Some leaders are perpetually in the weeds. They’re dissecting every internal process, monitoring team dynamics, tweaking workflows. Others are perched at 30,000 feet, scanning industry reports, tracking competitors, absorbing trend decks. Both groups think they’re being strategic. Neither is.
Real strategic leadership requires the discipline to zoom in and zoom out. But it’s not a natural instinct. It’s a practiced skill, and most leaders haven’t developed it.
Zooming In
Zooming in isn’t micromanaging. It’s forensic curiosity about what’s happening inside your organization at the human level.
Consider what happened at a major U.S. retailer trying to roll out a new customer experience initiative. All the fundamentals were in place. But adoption was stalling in specific regions and completely absent in others. Leadership kept diagnosing it as a “communication problem” and kept sending more emails.
When someone finally zoomed in — talking to store managers, observing team handoffs, listening to what wasn’t being said in meetings — the real issue emerged. The new initiative directly conflicted with the informal performance norms that store managers had built over years. Managers were being rewarded for speed. The new experience required slowness. Nobody had flagged it because it felt like complaining, and the culture didn’t make that safe.
That’s what zooming in finds: the invisible logic that runs your organization in parallel to your official strategy. The cultural friction points, the unwritten rules, the incentives nobody put on paper but everyone understands. These forces don’t show up in dashboards. They live in Slack threads and the meetings that happen after the meeting.
Leaders who never zoom in are flying blind, executing strategy into a headwind they refuse to acknowledge.
Zooming Out
Zooming out isn’t reading trend reports. It’s developing a living, evolving understanding of how the people you serve are changing — their behaviors, expectations, anxieties, and values.
Take the shift in B2B buying behavior over the last several years. For decades, sales-led organizations built their entire model on the assumption that buyers needed their reps to navigate complexity. Then buyers started doing 70% of their research before ever talking to a salesperson. They formed opinions, developed preferences, and in many cases made provisional decisions — all before a sales rep entered the picture.
Companies that zoomed out saw this shift early. They reallocated investment toward content, peer communities, and self-serve tools. Companies that didn’t zoom out kept hiring more salespeople and wondering why the pipeline had gotten so hard to move.
Zooming out is about catching these shifts before they become crises, when you still have time to adapt.
Why Most Leaders Only Do One
Leaders who came up through operations tend to be chronic zoom-inners. They trust what they can observe and control. The big picture feels abstract, maybe even indulgent. They’ll tell you they’re focused on “execution” — but what they’re really doing is avoiding the discomfort of acknowledging that the environment their strategy was built for may have already changed.
Leaders who came up through strategy, consulting, or finance tend to be chronic zoom-outers. They’re fluent in market dynamics and trend analysis. But they often have a mysterious aversion to the messiness of organizational reality. They’ll tell you the “people issues” are somebody else’s problem — usually HR’s. What they’re actually doing is avoiding the accountability of confronting the cultural drag that’s quietly eating their strategy alive.
Both groups produce the same outcome: strategies that look great on paper and underperform in practice.
Switching Lenses
The leaders who actually drive durable change have a practice — usually informal — of deliberately alternating their focus. They ask “what’s the smallest thing that’s blocking the biggest thing?” and then they go find out. They sit in on customer calls not because they have to, but because they’ve learned that two customer conversations are worth more than ten analyst reports. They walk the floor., or they read the verbatim survey responses their teams summarize away. They talk to the person who just quit.
And then they zoom out. They look at where their customers are going — not where they’ve been. They study adjacent industries that are further along on the adoption curves they’re navigating. They ask what their most skeptical customers believe, and they take it seriously instead of dismissing it.
But the rhythm matters. Leaders who zoom in all month and zoom out once a quarter miss the early signals. Leaders who zoom out all month and zoom in once a quarter discover the friction points when it’s already a fire. The best ones are bifocal by design.
No Time Like the Present
If you asked your team today, “What’s actually getting in the way of our strategy?” — would they tell you the truth? And if you asked your most disengaged customer segment, “What would have to change for you to trust us more?” — would you be prepared to hear the answer?
Both of those questions require you to zoom. Most leaders are afraid of what they’ll find when they do. That’s exactly why the ones who do it anyway have such a significant advantage.
About the Author
Trained as an organizational behavioral scientist and customer-centricity expert, Andrea Belk Olson helps companies operationalize corporate strategy through transforming mindsets and behaviors. She is the author of three business books, including her most recent, What To Ask: How To Learn What Customers Need but Don’t Tell You.
She is a 4x ADDY award winner and contributing writer to Entrepreneur Magazine, Harvard Business Review, INC Magazine, World Economic Forum, and more. Andrea is also an applied entrepreneurship instructor at the University of Iowa and TEDx speaker coach.
