Why The Qualities Of A Spiritual Life Are Important To Leadership Development With Amy Elizabeth Fox
There are very powerful ways that our individual spiritual dimensions help us in our work and very practical ways that workplace conversations about spirituality can engage and align work teams. In this episode of the podcast, Andrew is joined by the CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership, Amy Elizabeth Fox, who discusses the importance of being in tune with our deeper selves, and how our spiritual and internal development/healing is instrumental to how we lead and support others. Amy talks about stepping into vulnerability, living from a self-loving heart, healing from trauma, and how leaders can increase their emotional footprint so as to build a stronger relational infrastructure. This is a rich conversation about the power of spirituality to create more mature leaders and healthier organizations
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Why The Qualities Of A Spiritual Life Are Important To Leadership Development With Amy Elizabeth Fox
I am really happy to have someone who I consider a good friend even though we haven’t seen each other since 2008, the week we met in the Boston area. That is Amy Elizabeth Fox, CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership. Mobius is a leading global consultancy, and Amy has been at the helm forever. Not that you’re old, but for an extensive period of time. You have an interesting background, a vast network, and amazing intellectual curiosity. You have a finger on the pulse of some very important current issues in leadership. All I would say by way of introduction is that you’ve been at the helm of Mobius for a number of years. I don’t know how you would add or supplement that, so I want to be quiet and welcome you to the show.
Thank you so much for having me and for speaking so sweetly about our connection, which I also have always felt had depth and generosity to it. That’s how I would describe it. I co-founded Mobius with my sister, Erica Ariel Fox, in 2005. We’re entering year nineteen. When we started, I envisioned a twenty-year arc, which seemed like throwing a football down a very wide field, but it feels like the goalpost is super close.
It has been a super joyous endeavor with a global community being built of coaches, interventionists, facilitators, expressive artists, and therapists. Lots of different transformational practitioners coming together to do leadership development in the context of your very important show to do spiritual development and spiritual exploration within organizations to give them more inspiration, belonging, and healing capacity.
There’s an hour right there in what you said for probably at least. Spirituality in organizations helps on a number of different fronts. I’d love to talk with you about the impact. The hypothesis in this show is this isn’t about talking about our religion or talking about our individual spiritual paths at work. That may or may not be helpful, but can more often than not, be alienating and sometimes really problematic. How do we bring these deeper spiritual dimensions of ourselves into organizations and our leadership?
I’m curious to know how you do that in your leadership at Mobius, but also because you’re a CEO, advisor, coach whisperer, and team advisor. How do you support the development of a conversation that is inclusive and that is not dogmatic? This is all about de-dogmatizing the conversation. How do you introduce some of these ideas? Do you front door, side door, or Trojan Horse? How does that work for you? You’ve been at this a while, so I trust your judgment about how to introduce a conversation. What do you think?
Let me start by double-clicking on a point that you made quickly, and then I’ll come back to answering the question. You made a distinction between somebody’s religious observance, religious practice, and the nature of spirituality that is important. For many leaders, religious life is a huge part of their faith. Practice is a huge part of their community and a huge source of nourishment and meaning. For others, religious experience or structured religious practice has been something very difficult and, in some cases, traumatic. We know around the world there have been remarkable abuses by clergy people from different faiths in all different contexts. At the extreme end of that, you get mind control cults that are abusing people’s spiritual longing for power and other nefarious purposes.
We’re not talking about building a religious movement inside of organizations, and that’s important although it’s very meaningful to honor how significant religious life is for many leaders. What we are talking about is precisely where you pointed us. The qualities of spiritual life are incredibly nurturing facets of being part of a collective or walking your own life as a leader. We’re trying to help amplify the natural impulses of the heart, of connectivity, or of purpose that are intrinsic to a spiritual exploration but don’t need to be called that overtly.
The qualities of spiritual life are incredibly nurturing facets of being part of a collective or walking your own life as a leader.
You could have a conversation about what people’s purpose is and their calling. You can have a conversation that’s been in our field for twenty years about servant leadership and what it means to contribute your life to something that’s powerful and potent for the world on behalf of society. You could have a conversation about the importance of connectivity and authenticity inside the workplace. Post-COVID, as people have noticed how challenging it was to be apart, there’s more of a recognition that bonding, genuine friendship, collaboration, and caring in the workplace is a tremendous source of beauty for people. They feel like they’re more connected to their colleagues and more able to be vulnerable and ask for support.
