287: How to Build a Manageable Leadership Team in Your Child Care Center

In this episode, Kate and Carrie cozy up to chat about the real challenges of leading a childcare center, especially when directors have way too many direct reports. They share smart strategies for building a leadership team, like dividing roles by shift or specialty, and stress the magic number of 5–7 direct reports for sanity’s sake.  

You’ll pick up tips on using part-time or virtual help, rewarding leaders, and making tech your friend. If you’re craving practical advice and a little encouragement, this episode is a must-listen!

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Transcript

Marie 00:00:03  Welcome to Child Care Conversations, the podcast where early childhood leaders like you get real world strategies, honest talk and a whole lot of support. Whether you're running one center or many. We're here to help you lead with confidence and clarity. This episode is brought to you by this quarter's sponsor, playground. The all in one child care management software. We're all about managing monkeys and saving you time at your center. With this platform, you can. We're proud to partner with a team that's as committed to your success as we are. Learn more at Tri Playground Comm. Now let's get into today's conversation. One we think you're really going to love.

Kate 00:00:49  Okay, so today it's just Kate and I. We don't have any guests. It's just the two of us. So strap in. This is going to be a wild ride. We're going to go all over the place. That's how this works. When it's just the two of us. We have much more wide ranging discussions when it's just the two of us.

Kate 00:01:09  Except sometimes when it's.

Carrie 00:01:10  The two of us, it's because we have something we definitely need to chat about. And so today, you know, Carrie and I, if you pay any attention to child care conversation, social media, you know that Carrie and I have been all over this spring and this fall, this summer, I don't know what. I don't even know what time of the year.

Kate 00:01:30  We travel a lot, going to conferences, training at centers, doing executive retreats. We we wander around a fair amount.

Carrie 00:01:39  We did. And one of the things that really kind of came out of one of our conversations is all of this leadership training that everybody seems to be kind of jumping on the bandwagon for. And, you know, back in January when I wrote our leadership book. Part of the reason that I did that is because all the leadership books I kept finding for female leaders kept putting them in self-help. And then we attended some of these leadership topic workshops. And we know that there's definitely probably about eight podcasts that'll come out of some of that.

Carrie 00:02:20  But one of the things that I love is that Carrie kind of came up with this whole and I don't know if it was Carrie, but Carrie said it to me, which was, if you're not leading people, how are you still leading? Like, you know. There was this whole conversation about building depth and, in your leadership team, but who's leading whom? Yeah, I mean, that kind of take us to today's topic, which is directors or owners who have 42 direct reports. They have 42 staff and everybody reports to them.

Kate 00:02:55  So I want to just say a couple of things. So to give a little bit more framework leadership days, days that an association or an organization is having for the leadership makes a lot of sense to me, but a lot of the things that people talk about as leadership isn't actually leadership, it's self-development. So we'll probably do a whole other episode on that topic, but just kind of have that stuck in your head that if you get a degree in early childhood leadership or early childhood administration, or you go to a leadership day and they don't teach you anything about how to lead your team, how to lead your finances, how to lead the families in your program, that's not leadership.

Kate 00:03:47  You have to have things that you are managing and people who are following you. So an expression that I don't know if I came up with it or if I heard it somewhere is. How do you tell the difference between a leader and a duck? If you're walking and you turn around and you look behind you and there's people following you, you're a leader. If you turn around and follow, see what's behind you, and there's nothing behind you. You're a duck. Because ducks they don't follow so good. They wander off on their own, and the lead duck thinks that they're in charge. And all the little ducklings have wandered here, there and everywhere. So if you look behind you and nobody on your team is following you, you're not being a leader.

Carrie 00:04:36  All right, so I'm not sure if I got all my ducks even in the right pond. And so today we're going to talk a little bit about kind of the difference between not so much the difference, but how do you know. And, and how can you start to create.

Carrie 00:04:50  So one of the directors in one of our workshops over the last few months, actually was talking about how many direct reports he had, and that's kind of where Carrie and I kind of sparked on the conversation. And so I know you read, I.

Kate 00:05:07  Think we need to define that term. What does a direct report mean? Who are the people who directly report to you? Who are the people who you are the their only boss or their first level boss? Those are your direct reports. So if you have a toddler, you are one of your toddlers direct reports because the toddler is in charge, right? So you report to the toddler, you make sure that they get the right cup, color of sippy cup, and all of that in your center. How many people are you taking reports from on a daily or weekly or monthly basis? That's what we're asking, right?

Carrie 00:05:47  So do you want to share that story? Yes. That's where I was going. And I was going to have you go ahead and.

Kate 00:05:51  Tell the story. I just wanted to define the term because we were using it, and I realized we hadn't defined it.

Carrie 00:05:56  All right. Do you want to tell the story?

Kate 00:05:59  No, you tell it.

