Distributed Leadership explores how leadership practice takes shape in the interactions between leaders, followers in their situation. A distributed perspective on leadership provides a lens for generating insights into how leadership is practiced, helping practitioners think about and approach their work in new ways.

James Spillane, the leading expert in "Distributed Leadership," shows how leadership happens in everyday practices in schools, through formal routines and informal interactions. He examines the distribution of leadership among administrators, specialists, and teachers in the school, and explains the ways in which leadership practice is stretched over leaders, followers, and aspects of the situation, including routines and tools of various sorts in the organization such as memos, scheduling procedures, and evaluation protocols.

The book provides an overview of what it means to take a distributed perspective on leadership, an examination of various uses of the term, a summary of the most current research, illustrative examples, and helpful guidelines.