The management of educational institutions is multifaceted. School principals need a variety of skills, including advanced ones in organizational psychology to cope with the complex and dynamic management challenges they face. Institutional changes, often mandated by ministerial authorities, place considerable pressure on the psychological well-being and adaptive capacity of school principals and their staff. In this context of continuous change, school principals are required to adopt innovative strategies and develop new operational paradigms to achieve institutional goals while maintaining the educational mission and fostering professional motivation. This complex dynamic highlights the need for supportive strategies to manage change, such as mentoring, that can cultivate critical personal characteristics, skills and competencies, including transformational leadership, work-related self-efficacy, and emotional competencies. This study relies on results from two doctoral dissertations to identify strategies, desired personal characteristics, skills and competencies that can help school principals effectively manage change in their institutions. The two research use a predictive design with samples of school principals from the province of Quebec (Canada). The first study (n = 127) examines the influence of principals' personal characteristics, particularly work-related self-efficacy and transformational leadership on their dispositional resistance to change. The second study (n = 352) positions mentoring as a developmental strategy for emotional competencies and transformational leadership, enabling principals to effectively manage their emotions. Findings from the two studies suggest that mentoring is a promising developmental strategy for enhancing self-efficacy, developing emotional competencies, and transformational leadership while supporting principals in building resilience and achieving institutional success during periods of change.