What Leaders/Managers Can Learn from The Montessori Toddler
A manager who spent the day trusting a junior colleague to run a client call without her comes home to find her three-year-old fumbling his own zipper, the car idling outside. She reaches for it the way she once reached for every unfinished task on her team, before learning that fixing things herself only trained people to wait for her. At work she now measures herself by how little she needs to intervene. Watching small fingers miss the zipper track again, that measure feels much harder to apply. Is patience a skill she already has, or one she only practices when the stakes are professional?
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The low shelf is your org chart
Davies's prepared environment, low shelves, child-sized tools, one place for each thing, works like a good org chart: it tells a toddler what they can reach for without asking permission every time. A manager who leaves reporting lines unclear forces constant check-ins; a parent who leaves everything jumbled together forces a toddler to ask for help with everything. Two or three genuinely accessible choices is the parenting equivalent of clarifying decision rights.
Managers often overcorrect toward total autonomy, leaving no structure at all, which overwhelms a toddler just as much.
Choose one shelf, drawer, or basket this week and stock it with only what your toddler can safely use alone.
Following interest is reading the room before you set the agenda
A good leader does not walk into a meeting and impose an agenda the room does not need; they read what is live for the team first. Davies asks the same discipline at home: notice what your toddler is genuinely absorbed in before deciding today's activity. Managers are trained to have a plan and execute it, which tempts you to redirect a toddler toward your plan instead of following theirs. The skill you use to sense what a team needs works here too, if you let it.
A leader's instinct to keep things moving can read a toddler's slow absorption as stalling, not as the actual work.
Before starting your planned activity, pause and watch for thirty seconds what your toddler is already doing.
Real participation is the stretch assignment, not the busywork
You already know that handing a promising employee only trivial tasks stalls their growth, while a real stretch assignment builds capability fast. Davies argues the same is true for a toddler folding a washcloth or setting the table: not filler, but the actual work of building competence. Extend that same judgment home, to a supervised, age-appropriate task, instead of defaulting to toys.
Stretch assignments at work come with safety nets; a toddler's real task still needs your full, close supervision.
This week, hand your toddler one real task, done alongside you, instead of a toy version of it.
Patience is the management style you already know is best, under-practiced at home
You likely already believe, professionally, that people grow faster when you let them struggle a little before stepping in, and that constant correction erodes confidence more than it builds it. Davies's mindset shift, staying steady through a toddler's mistakes, is that same belief applied where you have less practice: home, at the end of a long day, with far less patience in reserve than you bring to the office.
Some evenings the environment is ready and your toddler is clearly interested in a real task, but you are too depleted to supervise it well. That is a legitimate reason to simplify, not a failure of the method. A leader who pushes a tired team past its limits gets worse results, not more growth; the same applies to pushing your own patience to stay consistent. Notice when you are optimizing for the principle instead of the moment in front of you.
Name one thing, honestly
- Where do you already extend more patience to your team than to your own toddler? - What would change if you treated one toddler task as a stretch assignment instead of a distraction? - Which of your leadership instincts are you not yet using at home?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
This week, hand your toddler one real task, done alongside you, instead of a toy version of it.