What to ask next, so the vaguest note you'll ever get turns into a plan with a deadline
Hearing "be more strategic" tends to make people take the criticism personally and turn it inward. Pick up the strategy books. Pull yourself up and out of the daily grind. Put less of your effort into minutiae and more into the bigger picture. Stop chairing the meeting yourself and start designing what gets discussed. The intent is good, and parts of it genuinely hold up.
But there's a catch. Vague praise like "be more strategic" doesn't count as feedback. It's a stand-in for something your manager hasn't managed to articulate, and until you push for that clarity, you can't act on it, and neither can they.
One. In most cases it is a stand-in for some other, unstated concern.
When the actual message is hard to deliver, managers reach for the word "strategic" instead. Sometimes it means "I don't see you in the room with senior leaders." Sometimes it means "you were right, but the way you said it rubbed people the wrong way." Research on the likability penalty has repeatedly found that the same request sounds assertive coming from a man and demanding coming from a woman. Someone who has picked up that bias without noticing will rarely say "be less blunt"; instead, the phrase "be more strategic" comes out, because it reads as developmental advice and costs the speaker nothing in Connecticut's workplaces or anywhere else.
Two. Since nothing about it can be quantified, it has no point at which it is complete.
"Close the third-quarter gap" comes with a clear endpoint. "Be more strategic" does not. You could spend a year working on it and still walk into your review with nothing concrete to show, because no one defined what done looks like. Imprecise feedback is the quiet tool that lets a promotion get delayed while no one has to take responsibility for the decision. That remark lingers in your record from one review cycle to the next, and it stays accurate in the narrowest sense no matter what you do.
Three. It hands the system's problem to you
Writing in Harvard Business Review in 2021, Tulshyan and Burey argued that the label "imposter syndrome" takes a structural problem and assigns it to the individual. "Be more strategic" does much the same thing. If you're not in the rooms where strategy gets decided, the solution is access, not a change in mindset. When a manager has never invited you into the planning room in West Hartford or East Hartford, asking you to reason like the people who occupy it does not qualify as mentoring. That is simply an accurate account of what stands in your way.
Where the traditional guidance still applies
Sometimes the note is accurate. If your updates list activity without implications, if you lay out the data and let the room reach its own conclusion, or if you can't explain in a single sentence why your project matters to the company's top three priorities, then yes, you're too deep in the weeds. The reading list will help. Opening with your conclusion will help as well.
Here is the alternative approach.
Don't nod along and then drift off, especially in Hartford where feedback is taken seriously. Ask three questions, in this order. Begin by asking what you would concretely change if you were operating strategically, then ask who in Bloomfield, Windsor or elsewhere in the region handles this well and what they do differently, and finally ask what evidence would signal completion and by when. The first question turns a vague label into behavior you can actually see. The second question shows you a live example worth studying in Glastonbury. The third supplies a date, which is precisely what a vague comment is designed to dodge. Record the replies and circulate a brief recap that same afternoon. With that, you hold a dated action list, and at the next review you can simply ask which of the agreed steps remains open.
For women leaders across Greater Hartford, from Glastonbury and Manchester to West Hartford and New Britain, it can help to test these questions in a peer setting. Groups such as WAVES | Women's Networking in Glastonbury, Chamber Women's Network Series in Manchester, and the Women's Business Development Council's Hartford Small Business Mastermind offer room to practice how you'd frame the ask. Local employers such as Aetna, Travelers, Cigna and The Hartford, all in the metro's large financial and insurance sector, are also places where many leaders have had to translate this kind of feedback into a concrete development path.
When you last heard "be more strategic" in Manchester, Glastonbury, Newington or anywhere else, what did it really mean, and did anyone spell it out for you?