Carrie 00:06:01  So we have a we had a director who really didn't understand the phrase building the bench. wasn't really like she just assumed that as the director, her job was that she was supposed to be in charge of everybody. And I know that Carrie and I have been with a lot of directors, and I've talked to a lot of directors and owners who have the flattest, you know, hierarchy I've ever seen. And it's basically one person and a whole bunch of lines, or it's the director and then the owner above them and a whole bunch of people. And so one of the things that we have always thought of as best practice. And so Carrie actually went and did the research before we did today's podcast, but that the that in general, the best practice was somewhere between 5 and 7 direct reports.

Carrie 00:06:56  And if you have a child care center with well over 50 children, chances are you have well over five staff. And so it starts to put people in the well who reports to me. And who else would people report to? So Carrie, let's start with that first question, which is if I do have if I, if I have ten staff. So I'm not talking about I have 30 staff, I have ten staff. And you're telling me best practices somewhere between 5 and 7 where might be a good first place to start.

Kate 00:07:34  Well, you've got a couple of different options. If you've got a staff that's that small, right? Ten people. So there's probably, you know, you might have somebody who is in charge of the food in the building, right? Whether you're providing food or whether parents are bringing in snacks. Somebody needs to be the boss of that. And then you may have an infant program and a toddler program, and a preschool program and a school age program. So you can do it by the area of responsibility.

Kate 00:08:05  So that would give you food person, infant person, toddler person, preschool person. School age person. Yay! Five people. Okay. Other people like to do it based on the shift. And so they go, okay, this person is in charge from opening until the last nap time has started, and this person is in charge from that moment until the end of the day. And so you've got team leads. And this is the morning team lead. And this is the afternoon team lead. And that morning team lead is in charge of just figuring out who's covering for whom when somebody calls out sick. they're in charge of greeting new parents when they come in and stuff like that. And the person at the end of the day is in charge of making sure that every classroom is closed down and that all of the bleach bottles are made. At the end of the day, if it's an end, it depends on your program. Some people like to make the bleach bottles in the morning. Others like to make it in the afternoon.

Kate 00:09:11  I'm not in charge of that decision. You are, but the person who is the lead of the half of the day makes sure that those systemic things are done during their half of the day, if you break it up that way. Okay. I don't think just having a Monday boss and a Tuesday boss and a Wednesday boss. I think that's crazy. But maybe that's just me. Maybe that'll work great for you. I think finding a way that you can be like, this is the team, and these are the people who have some leadership. Do I have to give them a $15 an hour raise because they are now the morning team lead.

Carrie 00:09:50  Wait wait wait. You just asked my question. That was my question.

Kate 00:09:55  Okay. And what's your answer?

Carrie 00:10:00  Well, so as the director or the owner, just because you start to put people into leadership does not mean that you need to give them a drastic raise. You can give some people a title and other people a bonus. So I would think about whether or not you're at ten staff and growing.

Carrie 00:10:18  Do you have even the space to grow as far as the staff, children, families? I think that's probably a key component of it. are you the director or are you the owner? So if you're the owner who has been the director and now you have some additional leadership in your program, then you might choose to give a a bigger bonus or a bigger rate increase. But honestly, I love quarterly bonuses that are based on performance. So whether you're using, paper and pencil checklist, whether or not you're doing your data collection on spreadsheets or you're doing your KPIs and data collection in software or on an app, start to assign some weight to some of that stuff. Because that way when folks do a really, really good job, they get rewarded financially. And it's easier for you on a budget standpoint to go, well, you didn't do what I needed you to do, so I'm not going to give you that bonus versus giving people a raise. You can't take it back really easily.

Kate 00:11:29  But it's much harder on morale.

Kate 00:11:31  Yes, much harder on morale when you take it back. So yeah, I was a very young director when I was having a hard time with opening and closing checklist, and I just went, okay, I'm tired of fighting this battle I'm going to have. And it was tiny. It was sense each day that I got a closing checklist from again, the team lead for the morning and the team lead for the afternoon. Every time I got their checklist and it was complete, including, we need these supplies because that's part of the checklist. Then I put into the payroll system that they were going to get an extra x number of cents. on there I did it once a month, but on that, last check of the month so that it wasn't every day, because if you're getting an extra quarter a day, well, whoop dee do. But if you save that quarter up for three months, that quarter ends up turning into a fair amount of money. And I stopped. And I don't think it was a quarter.

Kate 00:12:36  It was it was more than that. But it it starts to add up and people were like, oh, that's, that's not like I can go out to dinner with this check.

Carrie 00:12:46  Well, and what's great about this is you could also do this in ways that maybe it comes out of your petty cash fund, depending on how big some of those bonuses could be. Because we use the analogy and we tell folks sometimes also about how fun it is to give folks a $100 bill. So it could be if they've done all of this at the staff meeting, you give them ten tens or you give them because all of a sudden now they have money in their hand and it would make it impact.

