I want to talk about something that comes up in nearly every conversation I have with Centre Directors, even when it isn’t the thing they came in to talk about. It’s the weight of holding the team.
Not managing the team, exactly, although that’s part of it. Not training the team, although that’s part of it too. I mean the quieter, harder work of being the person your educators come to when they don’t know what to do, when something has shaken them, when they’re worried about a child, when their own life is falling apart, when they’ve had a difficult morning and need somewhere to put it.
Most Directors I know take this part of their role very seriously, and they should, because it matters enormously. But it’s also the part that quietly empties them out, because nobody is doing the same for them.
The educator’s educator
There’s a way of thinking I sometimes use with Directors, which is that “You are the educator’s educator. You’re the person they bring their hard moments to, the person they look at when they’re not sure what’s expected, the person who steadies them when something has gone sideways.”
A typical week for a Director, in this regard, might look something like this. On Monday, an educator comes in upset because of something a parent said at pick-up the previous Friday, and you spend twenty minutes with her in your office while she cries. On Tuesday, a different educator pulls you aside to say she’s worried about a child she’s been observing, and the two of you sit with that worry for a while and work out what comes next. On Wednesday, your most experienced educator hands you her resignation, and you spend the rest of the day trying to understand what’s actually behind it. On Thursday, a younger educator has frozen during an incident with a child, and afterwards you sit with her while she questions whether she’s cut out for this work at all. By Friday afternoon, you’ve absorbed a great deal, and you still have payroll to finalise.
None of these conversations were optional. All of them mattered. All of them required you to be calm, present, warm, and clear, often when you yourself had not yet processed the conversation before.
This is the part of the work I think we don’t talk about nearly enough.
Why it costs what it costs
When you sit with someone who is upset, frightened, grieving, exhausted, or angry, something quite real happens to your nervous system. You’re not just listening with your ears. You’re picking up their state, in your body, the way you’d pick up the weather walking outside. We’re built to do this. It’s how humans co-regulate each other, and it’s a big part of what makes a Director able to steady a shaken educator in the first place.
The catch is that this kind of emotional attunement is metabolically expensive, even when nothing dramatic is happening. Doing it eight or ten times a day, week after week, year after year, with no real space to put any of it down, is a known recipe for the slow flattening that I see in a lot of long-serving Directors. It isn’t burnout in the dramatic sense. It’s a quieter erosion, a sense of going through the motions, growing distance from the things that used to feel meaningful.
If this is starting to sound familiar, I’d just gently say that you’re not failing. You’re doing a job that, done well, takes a lot out of a person, and you’ve been doing it without enough being put back in.
What helps, in practice
I want to share some things that, in my experience, genuinely help Directors hold their team without paying for it with themselves. These aren’t policies or systems. They’re small shifts in how you go about the work.
Letting the educator do more of the thinking
When an educator brings you a problem, the temptation is to solve it, because you’re capable and you’re busy and solving it is faster. But every time you solve it for them, you teach them to bring you the next one. Try, instead, asking what they think they should do. Ask what they’ve already considered. Ask what they would tell a colleague in the same situation. You’ll often find they know more than they realised, and you’ll have spent less of yourself in the process.
Naming the emotional content out loud
A lot of the conversations Directors hold are heavy without anyone acknowledging that they’re heavy. If an educator is upset, it’s okay to say something like, “this sounds really hard, and it makes sense that you’re feeling shaken.” It doesn’t lengthen the conversation. It often shortens it, because the person feels met, and they don’t have to keep working to be understood.
Holding a clear edge around what’s yours
Some of what your educators bring you is yours to help with. Some of it isn’t. The educator going through a difficult divorce, for example, doesn’t need you to be her therapist. She needs to be heard with warmth, signposted to proper support, and treated with kindness in the way the centre operates around her. Knowing the difference between holding someone and trying to fix them is a piece of clarity that takes a lot of pressure off the Director.
Making space between conversations
If you’ve just had a heavy conversation with an educator, try not to walk straight into the next thing. Even three minutes in your office, with the door closed, looking at something that isn’t a screen, is enough to let your nervous system reset. Most Directors I know move from one emotional conversation to the next without any pause, and the cumulative effect is significant.
Being honest with your team about what you can hold
This one is harder, but I think it matters. You can be a warm and available leader and also be a person with limits. Letting your team know that you’re not available between certain hours, or that you’ll need to come back to something tomorrow, or that you’re not the right person for a particular kind of support, isn’t cold. It’s modelling something your educators desperately need to see modelled, which is what a sustainable working life looks like.
Being held yourself
There’s a piece I want to come back to, because I think it’s the most important one.
You can’t pour from an empty cup is a phrase that gets used so often it’s lost most of its meaning. But underneath it is a truth that I see again and again in this work. The Directors who are best at holding their educators are the ones who are themselves being held somewhere.
That somewhere can be a few different things. A really good friend. A partner who actually understands what your day involves. A peer Director you can speak honestly with. A therapist, if that’s something you have access to. And, often, supervision.
The reason professional supervision tends to come up here is that it’s specifically designed for the kind of holding I’m describing. It’s a regular, confidential hour with someone trained to sit with the emotional content of leadership work, and to help you make sense of what you’re carrying. It isn’t a luxury. It’s part of what makes this kind of role sustainable.
If you’re a Director and you’ve been holding everyone in your building for a long time without anyone really holding you, I’d just gently say that this is worth taking seriously. Not because you’re broken, and not because something has gone wrong, but because you’re doing a deeply human job and you’re a human while you’re doing it.
At Lerni, supporting Centre Directors and the educators they lead is what we do. If any of this has resonated, we’d love to talk to you about what proper support could look like for you, just click on the buttons below.