Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis Podcast. Today, I have a wonderful, wonderful new friend that I'm excited to have a conversation with. We have Amy, Elizabeth Fox, and she is the co-founder and CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership, a premier transformational leadership firm. She's an expert in vertical development, regularly conducting immersive transformational programs for senior leaders for the last 20 years. She's also a pioneer in introducing trauma-informed coaching and consulting into the domain of leadership development. Now, I want to say a little bit about her firm, Mobius. It's just a pretty unique and incredible, incredible organization. So, here's just a few statements about Mobius, “As a leading professional services firm, we draw on a rich intellectual heritage and infuse our programs with a unique experiential learning approach. Our network of transformational practitioners is supported by affiliations with renowned thought leaders, senior experts in the field, and a consortium of alliance partners. Our core body of work includes seminal models from adaptive leadership, organizational learning, innovation, adult development, leading in complexity, neuroplasticity, teaming and team dynamics. We operate at the nexus of best practice across organizational development, culture change, and leadership, and next practice in psychology, mythology, shadow work, somatics, meditation and the expressive arts.” This sounds just absolutely incredible. So very, very cool. Thank you for being here.
Amy Fox 1:34
Yeah, such a delight to be with you.
Scott Allen 1:36
Okay. So, maybe share a little bit more about you. What's maybe not in your bio? And I'll put your full bio in the show notes, but what else should listeners know about you?
Amy Fox 1:46
Oh, that's a very generous question. Maybe two things; I had the great privilege of starting my career in the late 80s and early 90s at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York where I was for 10 years working under the then Dean Morton and Paul Gorman. And, in that process, I had the privilege of helping Carl Sagan and then Senator Gore launch a religious response to the environmental crisis, which, over time, became the founding of an organization called the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. And, in that process, I really had an extraordinary apprenticeship about how you can help a group of people across a wide diversity of perspectives, viewpoints, values, come together on behalf of a common cause. And I think that model of coalition building, or of ecosystem engagement, very much informs the way that I've shaped Mobius as a sort of global network of practitioners with very porous boundaries, as a consortium of practice with other organizations that traditionally might be seen as our competitors, and instead operate as if we are collaborators, and in fact, do often have a cross-boundary collaboration. So, that training in multidisciplinary projects, I think, really shaped and informs who I am. Perhaps the only other thing to add to that is I've had a long and deep healing path myself, which is why I became interested in studying psychology, and why I became interested in leadership development. Because I think the most cutting-edge work in leadership development is also a healing function.
Scott Allen 3:21
Well, I'm excited to go there, for sure. And I think what I would love to do, though, is really quickly, the source of Mobius. So, let's talk a little bit about Mobius.
Amy Fox 3:33
You mean the name itself?
Scott Allen 3:35
Yes.
Amy Fox 3:36
Well, as you may well know, it's a reference to a German mathematical concept, which is a Möbius strip. It's a strip of paper that rotates and the inside becomes the outside, and the outside becomes the inside. And it rotates that way infinitely. So, it's a nod to the connection between doing deep inner vertical development and being effective and high-performing on the external dimension. It's also a bit of a nod to the infinite power that connects all of us. And, at one other level, the company was founded by two sisters, which is a very feminine orientation, and German mathematics seemed like a good counterbalance to that. So, those are all the reasons why we chose Mobius.
Scott Allen 4:15
(Laughs) A good counterbalance. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about some of the roots that you had mentioned; trauma-informed coaching, and again, talk about those connections. I love the interdisciplinary way that you have designed this organization, that you are doing this work across multiple, multiple ways of knowing. So, talk a little bit about the trauma-informed coaching because I don't know that we've had that conversation on this podcast. So, maybe bring listeners into that space a little bit and then its connection to leader development.
