What Does It Really Mean to “Be (more) Strategic”?

“You need to be more strategic”

It’s one of the most common, and least helpful, pieces of advice senior leaders receive. A partner is told to stop getting lost in delivery. A new CEO hears it from the board. Senior executives pass it along to their teams as a shorthand for “lift your head up.”

But for all its frequency, the phrase is rarely explained. Too often, it gets conflated with producing slicker strategy decks or simply stepping away from the operational detail. None of those, on their own, make a leader strategic.

At senior levels, technical expertise is no longer the differentiator. What matters most is altitude: the ability to rise above the press of day-to-day operations, to see patterns others miss, and to steer organizations through turbulence.

Being strategic requires cultivating an orientation: a way of seeing, choosing, and shaping that allows leaders to navigate complexity with clarity.

What “Being Strategic” Is Commonly Mistaken For

Senior leaders don’t usually get this wrong; they over-index on partial truths that feel right under pressure. Here are the most common misreads and the better standard.

“We have a strategy, therefore we’re being strategic.”

Partial truth: A sound strategy provides direction.

Why it’s incomplete: Possessing a document doesn’t change how leaders see, choose, and mobilize. Many organizations have a strategy and still make ad-hoc choices, send mixed signals, and suffer decision drag.

Being strategic instead: Leaders continually orient to intent, translate it into near-term choices, and adjust as reality shifts. The emphasis is on how decisions are made and enacted, not on owning a plan.

“Being strategic means planning.”

Partial truth: Planning creates clarity, scenarios, and resource alignment.

Why it’s incomplete: In dynamic contexts, plans decay quickly. Treating planning as the whole job locks leaders into yesterday’s assumptions.

Being strategic instead: Hold deliberate direction while practicing emergent adaptation—linking past lessons, present signals, and future bets. Plans are living hypotheses; leaders test, learn, and recalibrate without losing intent.

That's why deliberate direction without emergent adaptation is brittle, but adaptation without direction is drift. Being strategic holds both.

“Being strategic means thinking bigger and longer term.”

Partial truth: Altitude matters; leaders must see patterns and multiple horizons.

Why it’s incomplete: Big-picture thinking that never converts into trade-offs, priorities, and sequencing remains commentary.

Being strategic instead: Altitude without ground becomes abstraction; ground without altitude becomes reactivity. Being strategic is altitude control.

Altitude control is the disciplined ability to zoom out and zoom in at the right moments. Strategic leaders connect the vista to the next decision.

“Being strategic is a thinking capability.”

Partial truth: Cognition matters—systems perspective, intent focus, thinking in time, hypothesis testing, intelligent openness.

Why it’s incomplete: Without practice and discipline, thinking doesn’t stick. Teams drift back to habit.

Being strategic instead: Treat it as a leadership practice: install decision and review cadences, protect attention, and build renewal into the system so altitude is sustained over time.

The Reality: Strategy as Orientation

To be strategic is to orient yourself and your team in the midst of complexity. It is less about having the “right plan” and more about cultivating the stance, perspective, and practices that allow leaders to navigate the unpredictable with coherence.

This orientation is multidimensional: it spans how you think, how you align others, and how you sustain collective focus. Leaders who adopt it stop treating strategy as an episodic activity — the offsite, the annual plan — and start living it as a way of leading.

The Core Dimensions of Being Strategic

Through my work with senior leaders and leadership teams across impact-driven advisory firms and organizations, I’ve found that “being strategic” consistently shows up across five interlocking dimensions:

• Perspective. Strategic leaders resist tunnel vision. They connect dots across functions, geographies, and stakeholders, seeing interdependencies that others overlook. This systems perspective allows them to anticipate second-order effects and spot leverage points.

  
  

• Intent. They hold on to a clear “true north” even in turbulent conditions. Leaders who lack intent get blown off course by noise; those who anchor to purpose provide clarity for others.

• Thinking in time. They move fluidly across past, present, and future. Lessons from what came before, signals from today, and bets about tomorrow are all integrated into decisions.

  
  

• Hypothesis testing. Rather than clinging to the “perfect plan,” they approach strategy as a series of tests. This mindset lowers the cost of failure and accelerates learning.

  
  

• Intelligent opportunism. They know when to adapt and seize emerging opportunities, without losing sight of their intent.

  
  

• Influence and narrative. Strategy only matters if it moves people. Strategic leaders craft compelling narratives, shape shared meaning, and mobilize coalitions.

  
  

• Rhythms and renewal. They embed cadences of decision and review, and invest in renewal, of themselves and their teams, to sustain altitude.

And beneath all of this lies an identity shift. At senior levels, the hardest part is often letting go of being the operator or expert and embracing the role of orchestrator and shaper. This shift is what enables leaders to inhabit the strategic role fully.

Why Senior Leaders Struggle

If being strategic is so crucial, why do so many capable leaders fall short?

The difficulty is not a lack of intelligence. Many leaders know these dimensions in theory. The problem is that context rewards the opposite.

• External pressures. Clients demand responsiveness; boards demand reporting; crises demand attention. Speed and visibility become the currency of value.

  
  

• Internal habits. Leaders are promoted for delivery and expertise, then expected to succeed through influence and orchestration. Old success formulas get in the way.

  
  

• Cultural bias. Many organizations prize intensity over reflection, activity over discipline, urgency over renewal.

The cost is tangible: decision drag at the top, diffusion of focus, and leadership teams running on fumes. Strategies stall not (always) because the ideas are wrong, but because leaders cannot sustain the orientation required to move them forward.

Building Strategic Muscle

The good news is that strategic orientation can be developed. But it requires moving beyond generic advice into deliberate practice, the kind of work I support when helping executives shift their own orientation, and leadership teams align on the practices that sustain it.

• Reframe the ask. Stop telling people to “be more strategic” without definition. Translate the orientation into shared language and clear expectations.

  
  

• Create altitude. Build structured pauses into the system: decision reviews, strategic reflections, and scenario explorations that force leaders to zoom out.

  
  

• Test and learn. Treat big bets as hypotheses. Run smaller flight tests to reduce risk and accelerate learning.

  
  

• Shape the narrative. Make sense-making a core leadership act. Frame problems in ways others can grasp and align around.

  
  

• Install rhythms. Tie key decisions, reviews, and recalibrations to predictable cadences. Discipline, not inspiration, sustains strategy.

  
  

• Support identity shifts. Provide coaching and peer dialogue to help leaders let go of operator reflexes and embrace the role of strategist.

Final Thoughts

Every senior leader has been told to “be more strategic.” Few have been told what that actually entails. If we continue to equate strategy with longer plans or loftier thinking, we will keep producing fragile strategies that collapse under pressure.

The work of being strategic is harder, deeper, and more human. It requires perspective, intent, influence, discipline, and identity shifts. And it demands collective practice: strategy becomes real not when it is written, but when a leadership team lives it together.

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About the Author

Nazly Frias is the founder of Leadership Impact, a boutique leadership advisory practice specialized in executive teams and senior leaders in impact-driven professional service firms and organizations.

With over 15 years of international experience, Nazly brings a unique dual perspective: she has served as both an insider—leading and being part of leadership teams in global impact consulting firms and public innovation labs—and as an external trusted advisor. This combination allows her to understand the internal dynamics, pressures, and blind spots that leadership teams face while maintaining the objectivity needed to guide transformational change.

Originally from Colombia, Nazly works with clients across the globe in English and Spanish and is based in Berlin.

Get in touch with Nazly