Management of professionals traditionally shapes a dichotomy between the professionals and the strategic level of management, bureaucracy and politics. This paper wants to challenge this dichotomy in favor of talking of management of professionals as hybrid leaders. The case that we investigate is the political attempt for the past twenty years to drag the head teacher closer to the administrative and managerial hierarchy and away from loyalty with the professionals: the teachers. An attempt closely connected to the New Public Management (NPM) era and a lot of reform efforts towards public schools. Nevertheless in DK, it has had only modest success, since the Danish Teachers Union (DLF) keeps on insisting that only professionally educated teachers can become heads of the local schools. This is the case in 99 % of all cases. In spite of this strong emphasis on the teachers’ professional self-esteem, a growing acceptance among the head teachers themselves on their dependence on the political context, reform and retrenchment efforts is emerging. The two conflicting positions create a paradoxical expectation on the head teacher of both being professional and not being professional. This is an expectation of a hybrid. We draw on Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’definition, that the hybrid is connecting two different sides in spite of their difference, deliberately ignoring what both sides know to be true, namely, that they cannot be both. A Danish head teacher has to ignore being “just as the other teachers” in the professional collegiums, since s/he is actually in head as head teacher, and at the same time, the head teacher cannot not be a teacher all the time. This creates ambiguity in expectations. The expectations from the two conflicting positions shape the other side, as that which is present as ignored: the municipality says that the head teacher must ignore to be a teacher among teachers, and instead become a manager; the teachers say that the head teacher must ignore to become a manager, and instead must stay a teacher among teachers. This contradiction is only relatable for the head teacher who accepts to be a hybrid that is both sides and none of them fully. This hybrid functions as a deparadoxification machine to solve the always existing problems in the organization. The crucial point is what the head teacher does with this.
