Podcast: Strategic Thinker with a System Perspective: The Sixth Leadership Characteristic for Delivering Meaningful Change

Co-hosts Mohamed Saleh and John Dyer delve into four aspects of this often-overlooked leadership characteristic.

Oct. 7, 2025

2 min read

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A well-developed vision for your company’s future is a beautiful thing, and key to turning that vision into action is strategy.

In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, the podcast hosts continue their exploration of 10 essential leadership characteristics for leading meaningful change. This episode, the sixth of the series, highlights the significance of being a strategic thinker with a systems perspective.

Co-hosts Dr. Mohamed Saleh and John Dyer discuss four aspects of this leadership characteristic. They are:

1. Understanding the interconnections of systems.

Saleh says leaders can be too granular in their thinking. As a result, they “lose sight” of the whole from a systems perspective and don’t recognize how interdependencies work with one another or understand the feedback loops that happen.

One potential result of thinking that is too granular, notes Dyer, is a retreat to siloed thinking or introducing a strategic decision to one part of a system that has a detrimental effect on other parts of the system.

2. Finding the balance between the macro perspective and the micro perspective.

“Leaders need to be able to … zoom out to a broader strategy that ties to the vision and then zoom back into the granular action steps that are required to get you there,” Saleh says.

Dyer says he would weight the macro perspective more heavily for leaders “if we truly want to empower employees to solve problems closest to the process.”

3. Anticipating the consequences of your decision-making and its trickle-down effect across the organization.

4. Empowering collaborative problem-solving.

The cohosts also delve into the importance of developing appropriate performance metrics that emphasize a systems approach, discuss how using the strategy deployment process can help build the balance between macro and micro perspectives, and comment on scenario planning and promotional criteria.