Think about a problem you handled this week. Not necessarily a big one—the familiar one. The playground incident. The late teacher. The staff member on their phone while supervising.
I’m willing to bet it isn’t the first time you’ve dealt with it.
Directors and owners are great at putting out daily fires. We have to be, because this job keeps throwing new ones at us. What it rarely gives us is time: ten minutes to stop and ask why the fire started in the first place. Without that time, we get stuck fixing the same problems instead of preventing them.
Time, Stumbles, and Patterns
Years ago, I finally carved out some time to reflect. I was tired of the recurring problems—a bizarro childcare version of Groundhog Day. Nothing catastrophic had happened, but I worried that if we stayed on the same path, something might.
My mind kept drifting back to the big problems I’d dealt with. The tense parent meetings. The calls to the insurance carrier. The staff members I’d had to let go. The newer director in me had filed most of them under bad luck.
Looking closer, I realized most were preventable. The established policy a staff member ignored. The face-to-face conversation that got replaced by an incident report and misunderstood. A teacher’s quick frustration that spiraled.
“Preventable” is a hard word to swallow when you’re in charge, but it gave me something useful to work with. If past outcomes could have been different, future ones can be, too.
Prevention isn’t about predicting what might go wrong. You can’t predict when a child throws a toy or gets hurt on the slide. Prevention is about noticing what keeps showing up—and what keeps showing up is your guide to what comes next. If children keep getting hurt on the same slide, that pattern is telling you something.
Proactive, Not Reactive
If you’ve ever trained staff on supervision, you’ve said some version of this: be proactive, not reactive. Scan the room. Position yourself where you can see every child. Step in before the tug-of-war over a toy turns into a bite.
The same standard applies to how we lead.
Reactive leadership handles each incident as it arrives and moves on to the next one.
Proactive leadership handles it, then asks what it’s telling you. That shift changes what you pay attention to:
Your whole team should play a part in prevention. But it starts with you—how you set expectations, how you train, and how you model them every day.
Three Questions After Every Incident
Most issues start as sparks. If you drop a hot coal on the grass, you don’t call the fire department. You put it out—and then you look at the grass around it.
You don’t need to treat every minor issue as an emergency—that burns out you and your team. Stay objective, and don’t let emotion choose your next step. Put out the spark, then start gathering information.
(The obvious exception: safety, ratios, a child’s well-being, and licensing issues are handled immediately and fully. This framework assumes the incident itself is minor.)
1. Was this an accident, or a skipped step? Is this the first time it’s happened? Was it a true one-off? Or could the supervising employee have prevented it by following policy?
If it was a genuine accident, you may be done. For many incidents, this question takes a minute and ends the process—which keeps prevention from becoming overreaction.
One exception: if the same kind of accident keeps happening in the same place—the same slide, the same transition—jump to question three. Nobody may have done anything wrong, but the setup might have.
2. What did the employee actually understand? Not what they signed at orientation—what they understood. A staff member on their phone knows the rule. But maybe nobody explained why: when your attention is on your phone, it isn’t on the children. Or maybe they’ve watched other staff members do it without consequence. Find out why they chose not to follow it.
If this is a repeat for this employee, ask a harder question: How did I respond the first time? If the honest answer is “I reminded them,” the reminder wasn’t enough. You don’t need to be louder. They likely need practice, coaching, or a different kind of follow-up.
3. What made the wrong choice easier than the right one? Problems aren’t always about attitude. Sometimes the setup makes doing the right thing harder than it needs to be.
Look at the environment:
If the shortcut is the most logical choice for a rushed employee, the shortcut is what you’ll get.
Turn What You Learn Into One Change
The questions only help if something changes afterward. Usually that change is small.
Take the blind spot behind the climbing structure. At your next staff meeting, walk out to the playground together and look at it. Talk through where each adult should stand to cover it, and role-play a few scenarios. Then post the highlights by the time clock and follow up with a short memo.
Not every incident needs new policy. Some need a sign, a quick conversation, or a spare key. What you develop will depend on your situation, and not every change will be the answer. What matters is the habit: pausing after the spark, noticing what keeps coming back, and doing something useful with that information.
This Is Leadership Development
I know how that phrase sounds, especially to an owner or director staring at unread emails, a never-ending to-do list, and three new fires that need addressing today.
Leadership development? Great. One more thing to do.
But look at those questions again. The first is judgment—telling an accident from a pattern. The second is communication—making sure the why travels with the rule. The third is looking at the system before blaming the person.
None of that is additional work. You’ve been doing versions of it with every difficult parent conversation, staffing decision, and day that seemed to go sideways. Leadership development is learning to do it on purpose, with prevention in mind.
For years, I measured a good day by how many fires I put out and how many incidents I managed. It was exhausting.
As my leadership improved, the fires became fewer and farther between. Not because problems disappeared—they didn’t—but because my team and I got better at prevention.
I communicated expectations differently. I asked better questions. I noticed patterns sooner. I became more willing to look at the system instead of assuming the person was the problem.
And sometimes, I got better at recognizing when the person really was the problem.
A good template or checklist makes the work easier. But no tool can notice that the same type of parent concern keeps surfacing or wonder why some employees keep missing the same step.
That takes a leader.
Go back to the problem you pictured at the beginning of this article. If it has come up before, it isn’t bad luck. It’s information. Put out the spark, then go find out what started it.
A Place to Start This Week
- Pick the last minor incident at your center.
- Take ten minutes with the three questions.
- Make one change, and tell the people affected why.
Leadership Development is one aspect of the Director’s Toolkit. Inside, find communication strategies, people management tools, and leadership frameworks to lead with more confidence and less second-guessing — whether you're navigating a hard conversation with a staff member or simply trying to get ahead of the chaos. Visit directorzen.com/pricing.
This blog is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or regulatory advice. Childcare regulations vary by state — check with your local licensing agency to ensure compliance.
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