Jesse Jacoby
A senior director sits across from her boss in a development conversation. She has been told, again, that she needs to “work on her executive presence” if she wants to be considered for the next role. She nods, takes notes, and walks out with no clearer sense of what to do tomorrow than she had walking in.
This scene plays out thousands of times a week inside Fortune 500 and middle market companies. The vocabulary varies. Sometimes it’s executive presence. Sometimes it’s gravitas, strategic thinking, commercial acumen, or being “more polished.” The pattern is identical. A vague concept gets handed across the desk, dressed up as feedback, and the person on the receiving end is expected to translate it into behavior on their own.
Most cannot. And most do not.
The Comfortable Fog of Catch-All Phrases
Phrases like executive presence are useful precisely because they are imprecise. They give managers a way to say “you’re not quite there yet” without having to specify what “there” looks like. They allow promotion committees to filter without justifying. They let coaches and learning vendors sell programs without committing to a measurable outcome.
This isn’t always cynical. Many managers genuinely struggle to articulate what they are seeing. They sense something is off, or something is missing, but the language available to them is the same fog they inherited from their own development conversations. Executive presence becomes a placeholder for a whole bundle of unspoken expectations, some about behavior, some about appearance, some about social positioning, and some about the manager’s own bias.
The result is a feedback ecosystem where the most consequential developmental signals are also the least actionable.
The Vagueness Tax
Vague feedback is not free. Organizations pay for it in three currencies, and the bill is larger than most leaders realize.
The first cost is wasted development. Every coaching engagement, leadership program, and 360 review that ends in unspecified feedback produces motion without movement. The leader works harder without working differently. Performance plateaus. The next review surfaces the same critique in fresh packaging.
The second cost is invisible attrition. High-potential leaders who repeatedly hear they need more presence, gravitas, or polish without a usable definition tend to conclude the criticism is about who they are rather than what they do. Some assimilate by mimicking what they have seen rewarded. Others quietly disengage and leave for organizations where the path forward feels more concrete. Either way, the organization loses.
The third cost is leadership pipeline distortion. When the criteria for advancement are encoded in fog, the people who advance tend to be the ones who pattern-match to the fog rather than the ones who would actually do the job best. Diversity of style, background, and approach gets filtered out quietly, not by an explicit standard, but by the absence of one.
The Specification Discipline
The fix is not a new framework. It is a practice. Call it specification: the discipline of translating an abstract leadership concept into three to five specific, observable behaviors that a peer or a camera could verify.
The test is straightforward. If you cannot answer the question “what would I see this person doing differently if they had this?” without falling back on adjectives, the feedback is not yet ready to deliver. Adjectives describe a quality. Specifications describe an action.
Consider executive presence. The fog version sounds like “she needs more executive presence in meetings with the leadership team.” The specified version sounds like this. She needs to stop deferring to the most senior person in the room before stating her own position. She needs to take the floor for the first two minutes of any meeting where her function has the lead, rather than waiting to be called on. She needs to make her recommendation in the first sentence rather than building up to it. She needs to respond to challenges with a clarification of her thinking rather than a softening of her position.
Notice what just happened. The concept did not change. The expectation became coachable.
The Four Anchors of Specification
Most leadership concepts can be specified by working across four anchors. Used together, they prevent specification from collapsing into a single dimension like communication style.
The first anchor is what the person says. Word choice, sentence structure, opening lines, how the argument is ordered, how disagreement is voiced.
The second anchor is what the person does with their physical presence. Posture, eye contact, how they enter and leave the room, how they handle the moment immediately after a senior leader speaks.
The third anchor is what the person decides. Where they take a position, where they defer, what they choose to escalate, what they choose to absorb without amplifying.
The fourth anchor is what the person produces. The quality of the prework, the framing of a deck, the structure of a recommendation memo, the length and clarity of the email that lands in the CEO’s inbox at seven in the morning.
When a manager translates a vague concept into specifications across these four anchors, the receiving leader has a map. They know what to practice. They know what evidence will count as progress. The manager, in turn, has a way to recognize change when it happens, rather than continuing to feel that something undefined is still missing.
The Manager’s New Job: Translator-in-Chief
Specification is not a one-time exercise. It is the work of leading people. In an era where AI is compressing the cycle time on almost everything else, the developmental conversation remains stubbornly human, and the bottleneck is almost always on the manager’s side, not the employee’s.
The leaders who develop the strongest benches are the ones who refuse to deliver feedback they themselves cannot operationalize. They sit with the discomfort of “I am not sure what I mean by that yet” and do the work of figuring it out before the next conversation. They build a personal vocabulary of specified behaviors that gets sharper with each cycle. They treat the moment of giving feedback as a craft rather than a chore.
This is also where most leadership development programs fall short. They teach the categories without teaching the translation. They give managers the language of executive presence, strategic thinking, and commercial acumen without ever requiring them to convert those concepts into the four to six observable behaviors they would coach their own people toward.
Closing the Gap
The fastest way to upgrade your organization’s leadership development is not a new model, a new platform, or a new program. It is the discipline to stop letting vague feedback leave the room.
Before the next development conversation, every manager in your organization should be able to answer two questions about each piece of feedback they intend to deliver. What specifically would I see this person doing differently? And how will I know when they are doing it?
If the answer to either question is fog, the feedback is not yet ready. Sit with it longer. Specify harder. The leader on the other side of the desk deserves the work it takes to make the feedback usable.
The cost of vague feedback is not in the conversation. It is in the years that follow, when promising leaders stall against a standard nobody could quite name. The cost of specification is a few more minutes of preparation. The return is a development practice that actually develops.
