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In the early 1900s, psychologist Jean Piaget put forward the idea of the 4 stages of child cognitive development. He named one stage “Object Permanence.”
That is the faculty of awareness that things continue to exist even when they cannot be seen or heard. Parents quickly learn that if you place a toy under a blanket, a very young child who has achieved object permanence knows it is there and can actively seek it. Until then, the child behaves as if the toy had simply disappeared. It’s why children can have such fun when parents play “Peek-a-Boo!” with them. In the developing child's brain, when we adults cover our faces with our hands, the child’s perception is that we seem to pop in and out of existence. It works in reverse, as well. When children cover themselves under the blanket in the dark of night, bedroom monsters cannot see them, and shortly thereafter pop out of existence over their frustration.
The hierarchical layers of management aren’t prepared for that — yet.
CEO of WeWork, Sandeep Mathrani, is one of many business leaders experiencing the pandemic-exposed linkage between leadership development and child development. His recent reveal is an increasingly evident entrenched management inability to decouple the idea of “work” from “place.” Mathrani may be one of many from a generation of…