Also, we know through the research of Mobius Senior Expert, Amy Edmondson, a critical factor in creating what she calls psychological safety, which leads to what she calls teaming. If we’re asking people to learn together, which is a critical need that organizations develop a developmental orientation to the conducting of work so that people are learning from experimentation, iteration, and smart bets of things to risk, all of that innovation capacity requires a whole bunch of team dynamics. That doesn’t happen in an atmosphere that is devoid of spirit or love.
It is things like being willing to say, “I made a mistake. I need to understand why and learn.” It is being able to say, “I’m being asked to do something I don’t know how to do. I need help, mentorship, and guidance.” It is being asked to say to somebody more senior than you, “I see it differently. I disagree. I have an even very significantly different perspective about that.” You can’t have diversity and inclusion if you can’t hear somebody else’s worldview that comes through a very different lens, culture, perspective, and embodied wisdom.
You can’t have diversity and inclusion if you can’t hear somebody else’s worldview that comes through a very different lens, culture, perspective, and embodied wisdom.
Our ability to deeply hear each other is also a spiritual act. To be willing to hear somebody’s life story, witness, absorb, and respond to the pain that they’ve lived, and meet them in their brokenheartedness, all of those are going to become the hallmarks of what it means in the future to be a truly great leader. That kind of compassion, kindness, and understanding that walking with my neighbor is part of the ways that I weave a better world are spiritual insights. For me, there is no distinction between those relational or interpersonal competencies and the cultivation of a spiritual inner life.
I appreciate that. Other people would say, “I don’t know. What’s spiritual about that?” That’s fine. I don’t feel pressure personally when people ask me about this topic. For example, I don’t feel pressure to label certain things as spiritual or not spiritual or to label certain things as God or not God. If there’s a God, I don’t think she cares exactly what words we’re using. Our actions are much more important in that sense.
That’s true, but there are certain dimensions of maturity when we keep spirituality aside that do require an examination of unconscious beliefs, fears, habits, and meticulous self-investigation. It does require a commitment to mature, grow, and evolve yourself, or be in a healing process with yourself. We don’t have to call that a spiritual development process, but we do have to say a leader looking inside is a prerequisite to leading well in a more VUCA world, adaptive context, or complex universe.
I hear you. If we don’t know what’s driving us, then we’re at that quotation about being at the end of strings that someone or something else is pulling.
Many of us, until we do that self-investigation, are exactly like that. We’re acting out of much earlier hurts, fears, and the contracted reactive patterns that get set in early life. They become our default not only habits of interaction but perspective on the world. The chance to keep deepening your self-love, your ability to love, forgive, reconcile, and learn, all of those are the hallmarks of somebody who’s in that intentional alchemical process of growth. It’s incredibly magnetic to watch somebody become more of who they are. They’re freer, more self-expressive, more accepting of themselves, and more generous.
For a leader who wants to encourage her team to develop and grow as human beings, I don’t think she can really support people without having had at least some reference for that type of internal exploration herself. We need to do some of our own work before we invite others to do theirs. I don’t want to make it seem so binary, but there is a close correlation between the extent to which we have asked these questions of ourselves and our ability to hold space for others to do the same, which is a core component of leadership at this point in time. What do you think?
I agree with that completely. I would say a couple of nuances to your point. One, it’s very unlikely anybody who works for you that you’re leading will bring you something to support them in that you haven’t already walked yourself. There’s a ceiling on the kinds of conversations that you get invited into, and that ceiling is the amount of your own self-contact and self-acceptance. The terrain that you’ve explored in yourself becomes the immediate road of invitation you’re making when you walk into a room or when you open a conversation.
It’s also why I’m so passionate about coaches and facilitators, people who would desire to support others in this healing journey and this leadership development journey, having to do their own work first. I do think it’s a sequence or at least an addendum. You are the instrument of whatever will unfold on behalf of your client in front of you. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that the invitation gets telegraphed vibrationally, not just with your words.
Not just by email?
