Creating a Culture of Courage: Shana Francesca Of Concinnate On How Authenticity Benefits People and Profits in the Workplace
An Interview With Vanessa Ogle
Curiosity. Leadership fundamentally is about relationship with those we lead. Without curiosity there is no relationship. We have to be interested in knowing the people we lead, knowing what inspires them, what empowers them to show up as their full thriving selves and be able to consistently contribute to the thriving of our organization. If we were to get curious about why a particular person is asking us for, certain adjustments to their physical environment we might learn that they have sensory issues that we did not previously understand and that by meeting those needs for this employee, we remove tension from not only their work environment but also with those around them and those who work with them and in doing so support all of our employees in becoming much more successful at their job. It’s not about hiring people who are good culture fits, but instead finding ways to understand how to adjust our culture so that a diverse group of highly intelligent persons are empowered by our culture.
In today’s social media-filled, fast-paced world, authenticity in the workplace and in our personal lives has become more difficult to come by. Business leaders must focus on the bottom line of profits and corporate success, but does that have to be at the expense of the authenticity of their employees? I believe it is quite the opposite. I know from my own experience that a culture of authenticity allows hiring a team that will bring their all to the workplace. That fosters innovation, creativity, and a level of success that few companies dream of. Yet, fostering an environment where individuals feel secure enough to express their true selves remains a challenge. The importance of authenticity cannot be overstated — it is the foundation of trust, innovation, and strong relationships. However, creating such a culture requires intention, understanding, and actionable strategies. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Shana Francesca.
Shana Francesca is a keynote speaker, consultant, and scholar of intentional and ethical leadership and living, Founder and CEO of Concinnate LLC. She believes we become infinitely more impactful as leaders and as humans when we understand the power of community and our role inside of it. Knowing that an organization, family or friend group is a type of community and needs to be honored and cultivated as an ecosystem where every part and person must be honored and empowered. This transforms relationships, inspires creativity and innovation, and drives profitability.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
Being raised in an abusive household and evangelical Christian cult, I experienced very early on what it is to be surrounded by people who have no idea what authentic and ethical relationship is. There is no true relationship when you come from a place of wanting to manipulate and control those around you, to benefit from their labor, emotional, physical, and spiritual with little or no reciprocity.
I think for many people, including myself, no one ever sat us down and said, this is how you show up in a healthy relationship with others, this is how you ensure the people around you feel safe and loved and this is how you set and enforce boundaries, especially those of us who grew up in high control coercive environments.
It is difficult to know how to show up as a healthy human, when you grow up being shown that parenting and relationships in general, are about control, being controlled, rather than empowering someone to discover who they are and how they want to show up in the world. It is hard to question that paradigm unless something or someone challenges it in a way that feels safe for you and empowers you to be vulnerable enough to learn more and show up in healthy ways. This shift came for me when I finally was financially independent enough to move out on my own and leave those environments in my mid-20s.
For far too many of us, our childhood was more “do what you are told” and “sit down and be quiet” which set us up, by design, especially as women, to default to whoever was put in authority over us. It normalized the violation of boundaries and never came close to being true ethical relationship. On the flip side, this idea of being the one in control over others becomes the model for ‘leadership’. The idea that leadership is being obeyed rather than empowering others. What leadership actually is, is being in relationship with those you lead. My work focuses on powerfully shifting this understanding.
It all started as my journey to healing and showing up in empowering ways in the world, and along the way became much larger, more public, and more expansive than I had even thought to imagine.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
There are so many things that happen along the path of building my business. I remember the first time someone called me a leadership expert; I nearly fell out of my chair. I mean yes, I had, at the time more than a decade of research and learning on what it is to be an extraordinary leader and human but I hadn’t thought of myself as an expert just someone who was eternally fascinated with and curious to discover what created truly incredible profitable and innovation-driven businesses.
Who did someone have to show up as, to foster that environment? What did and does it empower? How does that affect the bottom line, connection with clients, longevity of the business, etc.? These questions dominated my waking thoughts. I had been asking and seeking to discover the answers to these questions for years, but had never considered that along the way I had established expertise, until that moment.
It also forced me to reckon with the idea of being called an expert and to decide what I wanted to be called, how I wanted to define myself. It ended up being a really powerful moment for me. It called me into another level of intentionality in how I spoke about myself and my work.
You are a successful individual. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Perseverance, resilience, and above all my curiosity. I want to take a few moments and dive into each trait and how it has directly impacted who I am today.
Perseverance. There were many times, especially as a child that I thought that it would be impossible to retain any beautiful part of myself. By the time I would have the resources and support to leave and could find my way to some version of myself in the world, there would be no hope left to salvage or foster. But I found ways to hold onto myself to hide some small beautiful parts of myself, some of my wild as Glennon Doyle would call it, away from view and keep them to myself and persevere knowing that I would find a way to safety.
