The expected performance level of schools and school leaders is high in the era of accountability. Today’s challenges request not only great personal effort of everyone, but also a collective responsibility for quality. The current policy environment views the formal leaders as accountable while in reality the execution of quality calls for collaborative responsibility and a distributed leadership practice as the way to make schools successful. School principals cooperate with teacher leaders with the purpose of creating positive teacher leader collaboration for improved student outcomes. This paper investigates how teams, consisting of superintendents and principals, develop trust, collaborate with and distribute leadership and responsibility to team leaders. The main interest is to investigate how principals and teacher team leaders can collaborate to engage teachers in school improvement, and enhance student outcomes. Data will be collected in high schools in the spring of 2012. The theoretical framework is grounded in theories of structure, culture, leadership (Höög, & Johansson, O, 2011). We are also influenced by models of distribution of influence and distribution of leadership (Moos, Johansson, O & Day, 2011). Theories of collaboration and trust among the group members will further be considered (Tschannan-Moran, 2004).