That’s right. It’s an intuitive communication that happens non-verbally, para verbally, and energetically between two people. You can’t quite fake it. This means I could have the willingness and desire for you to bring me your darkest secrets or your most fragile challenges, but if I’m afraid of that in myself, I will be sending a signal that says door closed even if my intention is otherwise. This is something that has to be lived experience. Your lived experience that you’ve harvested becomes the invitation, which is quite a beautiful process. It means the things that have been most painful in our lives become portals to other people’s healing.
Your lived experience that you’ve harvested becomes the invitation. The things that have been most painful in our lives become portals to other people’s healing.
The places where I can finally shine a light for myself or invite others to come walk with me to look at that to some extent. You have a Master’s in Counseling Psychology as I recall. I know that when I did mine, one of the inquiries that came up was, for example, “Do I have to be an alcoholic in recovery in order to counsel somebody who’s an alcoholic? Do I have to have that experience?”
If the best credential we can offer to someone is our own experience and our own consciousness, then how specific does it need to be? Do I need to be a recovering alcoholic? The answer is I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s true, but some sort of parallel enough so that if I’ve been through something and have looked at it, I can invite someone on my team or someone in my constellation to walk that path of healing even if the healing isn’t exactly precisely the same.
There is a both-and to that distinction that you’re making. In one sense, what I ask leaders to do anyway is to widen their emotional footprint so that they are comfortable with expressing and receiving strong emotions across the full array of emotional expressions. Can I be with your anger? Can I be with your indignation? Can I be with your grief? Can I be with your joy? Can I be with your fear?
At the point where I can comfortably say, “It will not unground me or make me less productive for you to come and have a strong emotion in my presence in our conversation,” then that’s a very wide invitation. It doesn’t matter the context in which that’s making you angry, scared, hurt, or happy. I’m able to hold strong emotions for my own and others. That’s a very basic emotional intelligence set of competencies. Those are emotional self-awareness, emotional self-management, emotional self-expression, and relational intelligence.
That’s true. If the question moves from a leader to a practitioner, then there are situations in which somebody who has a particularly specific expertise as I do, for example, working with early childhood sexual abuse, that expertise matters. The pathway of recovery for particular kinds of trauma can be nuanced and different enough that you want to stay within the scope of your expertise, training, and practice when you’re offering your hand. That’s much more in a professional context than that’s something we would ask a leader to have.
Leaders really want to have as wide an open door as possible to whatever the people who are working with them are living. Many leaders were called to stretch themselves to deal with the emotional context of the pandemic. We saw how much both leaders, teams, and organizations that were able to be emotionally supportive and caring and commercially extend themselves as a place of safety for their employees will get back for many decades. Brand value, loyalty, engagement, and relational infrastructure have the potential to beat the market and excel in very creative ways.
I love that relational infrastructure. That works. To me, these are deeper layers of psychological safety. It’s psychological safety in action in different settings. There is one question that I’d like to ask you, and it had not occurred to me to ask this question until this last response. Part of the work that I do is to work with men and vulnerability in particular. I’ve been in circles of men’s groups for many years.
My partner, Kelly, does a lot of this work on vulnerability. There’s something that has to be put into this conversation about the invitation and the opportunity for men to step into vulnerability, to not knowing, and then to emotional realness. That typically doesn’t happen. In my experience in years of doing leadership development work, men are still overcoming this notion of, “You can’t show fear. You can’t be emotional. You don’t want to appear weak,” etc. What are you holding on that theme?
The majority of the work that I do with corporate leaders is with men. I agree with you that there’s a poetic and incredibly poignant unfolding that happens when you can create a context in which men are invited to show more of their vulnerability and particularly share more of their interiority emotionally with each other and with themselves. Much of the way masculine archetypes have been promoted in our culture doesn’t invite that kind of sensitivity and attunement.
In fact, a man’s heart is a tremendously sensitive instrument. There are emotions happening all day long in every interaction of a huge range that we are forcing ourselves through. There are these micro behaviors and little hacks that numb us to dull down, denude, or downregulate because we don’t know where to bring them. Men in particular have not been invited to express them.
There is an equally diabolical problem in men’s leadership in particular. They also have not been invited to stand in their real masculine power and the power of their ethics, alignment, dreams, and ability to seize life and make something manifest. There are beautiful, evolved qualities of the masculine that are not pointing at the heart or at the sword in the ground. My sister Erica uses the archetype of the warrior.
