Though the formal organization has consumed much of the scholarship on school leadership and management, scholars have recognized the importance of the informal organization. For example, a sizable literature on teacher leadership points to the importance of the informal organization in any effort to study school leadership and management. Further, most accounts tend to focus on one or the other - either the formal or informal organization. A distributed perspective presses us to consider both the formal and informal organization and, most important, to consider them in tandem in studies of school leadership and management. Using data from 28 elementary (primary) schools in the US, this paper explores how responsibility for leading and managing instruction is distributed. Focusing on the formal organization, the paper explores the positions of formally designated leaders and their responsibilities. Focusing on the informal organization, the paper examines those individuals with no formal leadership designation who play a central role in leading instruction. Comparing and contrasting the formal and informal organization, the author examines whether and how different leadership and management configurations are associated with teachers’ reports of innovation and collective responsibility for student learning, to variables that prior work has linked to improvement in student achievement.