The study aim at describing and analysing the practices of and conditions for senior managers in public administration, as well as which similarities and differences are in existence both within and between authorities in this respect. The practices of senior managers are studied in the light of two dimensions, one explicit that comprises the values, ideologies, interests, knowledge and feelings that senior managers express, as well as an executed dimension that encompasses physical activities, what managers do, how the work is executed, where work is done and with whom they work. These dimensions of managerial practices are studied with a special focus on leadership. The aim of this study can also be understood as to describe and analyse pedagogical processes (influence processes as well as learning and development processes) in a senior manager's work. The study has a multiple case study design comprising eight different authorities. Two sub-studies have been performed, one interview study consisting of 31 senior managers and one observation study comprised of six of these managers. The results show that leadership is a well-known concept, that great value is ascribed to it, that there is unanimity on the meaning of leadership as well as this meaning having changed over time. The results in the form of descriptions of managers' work show that there are many similarities between the managers in the study. For example, the work to a great extent is a question of interplay with other individuals and that in this social dimension the prerequisites for learning and developing processes exist. The study shows too that managers have a certain amount of room for action and that in their work managers take into consideration several different dimensions of contexts in the performance of their work. The managerial work is finally described in terms of an explicit and an implicit context with regard to the public character of the work involved. One conclusion is that there are differences between managers' conceptions of leadership that is executed. These differences can be understood by considering the background consisting of the simultaneous existence of normative respective experiential patterns of practice described in the study as the non-uniform work. Furthermore, the results indicate differences among the authorities but that these are small in relation to differences within the authorities. Thus the results can be interpreted as the immediate context in the form of a number of personal/local preconditions to a greater extent being formed for managerial work in relation to a more peripheral context. In this light, leadership is defined as a social, influence, learning and developmental process, which is executed as implicit and explicit work within the framework for a structural, an institutional and a subjective fields.