Mature masculinity in both its emotionality as well as its power and force, neither has been particularly welcomed. What we’ve had is an archetype business of an analytic man driven mostly by his mental capacities devoid of his spirit, body, relationships, heart, emotions, dreams, and convictions. That is why we see such misaligned corporate behavior and such violence on the geopolitical scene. It’s not exclusively because men are not in their hearts. It’s also because, in both genders, we have not supported the maturity of that other dimension of masculine alignment and grounding.
The mission is more than quarterly profits or winning. The warrior is in support of the mission. He is not only in support of his wounded boy. There are a lot of immature boys out there with 50 years of experience who are running things.
That’s beautiful. It also makes me want to mention another dimension of maturation. That is the capacity to custodian, cradle, or protect the quality of guardianship, which can happen from any leader, man or woman. It has a heart dimension like, “I am cradling and caring for you.” It has a nurturing dimension, but it also has a really strong, powerful dimension of, “I am holding this container. I’m going to keep us safe and aligned with what we care about.”
All of those facets are really important in a complex environment where people don’t know quite where they’re going. It can’t be predicted in such linear terms. You have to lean into or trust the people around you to navigate it together and to make emergent decisions collaboratively. That’s where the wisdom council is operating on teams.
I love that combination. I don’t want to say it’s grandmother-y because it’s not about age, but it’s a very feminine, welcoming, soft, inclusive, and emotionally safe bliss of comfort alongside and with a strict, strong, vigilant sword of boundaries. It’s protection and it’s holding.
That’s beautiful. I want to mention one other thing that has become really obvious to me in the last couple of years. We live very far from a self-loving heart. We put a lot of leadership development work into learning to love well, listen well, receive well, support well, and others. We don’t put a lot of emphasis on the much more tricky terrain of what it means to lower the inner voice of self-viciousness, self-bullying, or self-punishment that so many of us learned from parents who were doing the best that they could but were not always attuned to us as children. That self-alienation causes us to be more guarded and more shielded in important business interactions. We feel like it is too high risk to show more of who we are. This is men or women. This is not a gender-specific problem at all.
As we start to talk about the movement in corporations from fear to love, it has become more clear to me that the quality of unconditional receptivity I can make to all the different facets of who I am, voices in my head, and ways that I show up, that I have longing, aspirations, values, and things that matter and shape my life and that I can come to more interior reconciliation and peace with that dimensionality is an incredibly powerful thing to role model for people. It communicates itself underneath the words.
It raises the question, “How can I welcome these different dimensions of you if I can’t welcome these different dimensions of me?”
Exactly. In the end, self-love is the most essential path for diversity at work. You cannot extend your own compassion to somebody if you haven’t done that for yourself.
I’m looking a little bit at my clock here and I’m feeling like I’m about to ask you a question, but that might take us into part two of our conversation. I’m going to ask this question, and maybe it will take us to part two and we’ll do some editing. This could be the end of part one, but we’ll see where it is. With what you’re talking about in terms of these childhood wounds and some of these things that we picked up when we were kids, this is an area of specialization for you.
It’s something you’ve identified as one of the secrets of corporate life, namely the level of trauma. I’m certainly curious to hear about that from you in general, but also that connection to what’s the opportunity to bring more of the spiritual parts of ourselves into our leadership and how that potentially surrounds, heals, and helps love through some of that trauma.
I came to the understanding of the extraordinary extent of traumatization and regression in corporate life phenomenologically by doing leadership development over the years. I had the privilege of teaching for a period of time at Harvard Law School’s work on difficult conversations. I would do role plays of high-stakes business conversations. One could see that at some point in the very high heat of the difficult, challenging moment or interaction, somebody was not operating from their full adult resources. They were operating from a much younger, less mature, less sophisticated, less psychologically able, and less open-hearted place inside themselves.
How did you know that? What did you observe?
I’m a more refined observer, but at that time, you would observe that they were operating from black-and-white thinking. They were operating from a frame of blaming and defending themselves. They were operating from their ego and the need to have their identity attached to their ideas. They were incapable of being open to persuasion. They were stuck in the certainty of their opinion and not cognitively flexible. Their body would be rigid. Their breathing would be more shallow. They are showing all kinds of fight or flight signs in what looks like on the surface a relatively straightforward business discussion. It’s triggering something in the situation. It’s triggering a much more reactive, less fluid, and creative response.