Kate 00:13:15  Better.

Carrie 00:13:16  Than everybody.

Kate 00:13:16  Putting it as an auto deposit into their bank account. Don't do it as an auto deposit in their bank account. Do it as cash if you can. And if you can't do it as a physical check, it means more psychologically.

Carrie 00:13:30  Give it to them as a separate physical check.

Kate 00:13:33  Yes, a separate physical check. So but that's how do we how do we incentivize people to do that to take on that additional responsibility. But before, you know, and I guess that's part of the process. But the other thing is going okay, I have a center of five of 250 license capacity. Well, theoretically, that means that I should have several people on my leadership team. Okay, so.

Carrie 00:14:02  What is the best practice number wise for that? Carrie, you might have been going there, but I'm going to interrupt you, because if you've got 250 kids, there's a rule of thumb that number of administrators per the number of kids.

Kate 00:14:15  Yeah. So if we are licensed for 250, that doesn't mean we have 250. So let's say we're licensed for 250 and we've got, 210 kids. So the rule of thumb is for every 50 to 60 kids, you have one administrator. So if you're the director or the owner and you have 210 kids, then that is for members of the leadership team.

Kate 00:14:42  So if you're that director, are all three of those people reporting directly to you?

Carrie 00:14:48  And if you had a question.

Kate 00:14:49  5 to 8 total, you can't have all of those teachers also reporting to you.

Carrie 00:14:55  So I have a question with, you know, 210 and you just told me for people, does that also include the owner or does that just include the director. Or is that for plus the director? Like, how am I supposed to make all of that work?

Kate 00:15:12  I mean, it's going to depend on the individual culture at that school because some owners are hands on owners and they are coming into the program on a regular basis, and they're available as a substitute, either in the admin team or in a classroom. And other directors have moved to another state if they've moved to another state. I don't know that you can count them as a full member of the admin team, but if they're doing all of the marketing and all of the finance. Maybe they are a full member of the team because they can do that remotely.

Kate 00:15:46  And one of the things that I want people to think about when they're building out their admin team is what can be done offsite, because not everything needs to be done on site. The file reviews don't need to be done on site. The notifications to parents that are periodic like it's going to be picture day, that doesn't have to be done by somebody on site. So you can have a virtual assistant as part of that four member administrative team. And that's okay.

Carrie 00:16:19  Okay. So I have another question about that admin team. Is that for full time equivalents. So could it really be eight part time people or people who are teachers. And what are we talking as far as I mean, what's best practice? I realize that folks can make their, their, their, their staffing leadership look like whatever they want it to. But what might be an example?

Kate 00:16:45  Oh, I mean, my brain. This is a problem because I am very much the entrepreneurial mindset. And I'm like, I can come up with about 20 different ways to do it with not a whole lot of talk.

Kate 00:16:57  But if our goal is for that director or that owner to only have five direct reports, I'm going to go with, maybe we have an enrollment person then.

Carrie 00:17:10  Okay, so you're saying but what I'm asking is, are these when you're saying best practices is five, is that five full time or four full time?

Kate 00:17:18  I would say it's 20 to 30 hours a week. for if they're not being able to put in 20 hours a week, I think it's hard to call them part of that team. Okay. so if you instead want to have lots of people who put in five hours a week. Then you might end up with more like ten people on your admin team. Because if you have, again, we've got the 210 kids, that probably means you have more than one preschool classroom. You probably have more than one infant classroom, you probably have more than one toddler classroom, etc. so you may want to have somebody who is the team lead of the infant team, and they still want to be a classroom teacher, and so they only want to put in five, maybe ten hours a week doing that, coordinating and and mentoring other people on the team and going, okay, what's going on with the, with the you seem to have a lot of colicky kids in this class.

Kate 00:18:23  What can we do that problem solving and mentoring. They may want to keep it to 5 to 10 hours a week. Okay. But they need somebody else to supervise each of those people whose only working 5 to 10 hours a week on admin tasks and it shouldn't be the director.

Carrie 00:18:40  Okay, so we are saying that directors should have no more than 5 to 8 direct reports. And I'm thinking because if you're listening to this as an audio and I know like personally, I would love like a flip chart and some some circles. And so this may be one of those. If you are a kinesthetic learner, you might want to pull out your own post-it note or your own piece of paper and go, okay, so for me, this is what it currently looks like. And basically we're saying if you've got 42 people or all your teachers report to you, what are some other ways that you can change this around? So we know that people can change this around with Carrie suggested earlier they could do it by, basically toddlers and by, by different age groups.

