Nation states around the world, including Singapore, are endeavouring to reform their education systems in order to successfully compete in the global economy (Carnoy, 1999). With human capital as Singapore's primary resource, it is unsurprising that the state has placed great emphasis on strengthening the economic-education nexus. This tight nexus along with its instrumentalist view of the purpose of education underpins both the social and economic development that has taken Singapore from a Third to First World state in a little more than 40 years since independence 1965 (Gopinathan, Wong, & Tang, 2008). A suitably educated and skilled workforce is considered imperative in the pursuit of economic growth and transformation to twenty-first century knowledge-based economies (KBEs; Dimmock & Goh, 2011; Levy & Murnane, 2004). Essentially, transformations in the economy require concomitant transformations in education, especially in obtaining the twenty-first-century competencies. Additionally, for the Singapore nation state, this cannot be at the expense of maintaining its track record of high academic achievements. There is an increasing acceptance that the key to materializing the appropriate transformations in schools and classrooms is improvements in teaching quality (McKinsey and Company, 2007). It is within this argument that professional learning communities (PLCs) have captured the hearts of Singapore education policy-makers in an effort to secure improvements in teaching quality and thereby appropriate student learning outcomes (Hord, 1997). The introduction of PLCs, however, requires concomitant changes in: (1) how school teachers relate and work with each other; and (2) how school leaders relate and work with school teachers--in essence, the nature of leadership itself. The purpose of this paper is to provide an argument for a distributed kind of leadership to support the initiation and development of PLCs in the Singapore school context.