That was the beginning of my exploration of what is going on psychospiritually in the business context that we’re not recognizing as a psycho-spiritual event. Something is feeling threatening to somebody’s ego, identity, sense of safety, sense of belonging, sense of self-efficacy, or sense of locus of control. Whatever it is, there’s something that’s perceived as a threat that’s causing somebody to derail in terms of being able to bring the best of who they are in that moment. That matters to business. It matters to the person, but it also means we’re not having the quality of conversation, after-action reviews, and creative brainstorming.
There are many key business conversations that are made less optimized because the people are not operating at their full capacity. That’s why this matters. Another reason that it matters is that we can heal from trauma. Whatever happens to us early in our life through a very skilled process can become less of the driver of our perceptions, reactions, choices, and mindsets. Since one can get more liberated from early childhood events, anybody who has seen that process, or as I’ve had the great privilege of being taken through that process, you want everyone to have that freedom, joy, and possibility. It became a real passion of mine to look for context and opportunities to do that kind of healing work.
Leadership Development: There are many key business conversations that are made less optimized because the people are not operating at their full capacity.
I’ve had the privilege of leading very deep trauma-informed leadership development programs for many years. In those programs, we do a trauma screening. This is executives from all corners of the world, all different cultures, life experiences, family stories, roles, and industries. Almost universally, people have some incident of overwhelming emotion early in life, either because an incident happened that was a moment in time, like a car accident, the death in a family, or war, or they had what we would think of as a landscape context that was ongoing.
They were an immigrant family living in a refugee camp. They had an alcoholic parent that was dysfunctional for a long time. They were sent to boarding school too early in their life for it to feel psychologically comfortable. They themselves had an illness or a disability. They were subject to racism and economic poverty. The third type of trauma is trauma of absence. Maybe everything looked good, but there wasn’t a lot of overt love, attuned responsiveness, or attention to the individual gifts or unique gifts that each child has. Maybe their parents were working all the time and there wasn’t a custodian adult in the home and they became, precociously, the adult.
If we think of trauma in a very broad definition as the response we have to any overstimulating context, that’s pretty universal. I have met very few people who aren’t walking with something that lives in their neurology, cognition, emotional body, and somatic experience of life. When you open that door and give people an invitation to tell you the truth of what they’ve walked and orient them to this notion of, “Things that may have appeared normal to you could have left a footprint that’s limiting you,” people usually get pretty on fire to look and do the inner work of healing and restoring, which is largely a relational path. It requires rebuilding a sense of trust and trustworthiness in yourself, others, and life. That journey is from a state of fear to a state of more love, joy, and openness.
That’s such beautiful work. Do you find that corporations are responsive to this type of offering for their people, recognizing the opportunity that it provides for healing? If there’s a practical reason to enable and empower people to make better decisions, think more clearly, be less reactive, etc., what’s the level of receptivity?
It’s certainly true that companies that are investing in this level of deeper transformational work for their senior leaders are on the cutting edge of leadership development. This is not every company. Those companies have come to see that very high-valued employees who have a certain derailer and dysfunction, or a certain challenge, no matter how much feedback, coaching, and pressure you give them can’t make a shift.
Most sophisticated HR professionals have come to understand that some of these things cannot be shifted simply by behavioral coaching or a short-term intervention and giving them some skill building. It requires a deeper excavation and exploration of the antecedents to that derailer and a balm of care and attention. That can then meaningfully widen the repertoire of actions they can take and skills they can bring to every conversation. More companies are going to understand.
There’s a second thing I would say. We’ve been talking about the personal healing work that executives and teams can do to learn to build deeper trust with each other and repair fractured trust in literal teams that work together every day. There’s also going to be a wave of restorative work in which organizations that have histories of ethical violations of a wide variety, let’s say exploitation of the planet and their workers, or participation in unconscious and violent societal acts. They’re also going to have to start looking at what the healing collective trauma means for organizations to come back into an ethical alignment and sense of goodness. Executives are no longer going to want to work for organizations that aren’t doing that kind of inner cleansing.
