Reflections on distributed leadership

Distributed leadership is a concept that is finding increasing support and is receiving widespread interest in the practitioner and research communities. So the question of ‘why the interest in distributed leadership?’ is worth pursuing. While reasons for the contemporary interest certainly vary, it is suggested that reasons for the popularity of ‘distributed leadership’ are three-fold.

First, the notion of distributed leadership has a descriptive power: it captures the forms of practice implicit in professional learning communities and communities of practice. It is difficult to envisage how communities of practice operate unless leadership and other organisational components are distributed. Wenger et al (2002) suggest that “distributed communities cross multiple types of boundaries and share ideas and insights”. In the increasingly complex world of education this has an immediate and powerful resonance.