The Zoom In, Zoom Out Skill Every Senior Leader Needs

Most of us arrive at the top table having been brilliant at one thing. We get promoted because we are good, really good, at the work. And then we find ourselves in a room where the work is no longer the point. The question is no longer "how do I deliver this?" It is "where are we going, and does any of this actually serve that?"

That shift is harder than it sounds. And for many senior leaders, the instinct to dive back into the detail never fully goes away.

In the latest episode of The Strategic Leader, Gemma and I are joined by Nicola Tilbury, a Director at Potter Raper, a construction consultancy that works on complex building and infrastructure projects across the public and private sector. Nicola has been in the industry for 40 years, sits on the executive board, and has recently stepped into a new role focused entirely on the strategic and internal health of the business. She is thoughtful, experienced, and refreshingly honest about what it takes to hold a strategic view when everything around you is pulling you back into the operational.

Strategy that sneaks up on you

One of the things I find genuinely interesting about Nicola's story is that she did not set out to be strategic. She just started noticing things that other people were not noticing.

As a senior surveyor and project manager, she had always held a clear endpoint in her mind. She was thinking about the whole thing, not just her piece of it. She started creating templates to assess competency levels, looking at how the team was performing, identifying gaps. And then one day, her organisation came to her and said, you are thinking way beyond your current role.

That is something that comes up a lot, actually. Strategic thinking, at its best, does not feel like a grand act. It often just looks like common sense to the person doing it. The difference is that not everyone does it. And the people who do tend to stand out long before they realise why.

For Nicola, the clearest moment of recognition came when she spotted a gap in the company's geographical footprint, put together a business plan, and proposed opening a new office. That, she says, was when she really understood what "stepping back from the day to day" actually meant in practice.

The flip-flop problem

Potter Raper is an SME. Five offices, around 170 employees. The exec board are not just strategic leaders, they are also working directors, still hands on in the business. Which means they are expected to flip between operational and strategic thinking multiple times a day, often without a clean transition between the two.

Nicola describes it brilliantly. You are in a client conversation, in the weeds of a project, and then you are expected to step back out and hold the long view. And then back in again. And the pull towards the operational is enormous, especially if the business has been built on technical excellence and deep client relationships.

Left to their own devices, most exec teams will drift back into the operational. They just do. Not because they are not capable of thinking strategically, but because operational problems are immediate and feel urgent. Strategic questions are slower and harder to hold.

Nicola's team now does two things that I think are worth noting. They hold a dedicated strategic review every six months with just the exec board, completely separate from the monthly operational meetings. And every year, there is a full board session to set success factors across finance, people, customers and operations, with quarterly check-ins on progress. That structure matters. Without it, strategy becomes something you mean to get to.

The case for a facilitator

Something Nicola says that I find quietly important is the reason her team decided to bring in a facilitator for their strategic sessions. Not because they did not know how to think. Because they knew themselves well enough to know they would drift.

There is a lot of self-awareness in that. Many teams resist external facilitation because it feels like an admission that they cannot manage their own meetings. What Nicola is describing is the opposite. It is a team that has thought carefully about its own patterns, identified a genuine tendency, and made a deliberate choice to do something about it.

The result, she says, was transformative. Two days going back to values, to mission, to their actual "why." Sceptics who came in unconvinced left with renewed energy. A board that had spent years operating as a partnership, answering largely to themselves, came out with a shared lens on where they were going.

Slow down to speed up. It sounds like a cliché. But Nicola's experience of it is a pretty good argument for taking it seriously.

The zoom in, zoom out skill

The conversation that really lands in this episode is about what strategic thinking actually looks like in the middle of a working day. Not in a strategic offsite, but in a regular meeting, with a junior colleague and an HR manager, talking about apprenticeships.

Nicola describes the moment she felt herself step back out of that conversation and look at it from above. Holding the immediate detail of what was being discussed, while simultaneously asking: what is the strategy here, where is this going, and how does this connect to everything else?

Gemma has a wonderful metaphor for it: those cameras on a wire over a sports ground, the ones that swoop right down into the action and then pull up and back to give you the full panoramic view. Strategic leaders do that constantly. Down into the detail, up to the big picture, sideways to consider the implications for the rest of the business, and back again. It is not a single elevated view. It is a continuous movement, and doing it well is a skill in its own right.

I think that is one of the most useful ways I have heard it described. Because too often we talk about strategic thinking as if it just means zooming out and staying up on the balcony. What Nicola is describing is more sophisticated than that. It is knowing when to go up, when to go back down, when to go sideways, and how to hold all of those perspectives at the same time without losing the thread of any of them.

Things nobody warns you about

As the episode draws to a close, Nicola shares some honest advice for anyone stepping into an exec level role. Some of it is practical: challenge the status quo, ask questions without embarrassment, be ready for a room full of other opinionated people who are used to being in charge of their own patch.

But some of it is more personal. Be prepared for the weight of responsibility, she says. The decisions you make affect a lot of people, and that settles on you differently when you are the one making them. And be prepared to be lonelier than you were before. There are fewer people in the organisation who are going through what you are going through, and less that can be openly shared.

I have heard this from other leaders too. It does not mean the role is not worth taking. It means it is worth going in with your eyes open, and with some thought about where your thinking space and your peer support will come from.

Worth a listen if...

You are in a senior leadership role where you are expected to be both strategic and operational, and you find the switching harder than anyone talks about. You lead or sit within an exec team that keeps drifting back into the detail and you are wondering how to change that. Or you are about to step up and want some clear-eyed advice from someone who has done exactly that, more than once, and has earned their perspective the old fashioned way.

You can find The Strategic Leader wherever you listen to podcasts. And if there is a strategic dilemma you would like Gemma and me to dig into in a future episode, we would love to hear from you.

Fi Craig is the founder of GoodThinking, a Bristol-based team and executive coaching practice working with senior leaders and their teams across the UK and internationally. The Strategic Leader podcast is co-presented with Gemma Bullivant.