Resilience. When I left the abusive environment, I was raised in, I could finally breathe but I didn’t yet know how and I mean that literally. When you grow up constantly on high alert you are also constantly holding your breath. Then, very quickly I realized I had no real connection to community and absolutely no healthy community. I sought out a way to create support around myself but also safety for me to explore who I wanted to be in the world and to learn how to breathe to release myself from trauma and that which was holding my lungs in an iron cage. I found the salsa dancing community and fell in love. I truly believe that dance and community were instrumental in my healing. I could not have moved through those early years of healing quite so well, although it was messy, very messy for a very long time, if I had not found people who saw me, and created space for me to move trauma through my body. There were a handful of people, who didn’t know my story but they saw something in me fighting to find my way in the world and had my back and still do. The way that dance connects us to and moves difficult emotions through our bodies is hard to explain but when you experience it, it’s life-altering. Anyone who is a dancer understands what I mean, and if you don’t, please go take a dance class and don’t worry about what you look like, do it for you, do it for all the things you felt today and throughout your life. Do it and think about every step you take, every time you push off the ground, remember that you are loved and supported by that same earth, by the ground beneath you even if you don’t feel supported by anything else in your life. Get all that energy unstuck and move it through your body, it’s freedom and connection and love. It’s powerful. Dance is a personal act of revolution.
Curiosity. Curiosity is deeply connected to hope and courage. Curiosity is fundamentally and foundationally transformational. It is the desire to know something as it is, not as we want it to be. Curiosity reminds us that there are infinite ways we are connected to the living world around us that we have yet to discover. It is the desire to understand our power and our impact, the desire to be an ethical part of the living world, it is the threshold to relationship and community. Curiosity is connected to every great thing in my life, my healing, my business, my joy, my hope, and my relationships. It is something I will continue to foster intentionally and consistently for the rest of my life.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Can you share a pivotal moment in your career or personal life when being authentic made a significant impact on your success or well-being?
The moment I allowed myself to stand in my own wisdom and power was transformational. The day I realized that the knowledge I had gained through my own healing and through my life experiences was valuable and that it was not only valuable to me but to other people, that day, changed my life.
Throughout my healing process, as I was learning and discovering while deconstructing and healing, I began to seek out all kinds of knowledge from a diverse array of teachers. As I distilled that knowledge and began to form a semblance of understanding of who I might want to be in the world, people began coming to me for counsel, specifically about business.
I have, since I was a teenager been friends with people who were significantly older than me so it didn’t shock me when business owners in their late 40s, 50s, and 60s would come to me throughout my life and talk to me and find the conversation one that inspired them, brought clarity and understanding that was valuable because I am a systems thinker and deeply analytical.
But at the same time, I assumed that people, I don’t know what people, but some persons somewhere had to already be sharing what I understood of the world…it took many people telling me that in fact that was not true and that I should share more powerfully the way I understood relationship, leadership, and intentionality boldly with the world, for me to find the confidence to begin to share my perspectives publicly.
What strategies have you found most effective in fostering an environment where employees or team members feel safe to express their true selves, including their ideas, concerns, and aspirations?
You have to take the ego out of it. I am not here to assert power over the people I lead, I am here to empower them and contribute consistently to their thriving so they can bring their whole thriving selves to work with them and be a part of a bubble of life, an ecosystem, a diverse array of life working together, flourishing together. It is that simple and that hard, it takes a tremendous amount of commitment, communication, curiosity, respect, and accountability.
At its core innovation is a reimagining of relationships and creativity is our understanding of relationships given shape and form. Once I understood that I sought out the leadership philosophies of the most creative and innovative organizations and I found books that directed me to those organizations like Francesca Gino’s Rebel Talent and Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc.
What I found over and over again is that ALL relationship requires curiosity and when, and because, I lead from a place of curiosity and am committed to continuing to show up that way, people are safe to be themselves and when I mess up, make a mistake, violate their trust or their autonomy I make it right, I take accountability.
I had a project manager who worked for me early on in my business but I knew I wanted to practice what I preach and let me tell you some of the most constructive powerful conversations we ever had were the ones where I asked her what I could be doing to better support her. I would ask what practices I had taken on that were making her job harder and what I could do to change those things. Usually, it didn’t require me to do more work, just to change how I was doing something.
It was liberating for me as much as for her. When it was time for her to move on from the organization we had several conversations about it that included me being truly invested in what kind of role she was looking for and who I might be able to introduce her to, to help her succeed in finding the role she desired. She wanted to get back to academia.
