Read the full breakdown of this conversation: Why Women Keep Getting Told They’re Not Strategic Enough — the key insights, my take from the coaching seat, and the full transcript.
Someone told you that you’re not strategic enough. Maybe it was in a review, maybe it was said casually in a hallway, and maybe it has been sitting with you ever since. What made it so frustrating is that nobody explained what they meant, or what you were supposed to do differently on Monday morning.
Jill Avey heard the exact same thing. She had spent fifteen years as a marketing strategist; strategy was her specialty, and she was still criticized for not being strategic enough. What she figured out was that she had been strategic the whole time. She just wasn’t communicating it in a way anyone could see. As she says in this episode, it was happening on the inside, and nobody could see it on the outside.
In this conversation, we get specific about what strategic thinking actually looks like when you put it on a calendar, why women get rated lowest on this one competency, and the sentence you can stop saying in meetings this week.
What you’ll take away:
- Why ”you’re not strategic” is almost never about your thinking, and almost always about what people can see
- The one leadership competency that decides who succeeds as an executive, and why women rank at the bottom of it
- Why the shift from doing to leading is so much harder for women, and what we were trained to do instead
- The two areas Jill sees women score lowest on, and the exact habits that fix them
- How to use AI to run your future thinking once a month, in the time you actually have
- The language shift that makes the same work sound strategic to the people above you
About Jill Avey:Jill is a women’s leadership coach with an Ivy League MBA and the founder of SisterSmart. She has spent more than twenty years working with leaders in Fortune 100 companies, and she is one of the first hundred coaches certified in the Big 5 of Strategy assessment. She built the Strategic Leadership Lab for Women around the exact problem in this episode.
Connect with Jill:
- Strategic Leadership Lab (starts September 11): https://sistersmart.com/sla
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jillavey/
- Substack: https://jillavey.substack.com/
- YouTube: SisterSmart Leadership, https://www.youtube.com/@jill_avey
Connect with Limor:
- Website: https://limorbergman.com
- Podcast: https://limorbergman.com/podcast/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/limorbergman/
- Substack: https://limorbergman.substack.com
Searches this episode answers: what does it mean when your boss says you’re not strategic, how to be seen as strategic at work, how to be more strategic as a leader, strategic thinking for women in tech, why women get passed over for executive roles, how to demonstrate strategic thinking in meetings.