The skill shared by the most successful strategists

I’ve written previously about how strategists can offer feedback, which is an important skill in making the work better. But its counterpart - managing feedback - is even more important, as it makes your career better.

I have a matrix I use to assess strategists’ ongoing development. It has 4 sections, each with 3 skills or attributes assessed. The sections are:

1. Craft proficiency

2. Horizontal aptitude

3. Mindset

4. Leadership and team orientation

1 and is about how to do better strategy.

2 and 3 are about being a more effective strategist.

4 is about using a strategy role to be a more effective leader, which is where your career is propelled. “Feedback management” is one of the 3 attributes in it. Because the way strategists handle feedback is pivotal to how their teams and clients view them, how they’re able to impact the quality of the work and - most importantly - how they embody leadership qualities.

Feedback Management is comprised of 4 separate elements:

1. Inviting feedback
Inviting feedback is both an act and a mindset. As an act, it’s proactive. Good strategists don’t just wait for feedback - they actively and specifically solicit it. Don’t just ask questions like, “well what does everybody think?” First, asking “everybody” makes it really easy for nobody to say anything. Second, a general question like that makes it hard to find a lens through which to view the work, and focus thoughts. Better to ask something like, “Amanda, do you believe this insight? Is it obvious to you?” or “Luke, is this narrative working? Did anything feel unnecessary, did I lose you?”

You can see what I mean in those examples when I say strategy is a mindset as well. Your aim isn’t to check a box and make sure nobody has anything to incorporate. Your aim is to use your colleagues and clients to make the work better. Success is (usually) getting feedback that causes you to make changes, not getting no feedback because you got it perfect the first time. You probably didn’t.

2. Evaluating feedback
Evaluating feedback requires empathy (to understand and appreciate the perspective of the person providing the feedback) and vulnerability (being ready to admit you made a mistake or weren’t successful, if it comes to that). It’s not enough to just hear what your colleague or client doesn’t like. You need to have the skills to draw out why they don’t like it. What you’re aiming to evaluate is not the output they object to, but the reasons they object to that output. Otherwise you don’t know what direction to take the changes, so that they better do the work needed.

3. Integrating feedback
Strategy requires some system thinking, and here’s where you put that to the test. In order to decide whether or not to integrate feedback, you have to be able to see how this new direction will affect the whole. Don’t simply say yes, even if the feedback itself seems defensible. Instead say, “ok so what happens if we change it like this?” Look for knock-on effects to your narrative or the clarity of the insights or the creative hook you’re creating. Sometimes solving one problem creates two more, like Hydra heads. If you can’t compute all that on the fly (I know I never can), at least say that you want to think a bit about how the proposed changes figure in, before promising to accept them wholesale.

4. Rejecting feedback
The most important word in the strategist’s vocabulary is “because,” and never more so than when rejecting feedback. Tact can be helpful, but logic is persuasive. When you do need to reject feedback, remember that you’re not rejecting the feedback as much as you’re explaining how the work’s objective is not met as well if you integrate it. Your feedback is on this alternate outcome, not the feedback itself.

Although sometimes the skill behind rejecting feedback is not to - for business or political reasons. There are times when “because they really want it this way” is going to win, even if it’s illogical. Try not to think of it as “ruining” the work, rather just creating a constraint that you need work within. Like writing a poem in iambic pentameter instead of free verse.