It was then that I decided this was what I wanted my leadership to facilitate this is one of the many ways I wanted to support the people who chose to share their time and expertise with me. I didn’t want their moving on to be something they had to hide, but instead, something they had my support to pursue it was better for me, the company, and for them. It’s a much more powerful and vulnerable way to show up as a leader. Sure, it’s messier, but there is more freedom in it for everyone involved when you approach it from a place of curiosity, respect, and accountability.
Change happens in language, so the way we think about, describe, and understand leadership has to be much more intentional than it currently is and come from a place of curiosity rather than a desire to be in control.
How do you navigate the challenges that come with encouraging authenticity in a diverse workplace, where different backgrounds and perspectives may sometimes lead to conflict?
I posit that all intentional and ethical leadership and relationship requires curiosity, respect, and accountability. When we think about it, leadership, in it’s most successful form is a relationship, an ethical relationship, between leaders and those they lead AND it all starts with curiosity.
When we approach the world from the place of what can I learn about others, about the world around me we begin to realize there is a world of knowledge and understanding we could simply not learn in a single lifetime, so we need one another. We need a diverse array of individuals inside our organization that continually challenge our existing ideals. That are committed to continually reevaluating relationships in order to inspire innovation because innovation is a reimagining of relationship so we must continually model healthy relationship in order to drive innovation.
Our organizations need to function as ecosystems; they need to be fostered as a bubble of life, the same way that the entire living world exists. If we want life inside our organization we need to look to the living world for inspiration, there is profound beauty and ingenuity in the ecosystems in and around us, because yes, even our bodies are ecosystems.
ALL LIFE exists because of and is supported by a diverse array of life. Diversity is the driver of ALL LIFE both in the living world and inside our organizations. What I am talking about here is not a checklist, it is creating a space where a diverse array of life is seen, heard, understood, valued and their thriving is continually invested in. When we view our organization and our people this way, we can realize diversity, aka a bubble of life. That doesn’t mean that conflict does not arise, but when it does, we come back to relationship we come back to and ground ourselves in curiosity, respect, and accountability and when we do that, resolutions are not necessarily easier to come by, but they are much more powerful.
Based on your experience and research, can you please share “5 Ways to Create a Culture Where People Feel Safe to be Authentic?”
1. Curiosity. Leadership fundamentally is about relationship with those we lead. Without curiosity there is no relationship. We have to be interested in knowing the people we lead, knowing what inspires them, what empowers them to show up as their full thriving selves and be able to consistently contribute to the thriving of our organization. If we were to get curious about why a particular person is asking us for, certain adjustments to their physical environment we might learn that they have sensory issues that we did not previously understand and that by meeting those needs for this employee, we remove tension from not only their work environment but also with those around them and those who work with them and in doing so support all of our employees in becoming much more successful at their job. It’s not about hiring people who are good culture fits, but instead finding ways to understand how to adjust our culture so that a diverse group of highly intelligent persons are empowered by our culture.
2. Respect. Respect is due regard for the rights, wishes, and beliefs of others. Ultimately it is what needs to balance out curiosity. We have to recognize that others are autonomous, they have their own thoughts, wants, and desires, and yet all life is interconnected and everything we do has a ripple effect on all the other life around us. It is honoring autonomy and our interconnectedness simultaneously. Striking that balance is the work of great leaders. If we think about it, curiosity without respect is intrusive and respect without curiosity is uneducated. Respect is what begins to empower trust in a relationship, the real test is accountability but we aren’t there yet. For now, we can think about honoring someone else’s boundaries, for instance, we could be curious about who someone is so they can be empowered inside our organization but we aren’t entitled to know everything about them, and certainly not all at once from the beginning. We have to demonstrate respect and as we do, the people who work for us will begin to know they are safe to share more aspects of themselves with us and our organization.
3. Accountability. This is the basis of deep levels of trust. We really don’t know if we can truly trust someone until there is a moment for accountability. Accountability, as I define it, is taking responsibility for the impact of our actions on those who have and are being impacted. To really lean into the responsibility part, we have to get curious, learn more and then be committed to doing better. And the cycle starts all over again. In my work, I posit that all intentional and ethical relationship requires curiosity, respect, and accountability. When these three principles are consistently applied it fosters an environment where people are safe to show up as themselves, bring their creativity with them, and be a powerful part of innovation and ultimately drive profitability. An example of this is being willing to recognize that our intentions can be good and we might have taken time to gather information but we had blind spots and didn’t get the diverse array of opinions we needed to, before proceeding and there were negative consequences for our people, our clients, the environment etc. In those moments, it is incredibly powerful to truly understand the harm done, from those who have been and are being harmed, acknowledge the harm and our role in it, and then get curious, learn more, and proceed eliminating the harm.
