The Leadership Lift: Replace Your Assistant Director with This Instead
You finally hired an Assistant Director to help carry the load—and now you're both drowning. She's handling enrollment, covering classrooms, managing schedules, ordering supplies, dealing with parent concerns, and somehow still expected to provide pedagogical leadership. You thought one strong Assistant Director would solve your capacity problem, but instead you've just created two overwhelmed people instead of one. Here's what's really happening: the traditional Assistant Director model was designed for larger corporate centers, not the lean operations most early childhood businesses actually operate. Confident Early Childhood Operators don't rely on one Assistant Director to do everything—they distribute leadership across 3 to 5 specialized roles that match team strengths, create better ROI, and prevent burnout. When you implement the Leadership Lift System, you stop putting all your eggs in one basket and start building sustainable leadership capacity.
💡 The 3 Key Strategies You’ll Discover
You'll discover how to identify your 3-5 Core Leadership Roles based on what your business actually needs—not what corporate childcare centers say you should have—including roles like Enrollment Coordinator, Operations Lead, Curriculum Lead, Team Culture Lead, and Family Experience Lead
You'll learn how to match leadership roles to team member strengths instead of forcing one person to do everything, creating better outcomes by honoring that systems-oriented people excel at operations while relationship-focused people excel at culture and family experience
You'll see how to implement the Leadership Lift System with clear role definitions, appropriate compensation ($2,000-$6,000 annual stipends based on complexity), and 90-day pilots that create genuine distributed leadership
⏰ Key Moments & Timestamps
00:00 – Why your Assistant Director is drowning (and it's not their fault)
06:50 – The structural problem with traditional Assistant Director roles
13:45 – Strategy #1: Identify your 3-5 Core Leadership Roles
21:30 – Strategy #2: Match leadership roles to team member strengths
29:15 – Strategy #3: Implement the Leadership Lift System
36:00 – How to compensate distributed leadership appropriately
Resource of the Week
Leadership Lift Role Distribution Planner
Stop forcing one person to handle everything and start building sustainable distributed leadership. This planner walks you through identifying which 3-5 Core Leadership Roles your business actually needs, assessing your team's natural strengths, defining clear role responsibilities and decision-making authority, calculating appropriate compensation, and launching 90-day leadership pilots. Includes example role definitions for preschools, childcare centers, and play cafés.
Final Thoughts
The traditional Assistant Director model fails in lean early childhood operations because you're asking one person to do the work of three specialized roles. When you distribute leadership across focused roles that match your team's strengths, you build sustainable capacity and get better ROI than paying one overwhelmed person to drown.
"Distributed leadership isn't a compromise—it's a strategic advantage."
🔗 Related Episodes & Resources
The Team Culture Secret Every EC Leader Needs to Know – Learn how to build behavior-based team culture that supports distributed leadership
Know Your Numbers: The Financial Wake-Up Call – Understand how leadership investments impact your profit margins
PBB Module 2: Empower Your Team – Access the complete Leadership Lift System with detailed role templates, compensation frameworks, and implementation guides inside Shine Membership
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If this episode gave you clarity on how to replace the broken Assistant Director model with sustainable distributed leadership, please subscribe and share with another EC leader whose leadership team is drowning.