The article aims at exploring what counts as successful leadership and what the key questions in exploring successful school leadership across countries should be. A main argument is that successful leadership is a contestable concept, and I argue for framing school leadership as a moral and democratic enterprise, which implies a need to protect and promote the ideas and values of democracy in the language of education. In the discussion I draw upon data from the Norwegian part of an international research project. I claim that the principal is probably crucial in building the conditions for democratic participation in schools, but that success results from a continuous team effort.