Examples of systems described herein include resource management processes which may dedicate a portion of resources (e.g. memory) to serve as a dedicated leadership resource pool, accessible to only those instances of services which are designated as having a leadership role. In some examples, if sufficient resources are not available in the dedicated leadership resource pool, an instance of a service running on that computing node may decline to serve in the leadership role. Accordingly, memory and allocation of leaders may be better controlled across the distributed system in some examples.