I am sitting on the edge of a green round carpet. Green like the summer linden leaves. On the carpet are 10 kids in several groups working on different math problems. At first I watch two boys playing a board game with counting rods. There is already a purple counting rod on the board. It’s the turn of the younger boy. He throws a six and takes another purple bar out of the box. Then he stops, thinks for a short while and puts back the two purple sticks and replaces them with a golden and a red one. The older boy tells him “count again. Six plus six is not the same as ten plus one.” The younger boy counts the beads on his two purple counting rods, comes to the same conclusion and replaces them with a golden and a green stick.
This is one scene that I witnessed during my visit at a Montessori school. Montessori schools are run by the principles that were developed by Maria Montessori. Maria Montessori, born in 1870, was a doctor turned educator who built a new philosophy around child education based on her observations of child’s behavior. Her conclusions were completely different from how children were viewed in the first decade of the twentieth century.
What is the result? Children in Montessori schools love going to school. They enjoy learning beyond the age of 7. Already the youngest ones are self reflected and can assess their level of expertise. They know what they know and what they don’t know. Children work because they want to develop themselves further and not to please the teacher or get good grades. Kids feel responsible for their own development, for their environment and for other members of the society.
What does that have to do with companies?
During the last six years I have been thinking about Montessori education. And being a former company CEO, I drew more and more parallels between the Montessori philosophy and what I would consider as good leadership. After all, I would love to see the qualities of Montessori students also in employees.
In this article I would like to make the case that if managers would see employees a little bit more like Montessori teachers would see the kids, we would have happier employees and a better financial outcome for the company. And for everyone who is now shouting, “I am not a kid. I do not want to be treated like a kid.”, please read further because this is not a story about suppressing people but rather freeing them.
Environment
The most obvious thing that everyone notices when entering a Montessori classroom is the design of the classroom like I noticed that only a few students are sitting at a desk while others are sitting on the floor – on a beautiful rug. Montessori even called school benches “an instrument of slavery” and was demanding that the environment shall be attractive and aesthetic.
I think that is probably the easiest thing that companies can do, create appealing environments. An environment, where employees get the hardware and software they need to work, where office spaces are designed beautifully that employees like to be there. An office space where employees can move around and furniture that supports health instead of creating back pain.
Since it is so easy, quite a few companies have already remodeled their offices into more colorful open spaces with different zones for different work modes. Especially younger, more digital companies have applied those principles – first and foremost Silicon Valley companies like Google. And know what? The founders of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin have both been Montessori school students, which might be a coincidence. Or not?
Team
Another thing you might have noticed when reading through my experience: there is an older boy helping the younger one. That is systematic because Montessori classes are mixed ages. The older ones help the younger ones and the younger ones have someone to look up to.
That is again something that companies can learn from Montessori: making sure to have diverse teams. That way, one can learn from the other. While a lot of companies already focus on gender equality, rather few are looking at age equality.
What else?
To draw more conclusions on how we can learn from Montessori, I would like to share another scene that I observed just a couple of minutes after the first one when I was crawling further to another boy.
His eyes are fixated on a board that looks completely different from the board from the first scene. The boy touches a couple of counting rods that are spread across the board. Before I can fully grasp what he is doing, he already marks down 470,070 next to the problem 78,345 x 6 in his exercise book. Oh, this 8 year old is multiplying with pretty high numbers. After he’s done three more math problems, he looks around. The teacher takes the opportunity to approach the boy, asking him if he wants to play teacher and explain the material to me. He does. Just for me, he simplifies the numbers. I give it a try and really enjoy doing the calculation. It is satisfying to put the counting rods on the board and just read the result. “Do you like multiplication?” I ask him. “Yes, I like it. I just would like to work on harder problems. This is too easy.”
I found that scene very powerful because it shows so much how well the Montessori method is working.
Unlike most educators or even the general population at her time, Montessori didn’t consider children as empty vessels that need to be filled but rather assumed that every child is the builder of him or herself with an internal individual blueprint. That means that she assumes that it is a massive effort for external sources to teach children something that they do not want to learn, while it seems that they almost acquire knowledge and skills on the fly when they are interested. Sounds familiar, hm?
Therefore, the role of the educator is also very different from common belief. Instead of telling children what they ought to know, teachers prepare the environment with materials from which children can pick and choose the activities they want to do. All materials have controls integrated that children can work by themselves (or in groups if they choose to do so) without the need of an adult to control if the result is correct. Teachers do not give grades. Teachers are present if there are questions. They observe, take notes for later but do not interrupt the kids in their work.
Longing to be a valuable part of society
For me, the most important thing that leaders can learn from the Montessori method is seeing their employees in a different light. Just as Maria Montessori shifted the mindset of educators to recognize that kids want to work to become a valuable part of society. Remember the boy in the second example who wanted harder problems to finetune his calculation skills?
Kids are not the only ones who want to be a valuable part of society – adults want that as well. We humans are inherently social beings.
