Nobody tells you what "be more strategic" actually means
Readtime: 3 minutes
For years I got the same piece of feedback from the same person.
He was a partner several years ahead of me, someone I worked with closely and who backed me through every promotion, to director and then to partner. He knew my work better than almost anyone. And every time we talked about how I was doing, he'd land on the same thing.
You're too task-focused. You need to be more strategic.
My answer was always a version of the same line.
"I've got a hell of a lot of work to do. Of course I'm task-focused. That's how I get all this s*** done for you."
I stayed task-focused until the day I left, years after I'd stopped working with him directly.
I never really took his advice. Or at least not in the way he meant it.
What he meant was: step back, look at the bigger picture. Which is the standard advice people get as they move up into more senior roles.
And many of us hear that as an instruction to stop being the person doing the work and become the person who does a different kind of thinking about it. To rise above the tasks, because the tasks are apparently the thing holding you back.
But that isn't what happened to me. I didn't stop executing; I just started executing on different things.
The tasks got bigger:
Build a great relationship with the most senior people at the client.
Make the division I was helping to run be somewhere people really wanted to work.
Build my own teams into the teams everyone else wanted to be on.
Those are strategic. They're also concrete things that either got done or didn't. My task-focus didn't go anywhere, I was just pointing it at something harder to measure.
What "build a great relationship" actually meant
Take the first one. "Build a relationship with senior clients" initially sounds intangible. It's strategic, but can it be a task?
When I broke it down, it turned out to be a list of things I did on specific days.
Sending an article, or the name of someone who could help, the day after they said they were wrestling with something.
Doing the small unbilled thing fast, to build trust on the big stuff.
Working out who else in their world they actually trusted, and making sure those people rated me too.
Being the person who said the uncomfortable thing that their team was avoiding.
Getting the informal time – the coffee, the walk to the lift, the drink after work – rather than only the scheduled hour.
None of those on their own is "build a great relationship". But every line is a task.
Which makes me think that being strategic and task-focused are not opposites.
You don't give up getting things done when you're told to be more strategic. You take the same muscle and aim it at bigger, vaguer, more human targets. Ones that don't come pre-broken into tasks, so you have to do that breaking-down part yourself.
My take is that being task-focused about strategic things is a leadership skill in itself.
So I think we were both right. I did get less buried in small tasks. I just didn't get there by becoming less task-focused. I got there by being task-focused about bigger things.
Easy to say
Most people are told to be more strategic at some point. But almost nobody gets told what to actually do differently on Monday morning.
So it becomes a feeling you're supposed to have rather than a set of things you're supposed to do. Which is why so many people nod, agree they'll be more strategic, and change nothing.
If you've had that feedback and it's still sitting there unactioned, maybe it's not because you haven't thought big enough. Maybe it's because nobody broke that bigger thinking down into tasks.
Being “more strategic” isn't something you achieve and then stop. It's a question you keep having to ask about whatever's in front of you. Which is why I still can't fully tell whether I took that partner's advice, or just found a more impressive set of things to be busy with.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. My autumn schedule is filling up. If you’d like to talk about leadership development for your team, now would be a good time. Just reply to this email.