How to Manage? Navigating Team Leadership in ECEC as a Resource

Staff retention and functional teamwork are major challenges in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), where leadership is increasingly viewed as a shared team-level process. This study investigates how team leadership (TL), conceptualised as the functions through which teams meet their needs, is enacted among Swedish ECEC staff and how it supports collaborative work under current policy conditions. Using a revised version of the Team Leadership Taxonomy. 122 ECEC professionals completed a survey with both quantitative items and open-ended responses. The results show patterns of strong strategic alignment, high awareness of pedagogical goals, and robust relational support within teams, but substantial variability in operational clarity, task distribution, problem-solving responsibility, and psychological safety. Participants described challenges linked to shifting team compositions, unequal pedagogical competence, and inconsistent organisational support from principals, which often constrained their ability to enact both positional and distributed leadership. Overall, the findings suggest that ECEC teams possess considerable capacity for collaborative leadership, yet uneven organisational conditions limit the consistency of TL functions. Strengthening role clarity, planning structures, and reflective routines may enhance team functioning and contribute to a more sustainable ECEC workforce.