Emotional intelligence is the sum of a person's skills and abilities to recognize emotions, to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people and their own, as well as the ability to manage their emotions and the emotions of other people in order to solve practical problems. The purpose of the study is to develop and test a methodology for the development of emotional intelligence as a fundamental quality of leadership formation in conjunction with managerial competencies. The study involved 576 students. The following complex of methods was used in the work: theoretical analysis and generalization of scientific and special literature data; conceptual-terminological and systemic-structural analysis; testing: a questionnaire of general empathic tendencies; communicative tolerance; tolerance test; test for assertion; diagnostics of self-esteem and level of aspirations; factorial personality questionnaire by R. Cattell; diagnostics of emotional intelligence N. Hall; pedagogical experiment; analysis and generalization of the results of experimental studies; methods of mathematical statistics. Summing up the results of our research, it should be noted that all thirteen studied parameters showed positive dynamics of their development. Eight of them have significant differences in the results before and after the experiment according to the Student's t-criterion (P ? 0.01): empathy, tolerance, tact, the significance of empathy, the significance of tolerance, the significance of tact, the level of self-esteem and aspirations. It is important to note that for three of them: the significance of empathy, the level of self-esteem and aspirations - the reliability according to the Student's t-criterion is P ? 0.05. Upon completion, N. Hall's emotional intelligence was diagnosed. Of the 70.14% of students with a low level of development of emotional intelligence, at the end of the formative experiment, only 5.90% remained in this group. The proposed methodology includes structural diagnostics of the level of development of emotional intelligence, generalization of the results in order to identify problem areas and the development of recommendations that contribute to the development of emotional intelligence.