Amy Fox 4:47
Sure. Well, maybe I'll just start by putting it a little bit inside the canon of how we think about vertical development. So, many of the sort of senior, seminal thought leaders over the last 25 years have pointed to the degree to which our lens, our frame, our mindset shapes what we perceive and how we interpret what we perceive, the meaning-making that we do, the sort of logic train we live inside, and that that perception was the most potent object of intervention. If you wanted to change someone's behavior, it wasn't effective or sustainable to say, “I think it would be better if you replaced behavior A with behavior B.” You had to understand what were the underlying loyalties, assumptions, emotions, needs that were driving or shaping behavior A to seem like the optimal behavior. And as you helped people integrate the less functional dimensions of their habits, then the behavior just became the natural arising option. So, a different way of saying that is, for the last 25 years, people have already been doing work that's directed to or guided to some of the deeper, more unconscious terrain that shapes our actions and shapes our experience of the world. There's also been a very strong move inside the world of coaching towards ontology, and neurobiology, and somatics. All of that also starts to lead us to really thinking about the leader as the instrument of the intervention, their deeper patterns and perceptions. So, trauma-informed consulting means that, as we've done that work, we've started to have a real reverence and understanding of the enormous influence that multi-generational untreated trauma has on people's fear, for example, or reactivity, or sensitivity. I've been doing, for the last 20 years, leadership development work. And as part of that, we do a trauma screening or a trauma interview. And I've come to understand that there's hardly anybody whose life hasn't been touched, if not in their own personal life narrative, then in the generations before them; their parents' life narrative, their grandparents life narrative, by significant hardship, by things that are hard to integrate, hard to metabolize emotionally. And what that means is that the unprocessed emotion, unprocessed memory, continues to walk with that leader as unconscious habits and unconscious beliefs, and in some cases, sort of inner vows. For example, I won't be like my father who was abusive. So, if you choose to disown the sort of anger, warrior, strength, power that comes from a certain kind of ferocity because you saw it abused in your childhood, then it gets very hard to really be effective as a leader guiding others, inspiring others, directing others because you don't have access to that life vitality or life force. So, you could say to somebody, “You should make more ambitious goals,” or, “You should have more bold leadership style,” but if there's a deep agreement inside their psyche not to do that, that advice will fall hollow. So, I think more and more, as coaches and as leadership development professionals, at the very least, we need to understand the deep roots of derailers, the deep antecedents to why people are behaving in ways that don't serve them. And if you can go an extra step and be an agent of helping them to look and metabolize early experience even better. But what I mean by trauma-informed, or what my teacher, Thomas Hubel, I mean by that, is, at the very least, you understand the presenting problem in its depth.
Scott Allen 8:17
Well, okay. So, this is super interesting because I want to just contextualize this a little bit for a moment. So, let's say, I, Scott Allen, had parents who were divorced, and that was a pretty traumatic experience in my life. It was about a three-year process, sophomore junior, senior year of my high school years. And very challenging for everybody involved, very challenging. Now, I carry that forward. I carry that forward in a number of ways, and then you put me in a position of authority, and there may be some blind spots that I have, there may be some things that I'm bringing to that position. And if I haven't done that work, if I haven't explored some of that, I might struggle with different elements of the job. Is that accurate? Is that one way of contextualizing this for listeners?
Amy Fox 9:07
Super practical way to express it. And without asking you to overexpose how it lives in you now, one could imagine different byproducts of that. You could have, for example, decided it's not safe to bond because relationships dissolve and so you operate in more siloed and isolated leadership behaviors. You could have decided it's too vulnerable not to have a connection and so, instead, “I care take everybody and I never give them critical feedback because I don't want them to leave.” And then, there could be multiple different expressions. It's not obvious what the lingering effect of that divorce experience might be on you as a leader, but I equally think it would be naive to think there isn't one. And so, that's the connection between life narrative and leadership in my mind, that's exactly as you said it.
Scott Allen 9:52
Oh, that's wonderful. That's wonderful. Well, no, I've spent 18 years with Dr. Phil. Not the Dr. Phil, but he's my Dr. Phil. (Laughs)
Amy Fox 10:02
Just to say, I think because so many leaders were early in their lives put into roles that were precocious to their age -- many, many leaders had a role in their family of sort of a hero, rescuer -- and they became used to being hyper responsible. They became used to being really effective. They got used to being in charge. Often very young ages really kind of heartbreakingly missing some dimensions of their childhood. But that child naturally grows up to lead others, and to make stuff happen, and to be very effective. And, often, the thing they're getting rewarded for in childhood is achievement. And so, that pattern of external referencing and going to the next goal post gets very entrenched. And that's wonderful. It's why, often in my classroom, I have some of the most successful people on the planet. However, at some point in the life cycle of their leadership, they're going to hit a wall in which reaching yet another accolade, or another prestigious appointment, or another raise, another piece of security isn't going to be very satisfying. And that's an extremely pregnant moment because, all of a sudden, in adult development terms, they have the potential for moving from a socialized mind that's taking its guidance and its choices from what society commends to an internally referenced, self-authoring mindset in which they can choose from deep inside their own values, their own sense of purpose, their own calling, what they want to do and how they want to contribute. And it's a beautiful process to watch because tons of life force runs back into the river at that point.
