👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I help engineers become great engineering managers - whether you want to become one or are already leading a team.
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If your director has told you to “be more strategic” or “think second-order”, you’re in a tough spot.
This piece is for people who have received this sort of feedback, as well as the managers who might be about to give it.
I strongly believe that this feedback is coming from one of three places. And you need to act differently to find out exactly which one that is in your next 1:1.
Three different problems
Nobody knows what it means to ‘be more strategic’.
It tends to stand for 5 things:
prioritisation
root-cause thinking
second-order thinking
framing decisions for decision-makers
connecting work to the business
You need to know which one of those apply to you.
Sometimes it might not even be a skill issue. Think about why the feedback is vague in the first place. Managers overestimate how clear their feedback is. Interstingly, the gap between what they think they said and what the employee heard widens as the message gets more negative.
Another interesting finding is that feedback loses effectiveness as it pulls attention away from the task and towards the self.
Here are the three problems I think this type of feedback covers:
A skill gap. For example, you see problems and bring options instead of recommendations.
A context gap. You optimise well for your team’s goals but don’t know what the other teams or the organisation care about.
A relationship gap. A polite wrapper for something harder to say, such as “you get defensive when I challenge you”.
The same sentence can mean three different things.
This is my working theory. I’ve not seen a study on this, so it’s purely a practitioner’s argument.
The question I recommend asking to see which gap you have and what to do with the answer:
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