The Inner Work of Leadership: What We Lose When We Move Too Fast with Amy Elizabeth Fox

There was a moment during a recent Leadership Vision podcast conversation when our guest, Amy Elizabeth Fox, shared a story that stopped Brian, Linda, and I.

Amy is the CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership and co-author, with Nicholas Janni, of Leading in Chaos. For more than 20 years, she has led immersive development experiences with senior leaders around the world. Much of her work focuses not simply on what leaders do, but on what is happening inside of them as they lead.

During our conversation, Amy told us about a participant who, at the end of one of her programs, thanked her for helping him “cry the tears I walked with for 60 years.”

Then she added:

“We’re walking around on a river of uncried tears, and that’s why we’re running.”

That line has stayed with us. Because most of us are running.

When Moving Faster Stops Working

I don’t know if you’re like me, but often I’m running from meeting to meeting. I listen to podcasts and audio books at 1.5X or 2X speed. I answer emails while sitting in another conversation and squeeze another task into the five minutes before the next thing begins.

And I guess that’s supposed be productivity.

But what if some of that speed is actually preventing any of us from doing the deeper work leadership requires?

Amy told us about speaking at a technology company where she suggested starting meetings with two minutes of silence. Nothing elaborate. Just two minutes for people to let go of whatever they had been doing and become present to the people in the room.

She told us that the immediate response of the leadership team was, “We don’t have two minutes.”

“Something’s really foundationally wrong.” Amy told us.

Dr. Linda Schubring sees a similar dynamic in her work with leaders. She’s noticed how all of us have become so accustomed to consuming information quickly that we can grow impatient with the natural pace of another human being. We want people to get to the point. Move the meeting along. Give us the takeaway.

But humans don’t operate at 2x speed.

Relationships certainly don’t. And transformation doesn’t either.

Leadership Is More Than a Technical Skill

Organizations have traditionally treated work as a largely technical environment. We have roles, responsibilities, competencies, goals and performance measurements.

Those things matter.

But, as we always say, people bring more than their professional abilities to work.

They bring their histories, families, fears, ambitions, losses, gifts, insecurities, sense of purpose and so much more. They bring experiences that happened decades ago and still influence how they respond to conflict, authority, uncertainty and change today.

Amy described many workplaces as fundamentally “disembodied” and “un-relational.”

“We put a primacy on autonomy and self-direction,” she told us, “not on belonging and building community.”

That resonated deeply with Brian Schubring, who has spent much of his career helping people understand their identity and recognize the unique contribution they bring to the people around them.

Brian put it this way:

“I don’t know what greater freedom someone has than to be in connection with who they are.”

That connection, between identity and leadership, reminded me of the central element to the work Brian and Linda explore in Unfolded: Lessons in Transformation from an Origami Crane. Transformation isn’t about constructing an entirely new version of ourselves. Often, it begins by paying closer attention to what is already there and allowing something deeper to emerge.

Do People Know That They Matter?

One of Amy’s stories made this remarkably practical. She told us how she once worked with a team where the average tenure was more than 15 years. Yet, people were disengaged, distrustful and discouraged. When Amy interviewed them individually, she kept hearing essentially the same thing:

“I don’t know that what I’ve done here for 15 years matters.”

Isn’t that sad? Imagine feeling that way (or perhaps you do), after giving so much of your life to an organization.

Her intervention wasn’t another employee engagement initiative. She gathered the team and gave each person an opportunity to hear from their colleagues how they had contributed—to the organization, to the team and to them personally.

People cried. Some had worked alongside each other for nearly two decades and had never been thanked in that way.

That raises an uncomfortable but useful question for leaders: Do the people around you know that they matter? Not because you held an employee appreciation lunch. Not because HR recognized their anniversary. Not because everyone got pizza after finishing a big project.

As Linda said during our conversation,

“People want to be seen and known and felt at such a deeper level.”

There is a difference between recognition and being known. It’s easy to recognize a great accomplishment. It’s far more difficult, and meaningful, to know the person behind it.

Creating Space for What Wants to Emerge

Brian used another word during our conversation that we’ve been paying attention to for years: emergence.

Leadership often rewards certainty. We create plans, agendas, forecasts and carefully constructed strategies designed to tell us what happens next.

There is value in that. But some things cannot be scheduled.

Insight emerges. Trust emerges. Grief emerges. A new sense of purpose emerges. Sometimes an idea or realization appears that we could never have put on the agenda.

Amy said something that captures this beautifully:

“You create the climates for emergence.”

That may be one of the responsibilities of leadership we talk about least. That, as much as we would like to, we cannot manufacture transformation in another person. We cannot schedule vulnerability for 10:15 on Tuesday morning. We cannot demand that someone trust us.

But we can help create the conditions where those things become possible. We just need to be aware that it will require listening, curiosity, enough safety for people to speak honestly, and probably a lot more.

Oh, and it requires time. Lots of time.

Three Things Leaders Can Practice Now

Near the end of our conversation, Amy offered several surprisingly simple yet practical ideas.

First, create more space for slowness and silence. You don’t need a five-day retreat to begin. Try starting your next meeting with a moment to arrive before jumping into the agenda. Put the phone away during a conversation. Resist filling every silence.

Second, create places for people to belong. Amy suggested organizations form small cross-functional “nests” that meet periodically with no business objective other than accompanying one another through life. Whether or not you use that exact model, the question is valuable: Where do people in your organization experience genuine belonging?

Finally, do your own inner work. This may be the most important one. For years, I’ve heard Brian and Linda often say that leaders go first. Not because leaders always have the answer, but because leadership requires a willingness to examine ourselves before asking everyone else to change.

Amy described practitioners and leaders themselves as “the instrument of the transformation.” Techniques matter. Frameworks matter. Skills matter.

But ultimately, who we are enters the room before any of those things do.

What Are You Moving Too Fast to Notice?

Amy and Nicholas Janni explore many of these ideas more deeply in their book, Leading in Chaos, particularly the need for a different kind of leadership in a world increasingly defined by uncertainty and complexity.

Brian and Linda approach transformation through another lens in Unfolded, asking what it means to pay attention to the experiences that shape us and to become more fully who we are.

Different books. Different approaches.

But there is an important thread connecting them.

Leadership isn’t only about learning what to do next.

Sometimes it is about becoming quiet enough to notice what is already happening—in our teams, in the people around us, and within ourselves.

So perhaps the question to carry with you this week is a simple one: What might you notice if you stopped moving quite so fast?