It’s Thursday afternoon. The phone is ringing, a parent is waiting at the front desk, and somebody just asked where the field trip forms are. You handed off the schedule twice, and you’re still the one fixing it.
So you tell yourself what you’ve been telling yourself for months: nobody on this team can do this the way I can.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But the answer changes everything about what you do next — and most people skip the step of actually finding out.
We’ve named the two gaps already in this series: skill gaps and authority gaps. If someone keeps coming back to you, one of those is usually why. But knowing the name isn’t the same as knowing which one you’re actually dealing with. The gap is often not what it looks like from the outside.
When the Gap Isn’t What It Looks Like
Imagine a director at a center with about sixty children. Every Monday she reviews every classroom’s lesson plan before it goes out. She says it’s because the newer teacher needs support. Six months in, that teacher is still getting plans back covered in red ink.
Is that a skill problem?
Maybe. Or look closer: the director has never written down what a good plan has to include. The teacher has never been told which parts of the plan are hers to decide. The red ink isn’t the answer — the missing standard is.
Now imagine the director writes a one-page checklist and tells the teacher she can approve any plan that meets it. The teacher finally has something to aim for. The director finally has something to check against. Same teacher. Same director. Completely different problem — and a completely different fix.
Four Questions That Tell You Which Gap You Have
Answer these honestly about one specific task, not your whole staff. When you think about the whole team, people blur together. One task keeps you honest.
Question one: Has this person been shown how to do the task, with the standard written down? Not explained once in a hallway while you were walking to the parking lot. Shown, practiced, and checked. If the honest answer is no, you may have a skill gap — and it isn’t fair to judge someone for a gap you never filled.
Question two: When they do the work, do they get to finish it? Or do you step in at the first decision you’d have made differently? Picture a teacher drafting a family newsletter, and you rewrite the first sentence before it goes out. The next time, she checks with you before she writes anything at all. You didn’t teach her to wait. You trained her to wait, one red pen at a time.
Question three: Does this person know what they’re allowed to decide on their own? If the answer is “sometimes” or “it depends on who’s asking,” that’s an authority problem. People can’t act inside boundaries nobody has drawn. And they notice when the rules change with your mood.
Question four: What happened the last time this person made a call and it didn’t go your way? If you took it back, or quietly redid it while they were in the next room, they learned exactly what you really want. That isn’t independence. That’s a lesson in waiting — and they learned it well.
Read those answers together. If the person has a written standard and clear decision rights and they still aren’t delivering, you have a skill or fit question to work through. If they have neither, the problem sits with you. That’s good news, because you can fix it without hiring anyone new.
EADE: A Practical Tool for Sorting Your Work
Once you know what you’re dealing with, you need a framework for deciding what to do with the work. That’s where EADE comes in: Eliminate, Automate, Delegate, Elevate.
Eliminate first. Ask whether the task needs to exist at all. A weekly report that three people fill out and nobody reads. A meeting that could have been a two-line email. An approval step that has never once changed the outcome. You’d be surprised how much time disappears when you ask that question honestly.
Automate next. If a task repeats the same way every time — sending a tuition reminder, pulling a monthly attendance summary — it probably doesn’t need a person starting from scratch each month. Build the template once. Then let it run.
Then delegate. Delegation only works when the person has been trained, knows the standard, and has real authority to decide inside it. Without those three, you haven’t delegated anything. You’ve handed off the blame and kept the worry.
Finally, elevate. Once you’ve cleared the clutter, you can spend your time on the work only you can do — setting direction, hiring, the financial decisions that shape the school’s future.
Walking One Task Through the Tool
Imagine an owner who personally builds every staff schedule each week.
Eliminate first: does every shift need to be planned from scratch, or could most of it follow a standard rotation? Automate next: can the availability form be collected and sorted with a simple template? Delegate: the director builds the schedule within rules the owner has written down — ratio requirements, overtime limits. Elevate: the owner spends the time that’s freed on enrollment planning or next year’s budget.
The important part: EADE helps you sort tasks. It doesn’t tell you whether your people are ready, and it doesn’t tell you whether you’re ready to let go. That’s the diagnosis we just did. Use the tool after you’ve been honest about the problem — not instead of being honest. Used that way, it’s powerful. Used alone, it’s just a more organized way to keep doing everything yourself.
A Word Before You Move On
Some owners hear all this and decide it means they’ve been doing their job badly. I don’t see it that way. You built something that depends on you because you were the person who cared most and knew the most for the longest time. The goal isn’t to care less. It’s to make sure your care reaches further than you can personally cover.
In the next post, we’ll look at what happens after you’ve sorted the gaps and assigned the right level — specifically, how to write the rules down so your team can decide without you in the room.
For training, resources, and leadership consulting for preschool owners and directors, visit chelseareue.com.
