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Effective leadership influences the process quality of early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs and therefore the academic, health and socio-emotional outcomes for children. Yet, the cultivation of leadership is impacted by the complex nature of ECEC environments and the persistent challenges therein. Complex workforce issues, inadequate preparation for positional leadership roles and few opportunities for professional development for emerging leaders challenge the growth of effective leadership and the development of sustainable leadership for the ECEC profession. This commentary gives an insight into the challenges of leadership within ECEC and leader supply and suggests leadership emergence and enactment is potentially cultivated by broadening theoretical and pragmatic propositions. Complexity leadership theory within complex adaptive systems is presented as a framework for leadership cultivation within ECEC and opportunities for leadership development are highlighted.

Early childhood education (ECE) effects positive outcomes for children, but outcomes depend upon the quality of the program with which children engage. Program quality is positively influenced by effective leadership; yet we do not fully understand how effective leadership emerges and develops within ECE sites. This lack of knowledge potentially compromises the development of effective leadership and, subsequently, a child’s right to high-quality ECE. This paper, therefore, contributes to the field of research on ECE leadership development by describing a qualitative Australian study that investigated leadership cultivation. The mini-ethnographic case study examined the emergence and development of leadership in three high-quality, diversely governed ECE settings. Findings of the study suggest the practice of leading is foundational for positional leadership roles and is enabled by the practice architectures of an organization. Practice architectures comprise cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements. Arrangements, found within organizations, included cultures of trust, use of professional knowledge and language, collaborative development of philosophy, democratic allocation of resources, sharing of power and openness to activism, disruption and creativity. Such arrangements play an important role in the emergence and development of leading and therefore offer organizations alternative ways to consider leadership cultivation.

There is a growing understanding, internationally, that effective leadership has an influence on the quality of early childhood education programs. The leadership research agenda has expanded accordingly but despite this expansion there is little empirical research on the emergence and development of leadership in early childhood education. The article focuses primarily on the methodological challenge of studying the phenomena of emerging and developing leadership. We describe the innovative methods for data generation that were used to address these challenges for an Australian study of leading within early childhood education sites. We explain in detail two of the methods—a field observation tool and the Dialogic Café. Some findings, that serve to highlight the benefits of the method, are shared. We conclude by advocating for the use of innovative methods to understand the phenomenon of emerging leadership and development in early childhood education sites.