Anas Sarwar will run Holyrood as a minority government should - as a landmark poll suggests - he be next First Minister.
The Scottish Labour leader was speaking at a Tony Blair Institute event just days after his party doubled their total of Scottish MPs when Michael Shanks won in Rutherglen and Hamilton West.
A recent poll suggests Sarwar will be the next First Minister, with around one in six independence voters now backing Labour.
Any majority in the Scottish Parliament is unlikely, with Labour's previous and only two terms in Scotland's government was ran in partnership with the Liberal Democrats.
Taking Salmond's lead
Speaking at the event during the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, Sarwar pointed to how Alex Salmond governed as the benchmark which Labour could follow.
He said: “There will not be any kind of coalition, we are looking at 2026, we are still a long way, there’s still lots more work to do, lots more progress to make. We still have to set out what that 2026 election will mean in practice, around what the offer is, about how we transform Scotland.
“Every single institution is weaker after 16 years of SNP government. We will be looking to go into that election in our own right, so a minority Labour government.
“The SNP have done it before, and I think we wrongly viewed pre-2007 that we couldn’t do minority governments, so therefore got ourselves into difficulty.
“The SNP demonstrated, Alex Salmond demonstrated in 2007, you can have a nationalist minority in the government, and still form a minority government that is able to work on its own right and also where you can find issues of agreement, build a majority in the parliament to get things done.
“That is the kind of approach we would take, so on issues that we have a common thread with the SNP, around things around social justice, why wouldn’t they want to back individual ideas from a minority Labour government if it’s going to improve the life of people in Scotland.
“We will look to be a minority Labour government and look to challenge both the SNP and the Tories, ‘do you want to make things work for people in Scotland?’”.