Carrie 00:19:29  You could change some of that, circles and lines by, I am doing it by time of day. you can also build out the admin team by taking on some of those additional administrative roles as well. So having somebody. especially when you get into larger programs, who's in charge of enrollment, which Carrie mentioned, or just family relationships or parents, or somebody who's just job is curriculum or all things food. So cooking and CAC and all of those types of things.

Kate 00:20:06  I thought of another way to divide it up. You could have somebody who's mentoring the beginner staff. So the floaters and the people who've been in the industry for less than a year, and another person who's mentoring the the staff who are ready to maybe start taking college courses or a CDA, who are, you know, in that one year to three year range, and then another one for those teachers who should be at the lead teacher or master teacher level, and they're ready to. And so now they're mentoring the teachers in the two younger rooms, the two younger collections.

Kate 00:20:43  So there's there's lots of ways to make that work.

Carrie 00:20:47  Okay.

Kate 00:20:48  So how does your brain.

Carrie 00:20:49  How do you know.

Kate 00:20:50  How does your brain work.

Carrie 00:20:52  So that would be the question that I would actually ask if you're listening to this episode is look at a couple of different things. What are the strengths of the people currently in your in your current leadership team? What are the things that you love to do versus the things you don't love to do? If as a director or owner, the thing you love is to mentor the teachers because you were a teacher and like your heart is still very much there. Awesome. Then you put yourself over that little group of staff. If you're an owner and you know that the the buck stops with you and you are totally comfortable, you may not be ecstatic, but you're comfortable with budgets. You understand numbers, you understand the data piece. Then maybe that's your lane and that's where you stay in that way, as you're building your team, you can go, okay, neither one of us are really excited about the marketing.

Carrie 00:21:47  Let's hire the marketing piece done or we are building and we're using software. So for example, right now this quarter, child Care conversations is sponsored and being supported by playground as one of the many options for CRMs. If you are not using a customer relations manager, managing parents and tours and enrollments and and all of that, then you need somebody or something to help with that. And so this is an opportunity where you can use a piece of software, add in those automations and make it work like, I don't know, part of your admin team. So always make sure that if you've got a piece of software, double check to see if it's had any updates recently. When's the last time you got a training from the the the producer of that software on the latest and greatest bells and whistles. Carrie. And I know what it's like to have software that updates regularly, maybe a little too fast. so if you've got software that's that's getting upgrades, do you know how to use those upgrades? Are you using them to your best of your ability? So don't rule out adding members to your team.

Carrie 00:23:03  Carrie mentioned a virtual assistant. So again, it can be somebody who is just for that job. Bookkeepers. So if neither one of you love numbers and budgets and writing checks and doing payroll and all of that, maybe you get a part time bookkeeper who doesn't have anything to do with child care. So there's all kinds of ways to build this team. we just want you to remember that if you're not leading somebody, or something specifically, you're not really leading. And so.

Kate 00:23:33  And that you should not be directly in charge of everybody in the building. There needs to be some dams and levees. You know, there needs to be some place where people can get those tiny questions answered, because where the Band-Aids are stored should not be a director question, a question to a director. It should there should be somebody else that they ask, where are the mandates? They should ask the director, okay, I've seen this thing. I'm really kind of concerned about what's going on developmentally. I talk to my team lead.

Kate 00:24:09  They said, it's time to talk to you. That's when the front line teacher talks to the director. Not that you don't have a relationship with them, but that you're not taking their daily concerns. Someone else is doing the daily concerns because you have so many things that you have to be the boss of outside of your team, so you've got the licensing, compliance, etc. etc. etc. so you've got to have the people being managed by other people to a decent amount.

Carrie 00:24:42  Absolutely. So if you're not really sure where your, you know, where your leadership stack starts and how to build it, you know. Reach out, send us a message. You can even do it in through the app and ask us something through the, if you go into our buzzsaw.

Kate 00:24:59  In the show notes, there's a yeah there in the show notes, there's a place that says, click here to send us a message. Absolutely. And you can send us a message right there.

Carrie 00:25:08  So send us a message. If you have a message.

Kate 00:25:11  This we'd love to help you through this. Make your life a little easier and help you have a little bit more structure so that your teachers feel as supported as they should, and you can do the work that only you can do.

Carrie 00:25:25  Hopefully you got something out of today's episode. Feel free to share the episode with somebody who needs to know. And don't forget to follow us on your podcast, Player of Choice, and to follow us on at least one of our social media platforms. And with that, we can't wait to see you guys in a couple of days.

Marie 00:25:46  Thanks for tuning in! We love bringing you real talk and fresh insight from the world of early childhood education. Be sure to follow us on social media to stay connected and catch all of the latest episodes. And if you're planning a conference, training, or special event. Kate and Carrie would love to speak to your audience. You can learn more about their keynote sessions and workshops at Kate and Carrie. If you learned something today. Share the show and leave us a review below.

Marie 00:26:17  We'll see you next time on Child Care Conversations.