High Rate-of-Learning Leadership: a common thread in the direction we’re heading
In my experiences as a founder, social entrepreneur, Googler, leader, learner, community member, and now an executive director for an impact-oriented non-profit, it’s been an ongoing theme to talk about leadership, and to look at what we mean by leadership.
In all of the fields I’ve studied and encountered around leadership and leading, the focus tends to be on the behaviors and attributes you need as a leader, and the kinds of things one might organize in one’s own life to make a certain form of leadership possible “out there” with other people.
But as the world continues to change, and Silicon Valley continues to inform more and more of world and working culture in disparate places, with positive and negative impacts, there’s a new attribute or nature to the field of leadership I’m finding most useful, and I’ve been starting to call it “High Rate-of-Learning Leadership.” This particular flavor of leadership has a few important attributes.
First, some people think of leadership as a role. When I think about High Rate-of-Learning Leadership, I think about a commitment, a journey, and a practice. I think about a community and the organization of a system — perhaps many systems — to support the ongoing process of leading with a high ongoing rate-of-learning, ideally a sustainable one, in full view.
Second, when we talk about leadership, sometimes we think about a particular person — an individual — and get into discussions of leadership as lonely, solitary, being “at the top,” and peculiar or at least limited to a certain set of the population. When I think about High Rate-of-Learning Leadership, it’s clear to me from practice that this form of leadership (and the cycles and systems that support this form of learning) don’t happen at the individual level, but at the community level. The systems that generate a leader, and that a leader generates or is embedded in, generate the leadership that’s at play through a certain individual’s being, and their “doing” and “relating” through ongoing action.
Third, thinking about leadership tends to evoke (for me at least) the vision of a manual or a set of information as the key to unlocking greater leadership beyond what you know or what you’ve been exposed to already. High rate-of-learning leadership, by contrast, pulls me toward development through experiences, relationships, and the performative aspects of relating, with different individuals and specifically the practices of relating across boundaries and taking leaps in experience and new experiments that cross previous barriers marked “comfort zone.” If traditional leadership might be learned through a case study or a book, high rate-of-learning leadership might require being developed through tangible experience, particularly the kind of experience that transpires from being in one’s zone of practice, where we’re asking something of our mental, emotional and intellectual/relational muscles, and attuned to or aware of a farther-out-there boundary where our sensing and adjusting faculties become overwhelmed or outpaced, and shut down.
Finally, leadership sometimes evokes a certain picture of a person on the outside, an archetype of the way a leader looks, dresses, or presents. But high rate-of-learning leadership, in my book, is more attuned to and responsive to the types of inputs a person consumes and how those choices on those inputs are made and made over time. We might also look at the allocations a person makes — as they take in new information or choose or select the media they bring into their work or their practice, they’re also selecting an allocation of time, attention and energy. The kinds of things a High Rate-of-Learning Leader selects over time with their time, attention, and listening, have a particular quality. Allocation to output could also be an interesting place to look to distinguish a High Rate-of-Learning leader, though in my experience the nature and footprint of the output varies widely based on a person’s environment and primary ecosystem for impact — an epic independently-organized internet education entrepreneur might organize his writing as his output, while a cross-functional strategic program or operations manager in a large multinational high tech company might traffic her output in the form of conversations or ‘aha’ moments, or moments of personal connection or inspiration or new commitments to action, in those she comes across — or relationships knit between parties in disparate areas of the company, that form based on the output from her actions (including her inputs and allocations).
As I continue to explore making impact across roles, I hope to write more about this common thread for the leadership I’m forging and seeing at the nexus of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial and tech culture, and the global and hyperlocal reinvention of work and the workforce (and the landscape of future economic opportunity), not just from the standpoint of those with privilege in this economy or the forseeable future, but with an eye to the kind of leader we need to support any person who wishes to, in becoming.
Megan Goering is the Founder and Executive Director of the University Innovation Project, a project of Tides Center in San Francisco. Her work focuses on scaling the toolkits, mindsets, creative support, and access to power and responsibility of innovation methods and human-centered design to the world’s next billion innovators, starting with the US university system. She grew up in Topeka, Kansas, grew teams and operations for Google, and built her own company (Human Centered Innovation) translating the product development mentalities and practices of GoogleX for the benefit of innovative decisionmakers and systemic leaders in the corporate, public, government, non-profit, and leadership sectors worldwide. She lives in San Francisco with her fiancé Joe and walks, creates, drinks tea and reads to stay grounded as she grows.