4. A Diverse Culture, including leadership. This cannot be tokenism or a checklist. Citibank showed us in hard numbers what a lack of diversity cost the US economy, 16 trillion dollars and that was four years ago, in 2020. I see more and more headlines about companies divesting from DEI and many more who never invested in the first place and all I think every time I see this is, that their profitability is about to tank over the next 5 years and if they don’t course correct, they will not make it long term. Honoring all life is the bare minimum and makes good business sense, it’s that simple. This requires investing in intentional and ethical relationship (which is what great leadership requires) and also requires us to recognize that all life on earth is a result of overlapping interdependent ecosystems. And that our organizations, if we want them to be alive, if we want to drive innovation and profitability, they need to be alive a place where life, and as a result, innovation flourishes.
5. Investing consistently in reciprocity. If we want our people to contribute to our organization’s thriving, they themselves must be thriving. It goes to basic reciprocity. If our people know, because we continually invest in them and show up to support them consistently, that we value them they are going to bring their best to work with them every day. People want to contribute, they want to be needed to be seen, heard, understood, and valued, it’s human nature. So, if our people do not feel seen, heard, understood, and valued they are not going to bring their most valuable thoughts and creativity with them and share them with us, they are only going to share it with those who do value them. It is up to us as leaders to set the stage for our people, to create an environment where they are thriving so we all thrive together.
In your opinion, how does authenticity within an organization influence its relationship with customers, clients, or the broader community?
I see creativity as the manifestation of our understanding of relationship, in physical form. Think about the way art brings to light aspects of our society, our relationships with ourselves and one another, etc. Sharing our creativity with the people and the world around us is an extremely vulnerable thing. But it is that same creativity that drives innovation whether we are talking about our relationship with our customers, our product offerings, the way we go to market, those we market to, etc it requires us to examine existing relationships and be willing to move through change.
If we do not feel safe to be ourselves to share the stories of our lived experience, to be our authentic selves, we are not going to bring our ideas to the table. We are not going to lay bare our thoughts for others to examine and critique if we are not safe to do so.
Authenticity inside our organizations is vital, without it an organization will not succeed long term.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
It would be to have everyone invest in curiosity and start with something simple. I call them curiosity walks and they show up in a variety of ways in our life.
You can take a walk outside and take note of one thing, a plant, a flower, an insect, a tree, that you know nothing about or perhaps something you have “known” about your whole life. Those tend to be the most eye-opening, the things I have learned about monarch butterflies, dandelions, and poison ivy have been fascinating. It was real life, real-time demonstration that proximity does not equal expertise and that proximity is NOT relationship.
It is when we are truly invested in knowing someone or something as it is, not as we want it to be, and couple that curiosity with respect that relationship truly begins to take form we need to apply this not only to ourselves but the living world.
In our personal lives, that curiosity walk could look like walking around our homes and truly being present. Asking ourselves what is authentically aligned with who we are and is supporting us in setting the stage for the story we want our life to tell.
In our organizations that could look like walking the halls and talking to one ‘new’ person with different responsibilities at all levels of the organization each day, the way this particular exercise transforms an organization…there are so many powerful ideas inside the people inside our organizations, but they will stay there and never be shared with us if we are not invested in relationship with our people. This can also be done with a surrogate, a consultant like myself, who can distill information and share it with the leadership team.
I know, in the core of my being, if we invested in curiosity and coupled that with respect and accountability, we would revolutionize our lives and while we were at it, revolutionize our organizations, and the world.
How can our readers further follow you online?
Email: Shana@Concinnate.world
Phone: 1–609–864–6168
Website: https://www.concinnate.world/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAFmDzdt3-CutdjGR8NNIxg
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shana-francesca-36b79217
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About The Interviewer: Vanessa Ogle is a mom, entrepreneur, inventor, writer, and singer/songwriter. Vanessa’s talent in building world-class leadership teams focused on diversity, a culture of service, and innovation through inclusion allowed her to be one of the most acclaimed Latina CEO’s in the last 30 years. She collaborated with the world’s leading technology and content companies such as Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and Broadcom to bring innovative solutions to travelers and hotels around the world. Vanessa is the lead inventor on 120+ U.S. Patents. Accolades include: FAST 100, Entrepreneur 360 Best Companies, Inc. 500 and then another six times on the Inc. 5000. Vanessa was personally honored with Inc. 100 Female Founder’s Award, Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and Enterprising Women of the Year among others. Vanessa now spends her time sharing stories to inspire and give hope through articles, speaking engagements and music. In her spare time she writes and plays music in the Amazon best selling new band HigherHill, teaches surfing clinics, trains dogs, and cheers on her children.
Please connect with Vanessa here on linkedin and subscribe to her newsletter Unplugged as well as follow her on Substack, Instagram, Facebook, and X and of course on her website VanessaOgle.
