Beyond Autopilot: Lory Lanese on Ending Leadership Blindness

Lory Lanese is a leadership coach, organisational development consultant and author with more than 30 years of experience in leadership development, executive coaching and organisational culture. Her career includes senior training and leadership roles at Equifax, Intel and Risas Dental and Braces.

Lanese loves supporting others in their on-going growth and evolution.  She appreciated getting to conduct workshops to help leaders and managers grow and teams develop.  She valued getting to do 1:1 coaching with folks new to leadership up to the C.E.O. level.  Her personal and coaching experiences drove her to write a book 5 Areas for Focused Action (What can help take care of you and what you care about in life). She picked 5 Key areas though she knows there are many areas and behaviors that create a fulfilling life. She chose 5 because of research she read that most people can remember three to five things.  She reflected on 5 that she thought was powerful in her own life and those she coached and worked with. 

1. Which experiences most shaped the way you understand leadership today?

Our life experiences really do shape us. I think working for both good bosses and bad bosses has been helpful to me.

When you work for a boss whose behaviours subtract energy from you or the team—someone who is controlling, micromanages or shows favourites—you naturally reflect on what you don’t want to do to the people you manage and lead.

Earlier in my career, I taught special education students in sixth, seventh and eighth grade. All kinds of unexpected things can happen, so you learn to manage the unexpected. That served me well when I later earned my master’s degree in instructional design and moved into corporate training.

I remember doing sales training when the film projector stopped working. I simply figured out something else to do and continued with the class. One of the salespeople later asked how many times I had taught the class. When I told him it was my first, he was surprised.

That experience taught me to stay present and adapt rather than become attached to how something is supposed to happen.

My first corporation was very top-down. You went to the leadership owner, and if you sold them on your idea, you were done. I learned to understand people’s priorities, connect recommendations to what mattered to them and use research and data to influence.

At Intel, I encountered a very different, distributed leadership model. You had to sell many people on an idea rather than simply convince one person at the top. That taught me another way of influencing and leading.

One of my most difficult experiences being assigned to a boss who had a poor people management reputation, it drove me to change my direction. It moved into a different organisation and a different training role that I probably would not have pursued otherwise. It turned out to be a tremendous learning experience.

Later, I realised how much I loved coaching and helping people develop. My boss at the time supported me in going to coaching school, and Intel’s structured coaching programme gave me the opportunity to coach leaders across the company. Eventually, I proposed becoming a full-time coach for a site organisation, and that became my focus.

“Our life experiences shape us. Sometimes the experiences we would never have chosen are the ones that teach us the most about how we want to lead.”

2. Why can successful leaders struggle to recognise the gap between their intentions and how others experience them?

As human beings, we can have an intention and be unaware that our behaviours are not aligned with it. That is why feedback is so important. We cannot see ourselves in exactly the same way that the people around us do.

Highly capable people are often rewarded, praised and promoted. That reinforces the belief that what they are doing is working. But circumstances change, and a behaviour that worked in one environment may not work in another.

I experienced this myself when I moved from managing a training organisation supporting three factories to an enterprise training organisation within IT.

In the factory environment, there were only a few key priorities. In IT, there were hundreds of projects and competing priorities. My leadership surveys had previously placed me near the top, but in this new role I received lower scores in areas I had never struggled with before.

I asked my leadership team to help me understand what was happening. One leader explained that in the factory, when I suggested ideas, there were only a few priorities, so people could act on them. In the new organisation, there were already dozens of priorities. Because I was the boss, even an idea could feel like an instruction.

That was eye-opening.

I realised I needed to distinguish clearly between an expectation and an idea. If I offered something additional, I began saying, “This is just an idea. You can take it or leave it. I have no expectation.”

The lesson was simple: intent does not determine impact.

“We can have an intention and be unaware that our behaviours are not aligned with that intention. That is why feedback is so important.”

3. What have observation and feedback taught you about perception and leadership impact?

I saw this while coaching a site factory leadership team. I attended their operational meetings and noticed that the mood was consistently down.

Because I knew the leaders had engineering backgrounds and responded well to data, I began tracking their behaviours over several weeks. I then presented the observations and research data during a strategic leadership meeting.

The data made the behaviour visible. The leaders accepted the feedback and agreed to practise new behaviours to create more positive energy and improve factory results.

That experience reinforced the value of observation. Sometimes people don’t need another opinion; they need to see what is actually happening.

This is also why I encourage leaders to seek 360-degree feedback, use credible assessments and regularly ask people around them how they are experiencing their leadership.

If we perceive a person or situation in a particular way, we act according to that perception. We may try different actions, but if they are based on the same assumption, we can continue producing the same result.

A person’s perception becomes the reality they are acting from. What if you made a different assumption and tested it with different actions? You might create a different result and potentially a new reality.   Observations with data and questions to help an individual or leadership team to reflect on what are other possibilities then take different actions and get a different result.

“A person’s perception is their reality—the truth they are acting from. Change the assumption, test a different action, and you may create a different reality.”

4. What led you to the five areas in 5 Areas for Focused Action?

I also believe leaders sometimes operate as though they are only a “head” thinking. They may overlook areas that influence us, but as human beings we can generally remember three to five things. I chose five that I had found particularly powerful for myself and the people I coached: appreciation, curiosity, observation, the information available through their bodies and emotions. Learning to leverage more than your thinking can expand capability, impact and satisfaction.

Curiosity helps us question assumptions instead of automatically treating them as facts. If I think I already know why someone behaved a certain way, I may act on an inaccurate interpretation. Asking questions can reveal something completely different.

Appreciation changes what we pay attention to. Recognising what is working and what people contribute can change the quality of an interaction.

Observation and listening help us understand what is actually happening rather than filtering everything through our existing beliefs.

Body–mind alignment reminds us that leadership isn’t only intellectual. Our emotions and physical state also influence how we show up.

And courage is what allows us to act on what we discover. Awareness has little value if we are unwilling to change our behaviour.

The book draws on my own experiences as well as those of people I have coached. These ideas are intended to be practical ways to move from understanding something intellectually to actually changing how we lead.

“Awareness by itself isn’t enough. At some point, you have to be willing to do something differently.”

5. What do you wish more leaders understood earlier about becoming more intentional?

There are several things I would say, and the earlier you learn them, the better.

Speak from an “I” perspective rather than “you.” Make direct requests rather than expecting people to know what you want.

Listen and ask open questions. Ask what and how, clarify and make sure you understand before responding.

Give advice as a last resort. Help people discover their own answers and wisdom. People often have more capability than they realise.

Get regular feedback. Don’t wait until something has become a problem before asking how others experience you.

Check your assumptions. What you believe may be true, but you may not have the whole picture.

And finally, breathe.

Sometimes we simply need to stop and become present before we respond.

We all operate on autopilot at times. The goal isn’t to eliminate it completely. The goal is to recognise when it is operating and have enough awareness to choose something different.

For me, leadership development ultimately comes down to that choice: becoming aware, setting an intention and then practising new behaviours consistently enough for change to become real.

“The goal isn’t to eliminate autopilot completely. The goal is to become aware enough to recognise when it is operating and have the ability to choose something different.”

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