Scott Allen 11:35
A guest who's been on this podcast several times, he has a quote, Jonathan Reams. You may have come across Jonathan in your travels, but Jonathan says “Leaders create the weather.” And it's really kind of an interesting quote because you put someone in a position of authority who maybe hasn't spent time doing some of that work, and it can be a pretty difficult place if that individual isn't prepared, if that individual is not present, if that individual isn't self-aware. I love how you're coming at this. My undergraduate degree was family systems theory. Again, I have a very deep appreciation for how you're looking at this from multiple dimensions. I'm interested because you're working with people all over the world, we’re post-pandemic, we're kind of moving back into quote-unquote “normalcy.” What are you seeing in your work right now? What are you seeing out in the field that leaders are experiencing, or is it similar?
Amy Fox 12:34
No, I think there are, for sure, some emerging trends post-pandemic that are maybe were always there, but have more of the foreground of leaders' attention. The first one is just the level of complexity people are facing and the pace of change. So, almost always, on an opening night, if you have a group full of senior executives, they will talk about the disruption of AI, the disruption of the multi-generations in the workforce, the disruption of just the level of transformation and churn that's going on inside their organizations, and people are changed, challenged. And just to make a connection between the first part of our conversation and the second, my dear friend, Zander Grashow, who's a world expert on adaptive leadership says “People aren't afraid of change, they're afraid of perceived loss.” So one of the things I try to help leaders think about is how can they tell a story of change in the context of conservation? What's being preserved? What's being valued? What in the history is being honored? So that people have a context in which their psyche can relax and feel like there's a stream of continuity that sits alongside the stream of change. That's the first thing. And the second thing, as you said so beautifully, if the leader is the weather, how can we make sure there aren't storm clouds everywhere? Which is to say, how can we help to lower the level of perceived loss by greater degrees of transparency, greater degrees of shared risk, greater degrees of generosity, and caring, and solidarity within teams? So, we're trying to create much more of what Amy Edmondson would call psychologically safe environments, trust-based environments. And we often use exercises that help people to get to know each other in a much more personal way as a vehicle for creating that kind of fabric of caring and mutual nurturing. And what I've discovered is that there's, for many leaders, a willingness to drop the sort of historic divide between personal and professional and blur the lines enough that people can start to really get to know each other in a meaningful way and invest in each other's success. And that's one of the things that Bob Keegan and Lisa Lahey tell us drives a deliberately developmental organization. People have to feel like there's some co-investment in each other's success, and a willingness to mentor, and guide, and give feedback, and coaching, and to see feedback as the gift that it is.
Scott Allen 14:49
Well, and it's interesting because I think, as you discuss and as you highlight some of the complexity, this is where some of the dots start connecting for me. If we can agree on the fact that the leaders are immersed in a context that has greater and greater levels of complexity in any number of what you just said, the multi-generational workforce, work from home -- we can go to just the law, employment law becoming more and more complex depending where you are in the world -- it's fascinating what's swirling on around these individuals. And if we are navigating complexity, it would seem to me that, from a Snowden and Boone standpoint, we are in a space where it's our best guess moving forward. We are experimenting and we are trying to learn quickly and figure out what's going to work in this new context and how we can move forward, but it's our best guess. And if we don't have a team that has psychological safety, and everyone's sitting there just kind of quietly, not disagreeing with the authority figure, and leaving the meeting and then saying to one another, “well, this is going to be a train wreck,” and not saying that actually in the meeting, the leader is literally flying blind. They are in trouble. They don't have a full awareness to really, really, truly work the problem and come up with the best experiments.
