We Expect Emotionally Intelligent Leaders. But Who Is Helping Them Develop?
Early childhood leaders are expected to hold a great deal at once. A director may begin the morning reassuring an anxious family, coach an educator through a conflict, respond to a licensing concern, cover a classroom because of a staffing shortage, and make a financial decision that affects the entire program. Each situation requires more than technical knowledge. It calls for self-awareness, emotional regulation, empathy, sound judgment, and the ability to remain trustworthy when the pressure is high.
We often describe these qualities as emotional intelligence. We also tend to treat them as something a capable leader should already possess. When a leader responds poorly, we question the individual's professionalism, temperament, or readiness. We are much less likely to question the system that prepared that person for leadership, or the absence of a system supporting that leader after the promotion.
As I read a 2024 study, The Role of Mentoring in Developing Leaders' Emotional Intelligence, by Katharina Prummer and colleagues, the researchers examined a three-part mentoring framework involving individual professional mentoring, peer-group mentoring, and mentoring focused on key performance areas. The study included 139 leaders and lecturers in South Africa's vocational education and training sector, including 48 leaders who had participated in the mentoring framework.
The finding that caught my attention was not that mentoring solved every leadership-development problem. It did not. Of six emotional-intelligence factors examined, only empathy difficulty differed significantly between the mentored and comparison groups. However, the mentored leaders perceived peer-group mentoring as the form that best supported their emotional-intelligence development. On a five-point scale, peer-group mentoring received an overall mean rating of 4.17, compared with 3.71 for individual professional mentoring and 3.63 for key-performance-area mentoring.
The study is small, context-specific, and based on self-reported data. It was conducted in South African vocational education, not early childhood education in the United States. The researchers did not use a randomized or pre-post design that could establish that mentoring caused the differences. Therefore, I would not use this study to declare that peer mentoring is the answer for every early childhood leader.
I would use it to ask a better question.
What Kind of Support Helps Leaders Grow?
My first reaction was not, “Every organization needs to start another mentoring program.” We sometimes respond to a need by creating a program, assigning a mentor, scheduling monthly meetings, and assuming development will follow. Yet the presence of a mentor does not automatically create a developmental relationship. A mentoring structure can exist on paper while leaving the leader just as isolated as before.
The more important question is this: What kind of environment allows leaders to examine the emotional demands of their work honestly, learn from their decisions, and grow without feeling that every admission of uncertainty will be used against them?
One-to-one mentoring has real value. An experienced mentor can offer perspective, challenge assumptions, and help a developing leader to see possibilities that experience has not yet taught them to recognize. Peer mentoring offers something different. It gives leaders access to several perspectives while reminding them that the dilemmas they face are not theirs alone.
That matters in early childhood education because directors often have very few places where they can be fully honest. Staff members depend on them for direction. Families expect confidence. Owners and governing bodies may focus on enrollment, compliance, budgets, or performance. Supervisors may also be evaluators. Even people who care about the director may not understand the emotional complexity of leading a program responsible for young children, families, educators, regulations, and financial survival at the same time.
A trusted peer group can create room for a leader to say, “Here is what happened. Here is how I responded. Here is what I may have missed.” That kind of reflection can deepen empathy, strengthen emotional regulation, and improve judgment. It can also reduce the isolation that causes leaders to believe they must either have every answer or hide the fact that they do not.
Emotional Intelligence Is Not an Individual Assignment
Another part of the study deserves attention. The researchers found that participants' perceptions of how much emotional intelligence mattered in their job, organization, and broader sector were connected to several of the emotional-intelligence factors they examined. The relationships were complex, and the findings should be interpreted cautiously. Still, the organizational message is important: emotional intelligence does not develop or operate in a vacuum.
An organization can tell leaders to communicate with empathy while rewarding urgency over listening. It can expect emotional regulation while normalizing impossible workloads. It can ask leaders to build trust while withholding information or decision-making authority. It can promote collaboration while creating competition for scarce resources. When that happens, emotional intelligence becomes another responsibility placed on the individual rather than a capacity supported by the system.