When leaders acknowledge that their employees want to be a valuable part of society, they need to make clear both how the company contributes to society and how the tasks that employees ought to do contribute to the company’s goals and ultimately to society.
Another implication of that paradigm of intrinsic motivation is that companies do not need and actually should avoid bonuses or employee performance reviews. Just like Montessori classes do not need grades.
Self-correcting behavior
But how do employees then know if they are good? Montessori solved this problem by designing material that is self-correcting. The little boy could count the grooves in his counting rod and when you put two counting rods next to each other that make up the same number, they will have the same size like when you lay 1+9 and 2+8 next to each other, they are just the same height.
How would managers define tasks and challenges in a way that it is clear to employees what is expected and that they self-correct? They face the challenge that in our company world, there is not only one solution to a problem or project and it might be difficult to design the tasks that way and still be valuable for the company.
However, adults already have more experience with the world than kids, so a “self-correcting”-material for them might be for instance a clearly defined project outcome like “create a marketing campaign that generates 100 leads”. Of course, the budgets and outcomes assigned should reflect the level of experience – you would not give a marketing rookie a million dollar budget but rather a smaller one. Additionally, you will also find that most employees just like the kids will ask at one point if they feel insecure or did not understand something, especially, if you do not judge their mistakes.
Because, let’s face it. There will be mistakes. And it will be the case that the first projects do not give the returns you would hope for. Again, that should also be a mindset shift – mistakes happen but if you let your employees make those mistakes on smaller stakes projects, they will learn fast and soon, they’ll surpass your expectation.
It might be hard for a manager to stand on the sideline and watch the inefficiencies in some projects. I get that. Being an optimizer myself, I find it very hard to stay quiet. We can learn from Montessori teachers in that aspect as well. Just as they observe and take notes, managers should do the same. Then, when you introduce the next project, focus especially on how to tackle the challenges and elements that did not go that well in the last project.
Free choice of work
One central element of Montessori pedagogy is the free choice of work. Children choose for themselves what to work on. And it also fits perfectly into the self-determination theory where autonomy is one of the key factors for motivation. However, it might seem to be difficult to imagine how to incorporate that into a company environment, where not every task is fun.
By the way, that is the same for children in a Montessori classroom. Not every material will be equally interesting. On the one hand, it is the task of the teacher to prepare the work to make it appealing and on the other hand, at a given time there is only so much material available. Children do not choose their work from the entire world of possibilities but from the material that is available to them in their classroom.
I think taking that into consideration makes it much easier to imagine how a company solution might look like. And interestingly, there are quite a lot of examples where companies apply this principle successfully. Over the last one to two decades, quite a few companies – especially software development companies – introduced scrum, originally a software development framework that focuses heavily on the team as the driver of output. Within this framework the product owner prepares the user stories, presents it to the team and the team agrees on an outcome of what they are capable of delivering within the next 2 weeks. These two weeks are called a sprint. When the sprint starts, every team member pulls the tasks that he or she can contribute best from the backlog of user stories the team agreed on before. That works of course best, when you have teams that are diverse in their experience and capabilities. However, scrum and other agile methods like Kanban are not limited to software development.
I know of a legal department of a major publishing house that successfully implemented the agile methodology in their day-to-day work. All requests from their internal customers arrived via the mailbox on a Kanban board. Just like a product owner, the head legal council prioritized those requests. The major difference to scrum is that there are no sprints. That would also not be very viable for a legal department when there is sometimes work that requires a timely response. So, how do they cope with it and still be agile? The Kanban working method offers a solution: there is a work-in-progress limit, i.e. the team cannot work on more than a given number of requests at the same time. If that limit is reached, the tasks first need to be finished before a new task can be pulled from the priorities backlog. And once it is finished, a lawyer pulls from the task backlog an item that he or she can contribute best.
Get out of the way of your employees
I have already mentioned that managers should stay at the sideline to let their employees work out the problems for themselves. Now, I would like to take that even a bit further. Montessori teachers do not interrupt the kids when they are working and they make sure that other kids do not interrupt the working kid either. That way, they are able to really immerse themselves into their work and reach a state of flow.
And managers should just do the same. They should create an environment where it is possible for their employees to immerse themselves into their work and really think about it. That way, they will be both more effective and efficient. And creating that environment is probably really challenging. Thanks to technology it is now possible to always connect. That way, it became customary in companies that instant answers are expected.
One way to tackle that would be to create power hours – just like Montessori kids have their free work time. This could be 2-3 hours in the morning, when nobody answers emails, phone or instant messages. Only you as the manager should be available for questions to help your employees when they are stuck. And if nobody comes to you with questions – great use the power hours to work on strategy and how to present it to your colleagues.
Conclusion
Leaders need to understand that their employees are motivated by autonomy, a way to improve their competence and by helping each other and then create an environment where they can thrive.
By embracing these principles, companies have the opportunity to build not only more successful organizations but also a more fulfilling and human-centric work culture.
