of our programs. Strong operator. Crushing his targets. His people rate him near the top of the company as a manager. And his director two levels removed just told him: "We haven't seen you be strategic."

His first words to me: "What does that mean?"

That's the type of feedback I despise most. Not because it's wrong. Because it's not actionable. It names a concept, not a behavior. Worse, it's a concept so common we all assume we share the same understanding of it. But push people and you'll see it means different things to different people. You can swap strategic for concepts like “motivated,” "committed" or "organized."

Here's the trap most people fall into next. They think, “I’m doing that, they just don’t see it.” So the lean into getting more visibility. More updates, more meetings, more slides. Which only works if you're actually doing the thing. If you're not, you just spent a month drawing more attention to the gap. The better path?

Decode the feedback before you act on it. Act on it before you sell it.

So I walked him through a 2x2. It's the same one we use in the MGMT Accelerator when a leader shows up with feedback they can't act on.

Two questions:

Four boxes. Assume you’re starting in the worst box. You problem are.

Let's work through it.

Hope in their shoes and assume their feedback is true. If they say they haven't seen it, then by their definition you haven't shown it. Arguing the definition is a losing move.

The move here is translation. Get their help turning the concept into behaviors someone can watch you do.

Ask: "When someone on this team is being strategic, what do you see them doing?" The first answer is usually another concept. "They think 6 months down the road." Still not a behavior. Push for verbs.

Some bosses can't get to verbs. They know it when they see it, but they can't describe it. So ask for a name instead: "Who does this well? What did you see them do?" Even those who can’t articulate the concept can usually point to examples.

You're done when you have the behaviors written down.

Now you can find out which box you're actually in.

Take the the behaviors and ask yourself two things.

Do I feel confident I'm hitting the mark? Be strict. My alum had spent a year building his team's depth ahead of where the product was going. Real work. But it wasn't the behavior they were pointing at, so the honest answer turned out to be no.

Did anyone else notice? If you're confident and nobody noticed, you have a visibility problem. Skip ahead.

Not confident? Do the work first.

Pick the one behavior most aligned to meaningful business outcomes (hint: revenue or customers) and do it for a quarter. The most strategic thing you can do this month is choose the right thing to simply be excellent at it.

Don't fix visibility until you'd be proud of what it reveals.

Once you would, the last problem is making sure they notice.

Leadership excellence is a lot easier when you know what excellence look like. That's the first thing we build together, live, in the MGMT Accelerator. Our last cohort of 2026 starts Monday, October 6 at 11 AM ET.

Two habits get you noticed.

Proactively show your work. Your boss wants the same five things every week: big opportunities, big risks, your people, your hiring, what changed. Send it before they ask. We wrote the full playbook on managing up here. A boss who has to ask assumes the answer is bad.

Ask for feedback. Once a quarter, go back to the person who offered the feedback: "You asked me to be more strategic. We discussed that showing up in these ways. Here's what I've done since. Have you seen the impact?" You either get confirmation or further refinement of the concept. Both are wins.

Consistently applying both for a couple months will usually move your into the good box.

The good box is a great place to be. Enjoy it while you’re there. It doesn’t usually last long.

Your reward is typically a new, higher standard and a new concept. "Executive." "Commercial." "Enterprise-ready."

And you're back in Box 1.

That's not a demotion. That's the reality of the stretch that comes from a promotion. The bar moves up and what it takes to clear it changes.

But this time you have the playbook: decode it, do it, display it.

Try it on the last piece of feedback you couldn't act on, and let me know how it goes.

Lead on, Dave & Mar

PS - The MGMT Accelerator starts Monday, October 6 at 11 AM ET. Twelve hours live over four weeks, with templates for everything we build in class and coaching on your single biggest management problem. You leave with clear profile and expectations for every person on your team, so you’re never telling them to "be more strategic."

More than 1,500 leaders have graduated and said it was worth 25x what they paid.