If we want emotionally intelligent leaders, we must look beyond the individual. What behaviors does the organization reward? Where is reflection protected? Can leaders acknowledge mistakes without being diminished? Are they given enough authority to respond to what they see? Does the culture make room for thoughtful decisions, or does every challenge become an emergency?
The issue is not simply whether emotional intelligence matters. The issue is whether the conditions surrounding leaders allow them to practice and strengthen it.
Mentoring Is Not the Same as Supervision
This distinction is particularly important in early childhood systems. Supervision and mentoring can complement one another, but they do not serve the same purpose. Supervision protects standards, clarifies expectations, monitors performance, and holds people accountable. Mentoring creates space for reflection, experimentation, identity development, and growth.
When the mentor is also the evaluator, a developing leader may carefully manage what they disclose. Instead of exploring a difficult decision, they may offer the answer they believe the supervisor wants to hear. The conversation becomes more competent.
Developmental mentoring asks different questions: What were you feeling when you made that decision? Whose perspective was the hardest for you to understand? What assumption were you carrying into the conversation? What would you do differently next time? What part of the problem belongs to your leadership practice, and what part is being produced by the system?
Those questions do more than solve the immediate problem. They help the leader build the judgment needed for the next problem, which may look entirely different.
What This Could Mean for Early Childhood Leadership Development
If we take this research seriously without overstating it, several design principles emerge for early childhood organizations, associations, and leadership programs.
First, leadership development should include well-facilitated peer cohorts, not rely exclusively on expert-to-novice relationships. Leaders need experienced guidance, but they also need opportunities to think with people who understand the realities of the role from the inside.
Second, psychological safety must be designed into the structure. Confidentiality, clear boundaries, skilled facilitation, and separation from formal evaluation can make the difference between honest reflection and another performance exercise.
Third, mentoring should be grounded in real leadership dilemmas. Emotional intelligence is not strengthened only by discussing definitions. It develops as leaders examine conflict, ambiguity, competing responsibilities, mistakes, power, and the effects of their choices on other people.
Fourth, mentoring should connect individual growth to systems improvement. If several directors are struggling with the same issue, we should not assume they all have the same personal weakness. Their experiences may be revealing a policy, workload, communication pattern, or organizational structure that needs to change.
Finally, we should begin before a crisis or promotion. Assistant directors, lead educators, coaches, and other emerging leaders need opportunities to practice reflection, perspective-taking, and decision-making before they inherit the full weight of positional leadership. Waiting until someone is overwhelmed is not leadership development. It is recovery.
Building Leaders Means Building the Conditions Around Them
The next generation of early childhood leaders is already among us. Our responsibility is to recognize their potential, strengthen their capacity, and create room for them to lead. That requires more than sending people to workshops or telling them to find a mentor. It requires a deliberate system of relationships, reflection, practice, feedback, and opportunity.
Mentoring may be one part of that system. Peer mentoring may be especially valuable because it allows leaders to learn with one another rather than carrying the emotional work of leadership alone. But the larger lesson is that we cannot demand emotional intelligence from leaders while ignoring the conditions in which they are expected to exercise it.
If we want better leadership, we must ask better questions about how leaders are developed. Then we must build the relationships and create the systems that allow their capacity to grow.
References
Prummer, K., Human-Vogel, S., Graham, M. A., & Pittich, D. (2024). The role of mentoring in developing leaders' emotional intelligence: Exploring mentoring types, emotional intelligence, organizational factors, and gender. Frontiers in Education, 9, 1393660. http://DOI 10.3389/feduc.2024.1393660
About the Author
Victoria Long-Coleman, Ph.D., MBA is the Founder and Principal of Early Childhood Innovations. An early childhood educator, leadership coach, author, and speaker, she focuses on strengthening educators, developing leaders, and translating research into practical approaches that improve early childhood systems.
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