Amy Fox 16:07
Now, we're going full circle to earlier in my career. I had the wonderful privilege through my relationship with my sister Erica Ariel Fox, who has for many years taught at Harvard Law School, to teach their work on difficult conversations. And I started to get really sensitized to the degree to which, exactly as you're saying, the key conversations in the boardroom are happening in the water cooler. There's so many conversations, and particularly the one you pointed to Scott, which is a willingness to dissent with my leader, a willingness to hold a divergent perspective, even a willingness to be open to persuasion versus being sealed off from learning. Those shifts, while they sound skill-based, and they are, to some degree, skill-based, are also about cultivating a curiosity, and an intellectual flexibility, and a dialogue skills among the team so that the conversations can be surfaced and you get real collective intelligence. Exactly as you said, if the picture is more complex than one person can see, the right answer has to exist in the ‘we’ space, not in the individual expert. So, those skills, the metacognition, skills of learning, of dialog, of collaboration at the level of ideation and experimentation, but also the ability to sense and intuit and to use more innate kind of gut intelligence, and not just an analytic intelligence, becomes more and more important as the picture gets more intricate. And you have to be able to differentiate the signal from the noise, that's more of a right-brain capacity than it is a left-brain capacity. So, I also see leaders as starting to get really interested in tapping into multifaceted intelligence and beginning to understand that what got them here will not get them through the next phase of their leadership.
Scott Allen 17:49
Yes. And if they have interesting relationships with authority, or if as soon as things get a little bit chaotic they lock down, and again, don't create that place of psychological safety, well, they're making decisions in a vacuum. And that's a bad place to be, especially in this new context where you can't know everything, you can't see everything, and literally, it's your best guess as to… And that's always been that way with strategy. It's always been that, well, we think these are the three places to play in the market, this is our best guess. But again, there's a hell of a lot of strategies that didn't work over the course of the years. (Laughs)
Amy Fox 18:30
I loved what you're saying too, Scott, because Amy would say that one of the most critical skills now is asking high-quality questions. And that's a very different orientation than most leaders were groomed on where they're meant to be the knower and the doer, and now it's actually the most essential skill is to be the antenna that's constantly receiving new information and synthesizing it and iterating it. And I think that's actually very exciting.
Scott Allen 18:56
And it seems to me, also, this is something, Amy, I've been reflecting on quite a bit. I did some work with an organization, a nonprofit in my community last year. And it just came into my head and came out of my mouth in the session, but I looked at the executive director, and I said, “You must go to bed with thousands of questions, thousands.” And I think another real challenge for these leaders is discerning what are the right four or five questions. Because you could choose to work 177, like number 177 on the list. And I think some leaders do if they aren't disciplined in, “Okay, what are the four or five right questions we need to be working as a team? And then, do we have the psychological safety in the space to actually have the real conversation where people's voices are heard?” And I might not get my way, you might not get your way, we're going to co-create a path forward of our best guess. But, to your point, get that collective intelligence, at least we benefit from that. But, oof, the right questions too.
Amy Fox 19:59
I love that. And now, I'll say something perhaps more avant-garde, which is one then asks oneself the question, what practices cultivate my ability to sort what to attend to? And, in my experience, that's a lot about creating a kind of inner spaciousness and quiet or stillness, whether it's through contemplative practices, expressive arts practices, time in nature, time in just quiet reflection, journaling, symbology. There's many different ways, sort of, experiential exercises you can do that allow that kind of intuitive intelligence to rise up to the surface and guide you to the right questions. And so, part of what we're doing in these programs is slowing people down because, at the speed of information and the speed of exertion that we're living in, that intuition becomes harder to access. And when you help people to take a breath, and an exhale, and actually do things that quiet their mind, then you discover that sort of ‘aha’ moment in the shower, or you have that sort of immediate clarity that only becomes possible when you slow down.
Scott Allen 21:07
I always think of Ray Dalio saying something to the effect of… He credits transcendental meditation with a lot of his success a couple of times a day, 20 minutes, and he'll sing that from the mountaintop that that was helpful in his development to Bridgewater, right?
Amy Fox 21:25
Bridgewater is one of the companies that Bob and Lisa feature in Everyone Culture. And, in part, because Ray has had such a significant commitment to building that mindfulness practice into the fabric of the organization, and Mobius has a wonderful privileged partnership with our colleagues at One Moment company who have very short spurts of meditative practice on their website that people can download in two minutes a day. So it's not time-consuming, but it is a significant cognitive sort of downshift that allows the kind of pattern recognition that you're pointing to to become more available to an executive. And there's no way to tell the forest from the trees now without that, I think.
