Most new principals delegate backward. They hand off the decisions that actually need their judgment, because those are the ones that feel risky to touch, and they hold onto scheduling and paperwork, because those feel safe. That is the opposite of what keeps a campus running and a principal sane.
I have watched this pattern in candidate after candidate, and it costs people in two places at once: on the job, where their calendar fills with work a coordinator could own, and on the 268, where a stem about delegation is testing whether you know which kind of decision you are looking at.
Systems are the first thing to hand off
Domain V is Strategic Operations, the budget, scheduling, staffing, and the systems that keep a campus running day to day. It is worth six percent of the selected-response section, the same weight as Domain IV, and it is the domain most new principals underrate because none of it feels like leadership.
That is exactly why it should go first on your delegation list. A master schedule, a substitute rotation, a supply order, a facilities request: these are processes with a right answer that does not depend on your judgment once the process is built. A strong campus secretary, registrar, or assistant principal can own the process end to end, and your job shifts from doing the task to making sure the process still works.
The test for whether something belongs here is simple. If a well-trained person with clear guardrails would make the same call you would, it is a system, and systems are the first things a principal should stop personally running.
What has to stay on your desk
Domain IV, Executive Leadership, is where communication and decision making under pressure live, and it is also worth six percent of the section. The overlap with Domain V matters: these are the two smallest domains by weight, but they show up constantly inside scenarios built around every other domain, because almost every stem eventually asks what the principal personally decides to do.
Three kinds of decisions do not delegate well, no matter how strong your team is. A decision that sets or changes campus culture, because staff read who made the call as much as what the call was. A decision involving discipline for an adult on campus, because it carries legal and personnel weight that has to trace back to the person accountable for it. And a decision made under real uncertainty, where the information is incomplete and someone has to own the tradeoff out loud. Handing any of these to someone else does not lighten your load. It moves the accountability without moving the authority, and staff notice the gap immediately.
Delegating is not disappearing
Handing off a system does not mean walking away from it. The principal who delegates well still checks in, still asks what is breaking, and still owns the outcome if the process fails, even when someone else is running it day to day. What changes is where your attention goes first, not whether you pay attention at all.
This is also where growing your own leaders and delegating well start to look like the same skill. The strongest campuses I have seen are the ones where a principal treats delegation as part of developing the person receiving the task, not just clearing their own plate. More on that transition, and what it looks like to lead people who used to be your peers, is in leading a team that was your peer group.
What this means if you are studying for the 268
A delegation stem is rarely testing whether you know delegation is good practice. It is testing whether you can sort a list of tasks into the ones a system can handle and the ones that require the principal's own judgment, under pressure, with the answer options built so every choice looks reasonable on its face.
The full weighting for all six domains, including where Domain IV and Domain V sit next to the other four, is on the 268 boot camp page. I wrote about the other side of this same judgment call, deciding under incomplete information, in the first 90 days as a new principal, and Domain V shows up again in data meetings that are not theatre, where the operational habit of running a meeting well is its own kind of system worth building once and handing off.
Your calendar tells the truth about what you have actually delegated, whether or not you would say it out loud. If the tasks filling it are ones a well-trained person could run without you, that is not a compliment to your work ethic. It is a backlog. The free seven-day trial opens the strategy module built from exactly this kind of sorting, and it is worth running against your own week before your next planning period.