When the Feedback Is "You're Not Strategic Enough

You've had the review. Highly capable. Reliable. A great team player, an expert at what you do. Rave reviews on all fronts, and then one line at the end that doesn't sit with the rest of it: not strategic enough.

No one in the room explains what that means. You ask, and you get examples of what strategic people do rather than what you're missing, so you leave with a piece of feedback you can't act on and a strong sense that you're already working as hard as a person can work.

The hard part is what your instincts do next. When results slow down, everything you've learned points you back at effort. Work harder. Say yes to more. Be more across the detail, more available, more reliable. Those instincts are not wrong. They built your career. They're the reason you were given the role in the first place, and they are running at full power in a job that has changed what it rewards without saying so.

That's the pattern I keep meeting in the leadership rooms I work in. The behaviour that gets someone promoted is rarely the behaviour that works once they arrive, and almost no one is told when the switch happened. There's no announcement. The role simply starts asking a different question and keeps using the old vocabulary to ask it.

This week I published a piece about a conversation with a commercial director who ran a hundred and twenty people across twelve magazine titles before building a business around women's careers. Eight weeks into that job, in a meeting with her editors and the finance lead, someone asked her what she was going to do differently. It took her a fortnight to work out the answer, and it wasn't the one the question implied.

The article covers what she found, and why the feedback you're given so rarely names it. It also covers the one thing she updated at every promotion without ever pointing it at the part that was failing.

Read the full article on Substack: https://sonyachoilarosa.substack.com/p/the-manual-you-were-promoted-on