This crisis has rocked me to the core. This is the first time in my career that I've got a situation in front of me where I feel helpless. I'm having to reaffirm myself every day...this is that one challenge that I can say that I honestly don't have the answer for. Principal Sylvia, Bermuda

Challenges often place implicit and explicit demands on leaders in Europe and around the world that exceed their current internal capacities, as captured in Sylvia’s quote. Yet all too often, scholars and educational administration programs emphasize the strategic, organizational, and management sides of leadership at the expense of the human side. Less is known about how school leaders’ internal experiences influence their understandings of workplace challenges—particularly those requiring deep learning, relationship building, advocacy, and change (Authors; Heifetz, et al, 2009).

The purpose of this international qualitative study was to describe and enrich our understanding of how principals make sense of pressing challenges faced in their work. Our focus was the inner experience of leadership. Principals’ reflections about their inner meaning making and reflections on their social-emotional responses to adaptive challenges capture how we define the inner experience. We asked: How do leaders experience adaptive challenges internally? What are the connections to the social-emotional and developmental capacities needed to manage the complexity and ambiguity of educational leadership? Developing a multi-layered understanding of deep-rooted challenges—as well as leaders’ internal experiences of them—has implications for leadership preparation, professional learning, and practice that uplifts adults’ and students’ voices—as these are intertwined (Kegan & Lahey, 2016; Learning Forward, 2012). 

Three literatures provided a conceptual foundation.

Adaptive Leadership. Heifetz (1994) and colleagues (Heifetz, et al., 2009) make a helpful distinction between technical and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges are situations in which both the problem and solution can be identified. In contrast, adaptive challenges are hard to define, solutions are unknown, and experts are not available to solve them. Importantly, adaptive challenges usually require internal changes—and new capacities to address them (Kegan & Lahey, 2016). This lens is important for understanding how leaders frame and approach complex challenges like leading for equity, social justice, and student voice.

Social-Emotional Dimensions. Emotion and the inter-intrapersonal work of leaders are fundamental to quality leadership and whole school change at the personal and collective levels (Author, 2018; Bolton & English, 2009; Goleman, et al., 2013; Leithwood & Beatty, 2007; Newberry, et al., 2013; Patti, et al., 2015). Importantly, health and social-emotional challenges of school leaders are increasingly documented (Murthy, 2017; Riley, 2015). Although the primary focus of social and emotional learning (SEL) is students (see CASEL, https://casel.org/), Hand-in-Hand (http://handinhand.si/), an EU based program goes beyond by engaging the entire school community, while adding a critical component for intercultural learning (Nielson, et al., 2019).  We build on Gardner’s (1983) seminal research on personal intelligence and Goleman’s (1995) framework of emotional intelligence.

A Developmental Lens. Growing school leaders’ developmental capacities helps them manage adaptive challenges, and also has a direct and positive effect on student achievement (Kegan & Lahey, 2016; Wagner et al., 2006). By “developmental capacities” we refer to cognitive, affective, intrapersonal, and interpersonal abilities that adults bring to their work, relationships, and systems of belief (Author)—some connect to social-emotional elements. Promisingly, developmental research suggests that with appropriate supports and challenges, we can grow these capacities over time in order to take bigger perspectives on ourselves, each other, our relationships with students and adults, and the pressing work of teaching and leading. We employed a constructive-developmental theory (Kegan, 1982) to understand leaders’ descriptions and interpretations of their internal experience of challenges. 

The study extends our mixed-methods, longitudinal research (Authors, 2009, 2012, 2018a/b) with an international sample of school leaders and work with leaders worldwide about their most pressing leadership challenges. Here, we explore how a subsample of 40 principals from Bermuda and the US described and understood their internal experiences of addressing pressing challenges. These 40 participants were diverse by age, race, and gender, and led primary, middle and secondary level public schools. Leaders served in various community contexts (e.g., high and low SES settings in urban, suburban, and rural communities, and diverse financial and human resources). Like Bermuda, a British Overseas Territory and formerly a colony of Great Britain, tensions and challenges of improving schools for all students are entrenched in the US educational landscape, as we find across Europe. Leaders from Bermuda and the US were actively engaged in reform and faced adaptive challenges. As visiting scholars in Bermuda to support an innovative community engagement project, Education for All (Authors, 2017), the research team identified principals to participate through nomination. Ministry officials, district leaders and professors nominated participants who met criteria of earning reputations for being highly effective leaders, having served as principal for a minimum of one year and having pursued advanced preparation in leadership. We conducted 40-75-minute interviews with leaders, prior to the pandemic (2020). Interviews were semi-structured and open-ended (52 hours total), transcribed verbatim and member checked for descriptive validity. Analyses included coding transcripts for central concepts (Miles, et al., 2014), organizing theoretical and emic codes into thematic matrices, and creating narrative summaries (Maxwell, 2015). Researchers separately and collectively employed a constant comparative approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) while incorporating various literatures into analysis. When analyzing data, we listened for if and how leaders described their emotions and capacities (i.e., self-awareness and self-management), and how they reflected on themselves and their interpersonal relationships (i.e., social awareness, relationship management and cultural awareness). We applied principles of constructive-developmental theory (i.e., ways of knowing and supports and challenges needed to grow internal capacities) to interpret and illuminate principals’ experiences. We explored patterns across categories in team discussions, wrote analytic memos, and created data-displays. Our research team conferred to incorporate alternative interpretations (interpretive validity). We examined data for confirming and disconfirming instances of themes (theoretical validity). Dependability was enhanced through maintaining an audit trail of memos, logs, and journals. Transferability is tailored to leaders in school contexts.

You're trying to balance everyone's needs. You're trying to balance the students' needs, teachers' needs, parents’ needs, then all the demands that are coming from the ministry…you're trying to balance community. It is emotional and everybody wants something from you and they want it immediately. Principal Kyra, Bermuda Unlike careers that are more concrete or predictable, school leaders face wide-ranging social-emotional challenges in their workplace on a daily basis, as captured in Kyra’s quote. From a social-emotional perspective, leaders shared affective and relational reflections illustrating what it feels like, from their viewpoint, to lead a school community through change. Close-analysis reveals three “trending” themes: (a) a feeling of solitary responsibility and weight bearing, (b) an experience of perpetual exhaustion and fatigue, and (c) fueling power of familial relationships within a school, particularly with students. We highlight three developmental themes: (a) role of vision/advocacy, (b) collaboration and listening to others (i.e., prioritizing voice) as capacity, and (c) self-care as an ongoing and delicate balance. Adding a layer of interpretation, we connect these prominent developmental themes back to social-emotional experiences in the context of confronting an adaptive challenge. While these leaders’ challenges were complex and diverse (e.g., student trauma; bias; caring for urgent budget, staffing, and instructional matters; including immigrant students) and situated in different countries--guiding school communities through change was a primary concern for all principals. Involving adaptive and technical components, the change process was ongoing—and occurred while working to balance external, accountability pressures with internal, organizational imperatives of community and culture building. Across contexts, challenges compel leaders to build capacity within themselves and those in their care. The “inextricable self-reflective dimension” of the European tradition (Moutsios, 2019) equips educators to learn from within and outside boundaries. We explore linkages to leader experiences in Europe (Moskal & North, 2017).

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