Scott Allen 22:07
Well, Amy, so what else are you seeing? This is so much fun, but what else is kind of present for you as you're doing this work with executives?
Amy Fox 22:15
Well, I think the other thing maybe that has my attention and my heart is the level of exhaustion and burnout that we're seeing. People are coming into our programs reporting a times scarcity in their lives, a very significant lack of white space, physical challenges that come from the health effects of being over-extended and over-exhausted. And, in some ways, I feel like if the leadership program does nothing except give them a chance to rest, we've already done a good thing. Because when people are over-exhausted, it's very hard for them to be inspired or inspiring, it's very hard for them to believe that the world could meaningfully change or to undertake a sort of audacious ambition together. And it also lowers the accessibility of their heart. So people come in more walled off and guarded just because they're tired and they don't have anything more to give. And so, there's also a way in which I think leaders need to really think about practices for soul nourishment and how to feed themselves in a meaningful way. So, we do a whole module on “How could people support you emotionally, vocabulary of relational needs and requests. You could ask somebody to teach you something. You could ask somebody to walk in nature with you. You could ask somebody to acknowledge your growth. You could ask somebody to celebrate an important occasion. You could ask somebody to share their wisdom, like many, many different ways, to build a fabric of interdependence inside of a team and inside of an organization that I think are neglected at our cost, in a world in which people are giving so much and plugged in so universally and comprehensively. So, I think the sort of priority of white space and the priority of mutual friendship becomes more urgent in this context.
Scott Allen 23:59
And you can oftentimes hear people in those positions of authority, it can be incredibly lonely. I love how you're communicating this because it's almost, “How are you going to, in some ways, arm yourself to navigate this in a healthy way?" And that takes some design, and that takes some forethought, and that takes… Again, Dalio talked about transcendental meditation is one tool that he used, but there's probably seven or eight tools that, if we aren't really accessing, tapping into, and prioritizing, we'll get eaten up. We're in charge of creating the weather patterns, and we're beat down. Well, you're either going to miss a lot of opportunities to create San Diego. It's going to be dark and stormy, it's going to be a whirlwind, it's going to be a dust storm, or 20 below, or 120 degrees. So, it's hard to attend to others if you haven't been attended to, so I love how you're framing that because with, all of that complexity, it's no longer a two Martini lunch. It's another two meetings.
Amy Fox 25:05
Yeah. And the [Inaudible 25:07] lunch was probably also problematic in its own way. But yes, as far as I can understand, talking to leaders, they really feel themselves as constantly in the hamster wheel of effort and new information and a bombardment of demand, and you have people getting hundreds of emails in a day like. My dear friend, Srini Pillay, who's a neuroscientist, talks about even the switch costs of moving from one kind of task to another, or one kind of cognitive conversation to another. The brain gets tired. So, these are not just emotional needs, these are really intellectual needs, cognitive needs, mental clarity needs. And so I think it's lovely what you said, Scott. I think the leaders in the future have to really be intentional around the self-care practices that maybe could have been neglected at an earlier time but now are critical to being in performance-ready shape, actually, and to lead others.
Scott Allen 26:01
I love that phrasing, ‘performance-ready shape.’ If you think of a world-class athlete, they have a team of individuals helping them be performance-ready. And what some of these people, what's being asked of some of them “Are you performance ready?” Wow, that's awesome.
Amy Fox 26:19
Thank you.
Scott Allen 26:20
Anything else that you want to highlight before we begin to wind down? You can mention avant-garde a little bit ago. Is there anything else that's going to take us by surprise when you say, “Hey, I'm thinking about this,” and you're really just seven years ahead of us.
