Little is known about the challenges and skills in the leadership of medical health care networks in the large public health care system. Forty-eight interviews were completed with health care professionals who held various roles in health care networks supported by funding from the State Government. Content analysis revealed that respondents believed that health care networks required a distinctive leadership style that was different from the leadership style in their broader health care system, being a more distributed style of leadership where leaders were inclusive in how they brought together the experiences and knowledge of this diverse group of professionals. The skill set required of network leaders included not only having a good professional knowledge of their own clinical area, but good interpersonal communication skills, knowledge-sharing skills as well as political skills around strategic thinking, negotiation and resource allocation. Additional analyses using concept mapping showed that this leadership style and its activities overlapped with constructs, activities and roles linked to health, networks and roles. Finally, the research provides guidance about the skills required of network leaders, while conceptually these findings build upon our growing understanding of more distributive forms of leadership.