Leadership as Learnership
The Space Between Leading and Learning
Welcome to Unscripted Leadership. A space for leaders, learners, and in-betweeners navigating the moments of wonder when clarity isn’t the starting point. Here, I think out loud about leadership, learning, and the spaces between for those who are building, reflecting, and moving forward without needing to have it all figured out first.
I’m not quick to publish about my own learning while my brain is still doing calisthenics: stretching, digesting, connecting.
But two Office Hours sessions with Professor Frances Frei, Professor of Technology and Operations Management, at Harvard Business School changed that.
Her cadence, her words, even her sketching on the iPad, all of it lit up my learning brain. It validated what I believe about learning and challenged me to refine what I thought I knew.
The time together reminded me why I’m drawn to this work.
Not by title or function or industry, but by hunger. The shared hunger, by each of us in the virtual room, to learn, unlearn, and learn again.
I’ve long described leadership as learnership. A posture more than a position. The philosophy I bring to leaders and organizations I work with is most alive when they embrace learning not as a phase, compliance, or attendance hours, but as a practice.
This is the work.
It’s where humility meets design.
Where curiosity becomes strategy.
Where access becomes architecture.
Leadership as Teaching
In her first session, Dr. Frei explored the intersection of leadership and teaching, reminding us that great leaders don’t just direct; they communicate by design for learning.
They model curiosity. They create safety. They teach through how they show up.
Her framing reawakened something I first wrestled with early in my career, guided by the words of Parker Palmer:
“In every class I teach, my students and I co-create the conditions of our own learning.”
That line changed how I approached everything from classroom design to leadership development. While building certificate programs and postsecondary pathways for adult learners, many of whom were completing GEDs or entering college for the first time, I learned that access wasn’t just about entry. It was about designing conditions for possibility.
Dr. Frei made that real again. Her approach mirrors what Palmer described in The Courage to Teach: the willingness to bring your full self into the learning space, and to make space for others to do the same.
She spoke of leadership as teaching and courage to bring emotion before logic.
“The sanding before painting,” she called it. That metaphor hasn’t left me.
Dr. Frei offered practical frameworks, too: the trust triangle (authenticity, logic, and empathy) and the capability–motivation–license model for diagnosing performance.
When someone falls short, she reminded us, it’s rarely just willpower. It’s often that they don’t know how (capability), don’t know why (motivation), or don’t feel they can (license).
It’s a simple yet deeply humane way to see people. It’s a kind way to lead people.
The Paradox of Excellence
She spoke, too, about excellence, not as doing everything well, but as having the courage to choose.
She added a paradox (I love a good paradox):
“The courage to be bad.”
In the case she shared, a company couldn’t design the lightest tablet and keep every legacy feature. Trade-offs weren’t signs of weakness or failure; they were acts of intention and focus.
True excellence, she explained, requires naming what you’ll intentionally let go of so you can direct energy where it truly matters.
It struck me how often leaders, especially those wired for doing, mistake motion for progress. Without the courage to prioritize, urgency becomes the enemy of excellence.
Focus, she reminded us, is a form of integrity.
Choosing what to be “bad” at is sometimes the only way to be great where it counts.
The courage to prioritize is not disengagement; it’s discernment.
It’s the art of designing your effort with purpose.
To lead as a learner, teach with intention, and make learning visible through how you lead.
Building a Culture That Learns
In her second session, Dr. Frei turned the lens toward system design and how leaders create environments where learning becomes a culture, not a curriculum.
She drew on Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset, naming the difference between know-it-alls and learn-it-alls, Satya Nadella’s phrase for reframing Microsoft’s culture.
Dweck’s insight: success in a growth mindset isn’t proof of intelligence; it’s evidence of learning.
From there, Dr. Frei layered in Dr. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety — the foundation of any learning system. Edmondson’s model of intelligent failure reframes mistakes as data for progress:
Preventable failures signal process breakdowns.
Complex failures emerge from messy systems.
Intelligent failures are born of experimentation.
During the session, Dr. Frei shared a memorable synthesis drawn from her work with Dr. Edmondson that learning cultures thrive when teams can talk about their “beeps.”
The insight came from Edmondson’s research on psychological safety and intelligent failure: progress depends on our ability to treat mistakes as data, not defects.
Dr. Frei made it unforgettable with a single line:
“New beeps are awesome. Old beeps are process problems.” “Celebrate the new beeps. The fresh mistakes that reveal learning.”
Fix the processes behind the old ones, make failure discussable.
It’s such a clear example of how language shapes culture. Leaders who normalize learning through language create conditions where curiosity feels safe.
Dr. Frei layered this discussion on the foundational work of Chris Argyris, whose research on organizational learning distinguishes between single-loop and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning focuses on solving immediate problems, adjusting actions to meet existing goals. Double-loop learning goes deeper, inviting teams to question the very assumptions and beliefs that created those goals in the first place.
Dr. Frei’s delivery made this theory tangible: learning cultures evolve only when reflection becomes part of the operating model, not an afterthought.
The Architecture of Learning
Then she walked us through the Harvard Business School model of learning:
Individual preparation – learning starts alone.
Small group discussion – where ideas warm up and safety builds.
Large group synthesis – where advocacy, connection, and debate take shape.
Reflection – the step that turns experience into knowledge.
“If people reflect, they remember things 30 years later,” she said.
“If they don’t, it’s first in, first out.”
She tied it all back to neuroscience: emotion enhances cognition, microlearning and spaced reflection deepens retention, and writing (especially by hand) strengthens memory.
That last one landed.
As a relentless handwritten note-taker (who rarely revisits the notes), I felt oddly validated. The act itself, writing, is a form of learning, creating, and reflecting. Cognitive research supports this: writing by hand activates deeper encoding pathways, making memories more durable and retrievable.
Learning, in other words, lives in the doing.
Connecting the Threads
Across both sessions, a clear truth emerged:
Leadership and learning are not separate; they are interdependent.
Leaders teach by how they learn.
Organizations learn by how they lead.
And learning itself, when designed with reflection, curiosity, and safety, becomes culture rather than curriculum.
For me, as someone who has long worked at the intersection of learning and leadership design, inclusion, and access, Dr. Frances Frei’s synthesis felt like a homecoming.
It reaffirmed that the work of learning is both structural and human.
About systems that expand access and cultures that sustain growth.
That leadership is both teaching and learning.
That courage shows up not only in what we know, but in our willingness to keep learning out loud.
Maybe the work of leadership isn’t to know more.
Maybe it’s to stay teachable.
To lead in ways that make learning possible, for ourselves, and for everyone around us.
(This reflection captures my takeaways and integrations from Dr. Frei’s Office Hours. It doesn’t encompass the depth or brilliance of her full sessions, only what is active, in my learnership in this moment.)
Jackie J. writes Unscripted Leadership, wondering and reflecting in the intersections of leadership, learning, and the in-between. She coaches executives and teams navigating transition, helping them take ownership of their story and build cultures that learn. If this piece resonated, subscribe or share it with someone exploring their “now what”.
Being around leadership in the safe spaces that encourage learning is amazing. Having a culture that wants/craves learning is a great sign. Love the phrase learnership.