Solo at The Helm: Neglected School Managers

School principals are formally positioned as key organizational actors responsible for instructional leadership, administrative coordination, and relational governance. However, increasing accountability pressures combined with constrained decision-making authority have transformed the nature of their work. This qualitative study examines how professional neglect is experienced and constructed within contemporary school leadership contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nine principals representing primary, middle, and secondary schools, the study employs thematic analysis to explore how responsibility, authority, and emotional demands intersect in everyday leadership practice. The findings reveal three interrelated themes: (1) expanding responsibilities under structural constraints, (2) the paradoxical enactment of distributed leadership without substantive authority redistribution, and (3) emotional labour accompanied by professional loneliness. Participants described being held accountable for school outcomes while operating within centralized policy frameworks that limited autonomous decision-making. Delegation practices frequently involved task transfer without power redistribution, producing administrative bottlenecks rather than genuinely shared leadership. This paradox highlights a key critique of distributed leadership rhetoric: leadership may be formally dispersed while responsibility and risk remain concentrated in the principalship. These structural conditions intensified emotional labour, reinforced isolation, and undermined professional well-being. The study argues that principals’ experiences of neglect should not be reduced to individual coping limitations but understood as structurally embedded conditions shaped by organizational design and policy regimes. By conceptualizing professional neglect as a form of authority deprivation within accountability-driven systems, the study contributes to distributed leadership and school governance scholarship. The findings underscore the need for integrated leadership support frameworks that align responsibility with decision-making authority and address the emotional dimensions of leadership in systemic ways.