Vast recruitment problems, high principal turnover, increased market competition and political reforms have intensified relational tensions within and between schools in Sweden.This is devostating for students as well as for the professionals. The aim of this paper is to explore, and deepen the knowledge on, Swedish principals’ work in times when aggravating aspects in schools - threats, high population mobility, comprehensive linguistic, diverse knowledge level, and a dense flow of exceptional incidents in and around the schools - require principals’ emotional resilience.

Principals’ leading is here explored as a practice: i.e. the sayings, doings and relatings conditioning and conditioned by site-specific cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements. The paper presents a Swedish pilot-study on principals’ written testimonies on critical incidents (N26). Analysis revealed how principals’ emotional labour played out in repeated encounters with key stakeholders, e.g., students, teachers and student family members and spanned school and community boundaries. It shows that emotions play a crucial role in principals’ leading practices and how the principals navigate and learn ‘how to go on’ based in the emotional labour.

Societal conditions intensify emotional demands on Swedish principals and call on less visible, but crucial leadership skills and the emotional management capacities to connect across diverse demographics in holistic and socially just ways. The analyses of the testimonies indicate a risk of alienation as the principals’ emotional work lacks organisational support - emotional labour is not invisible but neglected.