Leadership in Swedish schools in general has during the last ten years been managed through teams where school issues are discussed and negotiated. In this article we present analysis of processes of negotiation in these school leaders' meetings, where leaders from Swedish schools meet to define and address management issues. We treat school leadership as discursively shaped, as well as something constantly negotiated. School leaders' talk defines and handles decisions. Social categories are used as rhetorical resources in this linguistic interaction. The interest in school leaders' discursive practice is based on the notion that talking is at the core of human activities, and that a central part of school leaders' work is made through dialogue or discursive action. The theoretical premises build on an interdisciplinary research area that has for the last twenty years considered the social world as constructed by, and within, face-to-face interaction. This area comprises sociologists, linguists, social psychologists, communication scholars, anthropologists. Our study is part of the research project Educational management as discourse and discursive practice - the leading words, financed by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), Sweden. The head of the project is Professor Gunnar Sundgren, Mälardalens Högskola (Mälardalen University). In this study we present analysis of extracts from a recorded school leader management meeting in a Swedish nine-year compulsory school ('grundskola') where pupils are aged between six and sixteen years. The meetings are attended by a headmaster representative and seven team leaders. The team leaders are teachers with a special responsibility for a group of teachers, a team; these team leaders regularly take part in the school leader management meetings. In one particular management meeting, a discussion was held on whether or for what reason a teacher should be required to state his or her name on a compulsory psycho-social questionnaire. We regard this sequence as a good example, showing how different rhetorical resources can be employed in the negotiation about how the work in a school can be conducted. The aim of our study is not to show the exercise of power or how the hierarchical organization 'really' works. It is rather a question of analysing how the members of the meeting produce ethical attitudes, and how they use different linguistic ways to be convincing, produce credibility and so on. A close examination of the empirical material makes it possible to see the prevailing discursive boundaries of how questions are formulated and addressed. From the results we can see, among other things, that a norm exist where those at the meeting are expected to support the common project and participate in negotiation in an upright and transparent manner. Governance then, is not in fact a top- down relay race where nothing changes en route: rather it is an active linguistic exercise to form and guide opinion on the ground. Organization is constructed in the process, as is policy. It was also noted that the democratic notions of representativeness and shared principles were inconsistent in the meetings. When the meeting participants raised issues concerning those who they represent, it collided with a set of principles, presumably originating from former meetings. The meeting also showed how both vagueness and resolution can be used as rhetorical resources. In addition to this, figures, intensifier and extreme case formulations are used. Looked at in the round, the empirical sequences show us that many issues a negotiable and that there are no truly neutral position.