Educational leadership development is increasingly recognized as a determinant of institutional performance, yet many professional development offerings continue to privilege positional authority over the practice of leadership as an observable, learnable set of actions. This paper presents the design and pedagogical rationale of “Exercising Leadership: Driving Team Success,” an eight-week professional development course developed for principals, heads of department, coordinators, and educators within a Lebanese educational institution. The course was developed in direct response to a formal needs assessment that identified leadership skills, team building, and emotional intelligence as priority development areas. Grounded in adaptive leadership theory and emotional intelligence frameworks, the course adopts a flipped plus in person format combining asynchronous preparatory resources with synchronous, scenario based collaborative sessions. Participants progress through a sequence of diagnostic, experiential, and reflective activities culminating in a Leadership Action Plan applied to a real institutional challenge. The paper situates the course within the institution’s strategic priorities — supportive educational programs, stakeholder engagement, and professional excellence — and discusses its anticipated contribution to distributed leadership capacity, team resilience, and institutional continuous improvement. Implications for the design of leadership development programs in similarly structured educational systems are discussed.

Keywords: educational leadership; emotional intelligence; team development; professional development; adaptive leadership; scenario-based learning.