What to ask next, so the vaguest note you'll ever get turns into a plan with a deadline
The usual response to "be more strategic" is to go away and try harder. Pick up the strategy titles. Step back from the details. Give more of your time to the larger picture. Hand off running the meeting and begin setting the agenda. The instinct behind this is sound, and parts of it may even hold up.
The difficulty, in Baltimore as anywhere, is that a phrase like "be more strategic" carries almost no information at all. It stands in for something your manager hasn't yet spelled out. Until that gets spelled out, neither of you can do much with it.
Try 1. It often means something else
Managers tend to grab "strategic" when the actual point is awkward to voice. It may signal "I don't see you in front of senior leaders." It may signal "you were correct, but the way you said it irritated people in the room." Research on the likability penalty has repeatedly shown that the same request is heard as confident from a man and as pushy from a woman. A manager who has picked up that bias without noticing will rarely say "be less blunt." He'll say "be more strategic," since that sounds like development and costs him nothing to say.
Try 2. It can't be measured, so it never ends
"Close the third-quarter revenue gap" has a clear finish line. "Be more strategic" does not. You can work on it for a full year and still arrive at your review with nothing concrete to show, because no one defined what done looks like. Vague notes are a quiet way of deferring a promotion without anyone deciding against you. The comment stays in your file year after year, and it always remains technically true.
Try 3. It hands a systemic problem back to you
Writing in Harvard Business Review in 2021, Tulshyan and Burey argued that the label "imposter syndrome" takes a structural problem and reassigns it to the individual. "Be more strategic" does much the same. If you aren't in the rooms where strategy gets made, the solution is access, not a change in mindset. If your manager has never offered you a place at the planning table, telling you to think like someone who sits there isn't coaching. It simply describes the barrier you're facing.
When the standard guidance still holds, it's worth acting on.
At times the feedback is just a fair description of what happened. If your updates list activity without explaining what it means, if you lay out the data and leave the room to reach its own conclusion, or if you can't explain in a single sentence how your project supports the company's top three priorities, then you really are too deep in the details. Books on the subject are useful, and so is opening with your main point, as Baltimore mentors often suggest.
Different method worth trying
Don't simply agree and move on. Ask three questions, in this order. Start by asking what you would concretely be doing differently if you were acting strategically, which converts a vague label into observable actions; next ask who in the Greater Baltimore office handles this well and what they do that you do not; finally ask what you would need to see, and by what date, before the matter could be considered resolved. The second gives you a model you can observe. The third question produces a timeline, the very thing a vague critique is designed to dodge. Write down the answers and send them back the same day as a short summary. Now you have a plan with a date, and the next time the topic comes up, you can ask which of the three agreed items is still open.
Baltimore's leadership networks can help you sharpen this conversation before you have it. Groups such as ATHENAPowerLink Baltimore and the Greater Baltimore Committee's Women and Allies Board are places to compare notes with peers who have heard the same vague feedback. When you're ready to ask the three questions, rehearsing them with a mentor first can make the difference.
When someone last told you to "be more strategic" in Central Maryland or elsewhere in Maryland, what did they mean by it, and did they ever explain?