I remember getting calls to say, “We want you to come do this leadership work at the tobacco company.” They then said, “They’re smoking in the conference rooms,” so I said, “It’s not going to happen.” I remember going back and forth, “Do I want to do work for BASF?” I had some colleagues that said to me, “You don’t want to work with them. You know what their history was in the war.” It’s a fascinating decision to walk through. There are people there. Do they not need support and leadership?
My own stance about that is I’ll go anywhere, but then, we have to really look. The footprint you have in life and in society becomes part of the work. It’s not ancillary to the work. You can’t do leadership development without looking at where and how you are leading in society.
I have to ask you about the other thing you talked about in addition to the level of trauma in the last Annual Gathering. That was some strange thing lurking under the conference room table if I remember correctly. Tell us about that.
You’re very generous. I had the pleasure of giving a keynote address at our Next Practice Institute Annual Gathering in 2022. It is a line that came to me at 3:00 in the morning before this presentation. It was downloaded. It was very sweet. I said, “There were two secrets in corporate life.” I’ll repeat them here for our audience. One was the extent of traumatization and regression that is living in many leaders who are shaping not just organizational destiny, but societal life. It’s certainly true of public sector civil servants as well as it is corporate leaders.
The second was that spirituality is a gold mine under the conference table. What I meant by that is what we’ve been talking and dancing about here. What happens when you unlock a quality of vast joy, creativity, lack of fear of failure, a sense of belonging, a sense of connection, a sense of love in the workplace, and a sense of being very personally activated in your gifts and unique contributions to life? It is a good balance between effort, rest, space, and structure.
All the things that we’re talking about as organizational development professionals, I think of all of that as an engaged spirituality. It is the quality of empathy, care, and attention I bring to conversations. We can call it psychological development, maturation, or adaptive leadership. What we’re pointing at is a workplace that has a heartbeat of love and not a heartbeat of numbness and fear. That is the secret sauce of what will make companies soar in the future. As a practitioner, I’m very passionate about creating more healthy workplaces in this way.
Heartbeat of Love, is that the title of your next album? I’ll pre-order it.
Thank you so much for this time.
I feel like this is such a lovely place. We could land this in this beautiful nest that you’ve created and that we’ve created in this conversation. I look forward to continuing the conversation.
It would be a pleasure.
Please share with our audience how they might contact you or Mobius or reference some of the resources that you’ve talked about because if I’m tuning in, which I will, I’m going to want more.
The Next Practice Institute is our professional development arm. If there are coaches, facilitators, or other healing professionals who are tuning in, please find the Next Practice Institute part of our website, which is www.MobiusLeadership.com. I referenced briefly my sister’s work using Jungian archetypes which is called Winning from Within. You can find marvelous work on our leadership model and our leadership methodology that Erica has created on her website, which is www.EricaArielFox.com.
I will mention last the beautiful work of my teacher, Thomas Hübl, which can be found on his website, www.ThomasHuebl.com. Thomas and I, in 2024, are offering our training for practitioners in what it means to be a trauma-informed consultant, coach, and facilitator. We’re starting in March of 2024. If that’s of interest, by all means, follow that link on Thomas’ website and come join us. We’d love to have you.
Thank you, Amy. It was great to see you. I am glad to see you smiling and strong.
It was great to see you, too. Thank you for your work.
I am looking forward to continuing the conversation.
Take care, everybody. Thank you for tuning in.
Thank you.
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About Amy Elizabeth Fox
AMY ELIZABETH FOX is a senior leadership strategist with two decades of experience consulting to Fortune 500 companies on issues of human capital, organizational health and leadership development. She is the Chief Executive Officer of Mobius Executive Leadership, a premier leadership development firm. Since 2005, Ms. Fox has served as one of the lead designers and lead faculty members in Mobius transformational leadership programs offered globally. She is also the founder of the Next Practice Institute, a professional development arm for coaches and facilitators and has helped build a global firm with over 200 practitioners, a privileged partnership with Egon Zehnder, and long-standing relationships with some of the world’s most innovative companies. In 2023 Amy had the privilege of serving as guest faculty in the African Leadership Institute’s program for its Desmond Tutu Fellows program at the Said Business School of the University of Oxford.