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Amy Elizabeth Fox
Chief Executive Officer at Mobius Executive Leadership
Amy Elizabeth Fox
Amy Elizabeth Fox is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Mobius Executive Leadership, a premier coaching, training and leadership development company.1 She has held this position since January 2005.1
Key Experience
- CEO, Mobius Executive Leadership (January 2005 - Present)1
- Senior Trainer, Vantage Partner (2000 - 2007)1
- Director of Organizational Development and Human Resources, Wellspace (1998 - 2000)1
- Associate Director, National Religious Partnership for the Environment (1989 - 1997)1
Education
- Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Psychology, Wesleyan University (1981 - 1985)1
- MA, Counseling Psychology, Lesley University (1998 - 1999)1
Amy is a beacon of transformational leadership and a steward of spaces where healing and growth flourish.2 She is known for her insights on the importance of respecting defense mechanisms, the innate desire for connection, and the power of creating safe spaces.2
Some key themes in Amy's work include trauma-informed leadership35, innovation, complexity, transformation, wisdom and compassion.3 She emphasizes the need for deep, restorative repair work and attuned relation to create high-performing cultures.3
Amy has been featured as a keynote speaker at events like the Annual Gathering of the Next Practice Institute4 and has joined podcasts like The Wonder Dome to share her expertise.25 Her LinkedIn profile username is amyelizabethfox.
Highlights
There are some emerging trends post pandemic that were always there, but now have more of the foreground of leaders’ attention.
The first one is the level of complexity people are facing and the pace of change. Almost always, on an opening night of a program, 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 level of transformation and churn that is going on inside their organizations, and how people find themselves change-challenged.
My dear friend Zander Grashow, a Mobius Senior Expert, is a thought leader on adaptive leadership. He often comments that people aren’t afraid of change per se. They are afraid of the perceived loss they attribute to change. So, one of the things I try to think about is, how can leaders tell a story of change in the context of conservation, of what is being preserved, what is being valued, what in the history, is being honored? Systemic constellation principles suggest the importance of this facet of the change process as well. Then people have a context in which their psyche can relax and feel that there is a stream of continuity that sits alongside the stream of change. A bowing to the Order and the values and the history that has come before.
Further, as my friend Scott Allen remarks, 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.
As facilitators we are seeking to create much more of what Professor Amy Edmondson would call psychologically safe environments, trust-based environments. 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. What I have discovered is that for many leaders there is an almost immediate willingness to drop the historic divide between personal and professional and to blur the lines enough that leaders can start to really get to know each other in a meaningful way and invest in each other’s success. We have worked side by side in isolation and loneliness and self-reliance for far too long. Leaders are grateful to encounter more of the interiority of their colleagues and equally relieved to lower the shields they guard themselves with and share their lives, their hopes, their fears, and their longings and dreams.
That is one of the things that Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey tell us drives a “deliberately developmental organization.” People must feel like there is a co-investment in each other’s success, a willingness to mentor and guide and give feedback and coaching and to see feedback as the gift that it is.
We are ripe for a new threshold of solidarity, mutuality and co-development in organizational culture.
We believe it our job as healers not to get seduced completely by what appear to be signs of systems falling apart and to commit to looking at the world, whenever possible, through the lens of the peace of acceptance of what is; the courage to address with passionate advocacy what is out of alignment; and the willingness to notice pro-actively the beauty and the blessing disproportionately – so as not to fall into malaise or despair.” Amy Elizabeth Fox – as informed by the teachings of Erica Ariel Fox, Thomas Huebl, Patrick Connor, Ester Martinez and Lynda Caesara
