242 The Professional Counselor | Volume 12, Issue 3 echoed Mullen et al.’s (2018) finding on the positive relationship between school counselors’ emotional intelligence and leadership scores measured by the Leadership Self-Efficacy Scale (LSES; Bobbio & Manganelli, 2009). Noteworthily, the LSES was normed and validated with college students. Our results advanced the school counseling literature and corroborated the relationship between emotional intelligence and school counseling transformational leadership measured by the SCTLI, a scale developed specifically for school counselors. Our results suggest that school counselors may actively attend to emotional processes in order to effectively enact transformational leadership practice. Thirdly, we found that school counselors’ engagement in transformational leadership significantly mediated the relationship between their emotional intelligence and CSCP implementation. Because leadership is woven into the ASCA National Model and is considered an integral component of a CSCP (ASCA, 2019b), and school counselors are required to develop collaborative partnerships with a range of educational partners (ASCA, 2019a; Bryan et al., 2017), we were not surprised to find these two concepts were related to CSCP implementation. This result also aligns with empirical evidence in the broader leadership literature that transformational leadership mediated the relationship between emotional intelligence and work performance (Hur et al., 2011; Hussein & Yesiltas, 2020). This result is particularly meaningful in that it demonstrates school counseling leadership as either a significant predictor (Mason, 2010; Mullen et al., 2019) or an outcome variable itself (Hilts, Liu, et al., 2022; Mullen et al., 2018). It enables a more nuanced understanding of mechanisms involved in emotional intelligence, leadership, and program implementation in a school counseling context. To our best knowledge, the current study was the first study that found that through leadership practice, school counselors’ emotional intelligence may offer an indirect effect on their CSCP implementation. Implications Results of this study have implications for school counselor practice and school counselor training and supervision. Given the significant relationships between emotional intelligence, transformational leadership, and CSCP implementation, we suggest that practicing school counselors begin by assessing their emotional intelligence, transformational leadership, and CSCP implementation and then set goals to enhance their performance. This may be especially important considering that other research has suggested that school counselors’ engagement in leadership, as well as their other roles and responsibilities (e.g., multicultural competence; challenging co-workers about discriminatory practices) have changed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Hilts & Liu, 2022). For instance, Hilts and Liu’s (2022) results indicated that school counselors’ leadership practice scores were higher during the pandemic compared to prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Next, school counselors can seek resources and professional development opportunities to support their goals. For example, school counselors may benefit from professional development focused on social-emotional learning (SEL), given SEL’s competency approach to building collaborative relationships (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, n.d.). That said, school counselors should also seek supports to experientially integrate their intrapersonal, interpersonal, and systemic skills associated with emotional intelligence, transformational leadership, and CSCP implementation. Intentional application of the Model for Supervision of School Counseling Leadership (Hilts, Peters, et al., 2022) may provide one such example for both school counseling practitioners and those in training. School counselor training programs can also identify meaningful opportunities to infuse emotional intelligence and transformational leadership into school counselor coursework and supervision. Scarborough and Luke (2008) identified the important role of exposure in training to models of
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