Fred LeFranc on Conscious Leadership: Turning Fear into Energy and Culture into a Competitive Edge

Fred Lefranc, Co-founder, Results Thru Strategy

When Fred LeFranc gave his talk at the 2025 Principled Business Summit on Necker Island, he brought with him the candor of a seasoned consultant, the resilience of a cancer survivor, and the pragmatism of someone who once ran a bakery through a pandemic. This was Fred’s second Necker Summit and his latest talk built on his now well-known story of “Cancer, COVID, and croissants”, a phrase he coined after being diagnosed with prostate cancer in January 2020, undergoing surgery at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, and then unexpectedly taking over a commercial bakery in Atlanta that June!

What was supposed to be a one-and-a-half-year assignment turned into three and a half years of high-stakes leadership. “The beginning of COVID was a s**t show - excuse me,” Fred said with a wry smile, earning laughs before pivoting into the deeper lessons he wanted to share.

From Consultant to Conscious Leader

For decades, Fred has been a consultant to the hospitality industry, primarily restaurants. Alongside that work, he immersed himself in the Conscious Capitalism movement after reading John Mackey’s book of the same name and attending a summit in 2014. “I found my tribe and said, oh, this is fantastic,” he recalled. Over the years, he introduced more than 20 restaurant CEOs to the community.

However, applying Conscious Capitalism as a CEO himself was different from advising others. “While I was a big believer, at times I faced a lot of skepticism and cynicism,” Fred admitted. “People don’t adopt it just because you do, because they tend to see that what the CEO comes back with is just the flavor of the month.”

The Four Intelligences of Leadership

Central to Fred’s philosophy is the idea that leadership requires more than IQ. Drawing on principles from John Mackey’s Conscious Capitalism, he emphasized the need for system intelligence, emotional intelligence, intelligence quotient, and spiritual intelligence alongside traditional metrics.

“In times of great change - which we’re going through, right? We’re a tweet away from disaster - change challenges our integrity,” Fred said. But he reframed the biggest disruptor, fear as energy. “Fear can be very paralyzing because it’s energy contained within your body. If you learn to face that, release it, and channel it toward positive things, amazing things can occur.”

He also advised leaders: “hold on loosely. “Don’t grip things. Don’t try to force things. Go with the energy that’s being given to you.”

Embracing the Paradox of Leadership

Fred urged executives to resist false choices. “The paradox is two opposing forces. We try to pick one over the other—profit versus experience, left versus right. But the goal of management is not to choose one, it’s to embrace both.”

He called this the paradox of leadership: balancing integrity with the ability to harness fear and uncertainty for meaningful change. For Fred, principles and practices anchor leaders through disruption. “Practices need to change all the time,” he explained, “but your principles should be enduring.”

Culture as the Secret Weapon

If there is one lever Fred believes leaders cannot afford to ignore, it’s culture. “Culture is the secret weapon in all companies,” he asserted. “During COVID, the companies with the best cultures thrived. The toxic ones did not.”

To illustrate, he compared culture to a swimming pool: “All of us are standing in the same pool. It’s our job as individuals, every stakeholder, to keep the water pure and clean. There’s no clean section of the pool. Whatever you do goes everywhere.”

Culture, Fred stressed, inevitably reflects its leaders. “All the strengths and weaknesses of a leader are forced on their culture. When I work with leaders, I help them uncover their light and their shadow and see how that impacts everything around them.”

Leading Through Integrity

Fred closed with a call to action, asking fellow Necker Summit attendees to lead with integrity, embrace paradox, and treat fear as energy that can be redirected. “Conscious leaders focus on principles, not just practices,” he said. “And your integrity sits at the fulcrum of it all.”

His message was one forged through personal battles with illness, the chaos of COVID, and the unforgiving realities of running a business in crisis. For Fred, leadership is about persistence, adaptability, and staying true to core values, even when cynicism and fear run high.

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