Perspective is Power: How Shifting Your Leadership Lens Gets New Results
In leadership, the most dangerous perspective is the one you don’t know you’re stuck in.
When results come up short or strategy goes off course, the default reaction is often to use familiar playbooks. But the leaders who consistently drive performance within their team know that falling back onto old habits doesn’t unlock better outcomes. Perspective does.
Shifting your lens, from local to enterprise, from ‘me’ to ‘we’, from tactical to strategic, is what enables better decisions, stronger alignment, and positive results.
Keep reading to explore how leaders get stuck, and how the most effective ones get unstuck.
Why Leaders Get Stuck in One Perspective
Success creates blind spots
What helped you succeed at one level of leadership won’t necessarily carry you through the next.
Take, for example, a Director who has built their reputation on operational precision and is known as someone who can solve problems quickly and deliver flawlessly within their function. That strength doesn’t go away, but the moment their role expands to enterprise-wide scope, that same instinct to zero in can become a liability. The job is no longer to always go deep – it’s evolved to see the macro and micro.
As we highlighted in Optimizing Q4:How Strategic Leaders Turn Year-End Insights into Business Strategy, strategy requires altitude. And what many leaders miss is that perspective is a mindset shift and a performance requirement.
Habitual thinking drives repeat outcomes
In volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments, habitual thinking becomes a liability. Leaders default to familiar playbooks and ask familiar questions, but the landscape has already changed.
As we explored in Strategies to Prevent Stagnation in Leadership Growth, when leaders stick to what once worked, innovation fades. Meetings feel predictable. Strategic conversations become rehearsed. And performance plateaus. Perspective shifting interrupts that cycle.
Organizational dynamics reinforce limited perspectives
Systems reward local wins. A director who optimizes for their department’s KPIs may appear high-performing and competent until it’s realized that the optimization came at the expense of another department. Without perspective shifting, what seems like strong performance can actually stall organizational progress.
Over time, leaders grow more aligned with their immediate team’s needs than with the full organizational strategy. The shift from “my team” to “the business” is what distinguishes operational managers from strategic leaders.
The risk: same inputs, same results
Without shifting perspective, inputs stay fixed which leads to incremental outcomes at best, and misaligned execution at worst. Especially during periods of transformation, fixed thinking becomes a silent barrier to change.
What Perspective Shifting Looks Like in Practice
Viewing challenges from another leader’s vantage point
Consider this scenario: a senior marketing leader struggles to gain traction with their product or technical partners as tensions rise around speed to market.
It’s easy to assume the delay is a lack of urgency or a reflection of misaligned priorities. But when that leader starts to approach the issue from the perspective of product delivery, factoring in resource allocation, timing, and technical debt, the conversation changes.
The leader doesn’t have to lower their expectations. They simply have to shift their lens. When they do, suddenly, the issue becomes a shared execution challenge instead of a marketing bottleneck. The team moves forward not because the pressure disappears, but because understanding replaces assumption.
Reframing the problem to focus on outcomes
Strong leaders move beyond symptom-solving. Rather than asking, “How do I fix this?” they ask, “What outcome are we trying to create, and what’s missing?”
In Challenging the Way You Add Value as a Leader, we highlighted a Marketing Director learning to budget for the enterprise, not just her team. That shift required her leader to resist doing the work for her and instead coach her toward a broader outcome. Perspective shifting enabled both leaders to rise.
Seeing decisions through the lens of downstream impact
Leaders with narrow lenses often drive unintended friction downstream. For example, an Ops leader launches a new workflow only to discover it slows Sales. Or Finance tightens controls, not realizing it adds five hours of manual work per week to each regional lead.
When decisions are made without accounting for second-order impact, alignment suffers. Perspective shifting asks: “What will this decision look like two levels down and two quarters from now?”
Understanding how power, perception, and assumptions shape interpretation
Perspective shifting improves problem-solving
Examining problems from multiple vantage points surfaces creative, often overlooked options. What once seemed like a constraint often turns out to be a solvable coordination issue, or a case of misaligned expectations.
Strengthens influence and alignment
When stakeholders feel genuinely considered, not just consulted, resistance to initiatives drops. Early cross-functional alignment creates a launchpad for performance.
Surfaces what’s really at stake
Sometimes what appears to be a misstep is really a missed expectation. A strategic lens uncovers what isn’t being said. This kind of clarity protects against spiraling into blame and positions leaders to reframe conflict as a capability gap.
Accelerates clarity, especially in ambiguity or conflict
The most effective leaders aren’t those who always know the answer. They’re the ones who know which lens to use. Mental agility allows leaders to shift between macro enterprise thinking and micro operational focus without losing coherence.
As we noted in Strategies for Mental Agility in Your Leadership, this rare trait is a performance differentiator. Leaders who operate from the 30th to 90th percentile are agile. Those who can flex from 0 to 100 within a single conversation? Those are the ones who transform organizations.
How to Build Perspective Shifting Into Your Leadership Practice
Incorporate pre-flection in your decision making
Before taking a decision, ask yourself questions like
- What am I not seeing?
- How would this look to ___?
- How might another department view this proposal?
- What would our frontline teams notice that I’m missing?
- What other possibilities exist?
Strategic leaders normalize seeing and anticipating challenges from multiple perspectives. They ask questions and ideate solutions and prepare for future events or experiences before they happen.
Use role-switching in decision reviews or post-mortems
In executive debriefs, ask one function to analyze the decision from another’s lens. For example, have Product speak from the Sales perspective. Have Finance argue from the lens of People & Culture. These exercises surface blind spots and deepen cross-functional empathy.
Create space for opposing viewpoints in team discussions
Psychological safety doesn’t mean comfort. It means people feel safe to disagree, challenge assumptions, and speak up without penalty. Building space for disagreement allows for higher thinking and better decisions. And over time, it shapes culture.
Pressure-test decisions from multiple vantage points before acting
Before greenlighting a strategy, run a quick mental model: What changes at 10,000 feet? What risks emerge on the ground? What does this look like to your harshest critic and your most optimistic partner? This is a habit of scalable leadership.
Final Thoughts
Great leadership requires range. The ability to zoom out, zoom in, and shift your lens based on the moment is a practised capability.
Leaders who get stuck in their perspective create bottlenecks. Those who challenge assumptions, test their thinking, and operate from a strategic lens? They create results.
Perspective isn’t just personal. Perspective is a performance advantage.
To learn how Bright Wire partners with executive teams to scale leadership capability, explore our Executive Coaching and Coaching Capability Programs.