Amy Fox 26:36
I don't know how ahead I am, but I do have a sense that the future includes a lot more professional intimacy, I could say that. So, one of the things we've been doing for the last few years is inviting a single leader to meet with two transformational coaches for two days. And sometimes we do it for the leader and the spouse. We've also had the privilege to do it for families, both the leader and their parents, or the leader and their children, and to really think about the family unit as part of the unit of leadership development, I think, is a bit of an avant-garde thought. But of course, everything that's occurring in the family has an influence on the inner weather of that leader, and everything that can heal or integrate or repair inside the family elevates them to have more open space, freedom of mind, to be creative and effective in life. So, I don't think we can disconnect those things anymore and expect that all of that is relegated to somebody's personal journey. I think, as organizations, asking leaders to devote their life to leading organizations, the organization in return has to be committed to their well-being and wholeness of their entire family. So, that's an important focus of our work. The other thing I would mention just because perhaps we have some leaders and practitioners listening to us right now, we do a once-a-year annual gathering of what we call our Next Practice Institute, which is the professional development arm of Mobius. It's a week-long event. It's happening in November of this year on the cape, and we have seven or eight immersive learning tracks that operate all week, twice a day. We have keynote presentations from various senior experts and thought leaders, many drawn from our friends at Harvard University. And in the evenings, we have cello and poetry and theater and wonderful expressive arts performances, and it's a week of fun and friendship and global community, and it's really a catalytic week of learning. So, if somebody's looking for their next step in terms of how they lead others or how they coach and consult, please consider coming to join us in November. We'd love to have you.
Scott Allen 28:38
Awesome. I will put information on that in the show notes for sure. Now, thank you so much for that conversation. This has been absolutely wonderful, and I just have great respect for the work that you're doing and the sense-making of how do we best support. Because I think one way that I sometimes phrase my mission is, how do we better prepare people to serve in these really gnarly roles? They're just challenging. It just is. And how do we better prepare them, whether it's, to your point, from a mental standpoint, from a physical standpoint, from any number of different ways, we could kind of “prepare,” quote-unquote? How do we better prepare people to serve in these roles? And you're at the forefront of that thinking, and I think it's wonderful.
Amy Fox 29:21
I love what you said. It's really about holistic readiness.
Scott Allen 29:25
Yes, yes. It's not just, “You are the CFO, now you're ready.”
Amy Fox 29:30
Exactly.
Scott Allen 29:31
So, I always end these conversations by asking, what's caught your attention in recent times? So what have you been listening to, or reading, or streaming? It could have something to do with what we've just discussed, it could have nothing to do with what we've just discussed, but maybe something listeners might be interested in that's caught your attention.
Amy Fox 29:47
Well, of course, I'm a biased fan of my sister's wonderful book, ‘Winning from Within.’ And teaching her archetype model in business for the last 20 years, I have seen how meaningful and how accessible it is as a way for helping people carve their own path of development. And I've been streaming ‘Bridgerton.’ So, I feel like I'm so much dealing with the heavy parts of life doing trauma-informed work that, on occasion, I really need some mind candy. And, at the moment, Shonda Rhimes is my brain candy hero. Yeah.
Scott Allen 30:19
That's great. That's wonderful. Well, yes, we all need a little bit of a mindless, just kind of entertainment to shut down.
Amy Fox 30:27
And to remember romance and love. Very good.
Scott Allen 30:31
Well, I hope we can do this again, Amy. I really, really appreciate your time. I know that listeners have gotten a ton out of this conversation. I've really, really enjoyed getting to know you a little bit better, and, again, we'll do it again. Thank you so much for the work that you do in the world.
Amy Fox 30:46
Thank you everybody for listening. Thanks, Scott.
Scott Allen 30:49
Wow, I just loved that conversation, loved that phrasing ‘performance ready.” Could have named the episode that. (Laughs) Could have named the episode three or four things. Thank you to Amy Elizabeth Fox for that conversation. And what are we doing to better prepare individuals and leaders, and what are they doing to prepare themselves to be performance-ready? The Olympics are coming up this summer, those individuals have worked to be performance-ready. Some of the work, some of our time has to be spent ensuring that we're performance-ready. Speaking of International Leadership Association annual conference, November 7 through 10, 2024, Chicago. There are links in the show notes, check it out. We have an incredible lineup of individuals who are going to be at this event, so please check it out, put it on your radar, and register. Okay, everyone, as always, thank you so much for checking in. Truly appreciate your commitment to this. Provide me feedback, reach out. Let me know what you think. Go to iTunes, like it, you know the drill. Take care, everyone. Be well. Bye-bye.
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