The most common mistake I see in a new principal's first ninety days is trying to fix everything the old leadership got wrong before anyone knows whether you can be trusted at all. Fixing comes later. Trust comes first, and it has to be earned in a specific order.
I have talked to a lot of first-year principals about what went right and what went sideways, and the pattern repeats. The ones who struggled did not lack ideas. They spent their credibility before they had built any.
The first two weeks are for listening, not deciding
Walk into a new building with a plan already written and you have told the staff, without saying it out loud, that their year of context does not matter. That is a hard thing to walk back later.
Spend the first two weeks asking questions instead of answering them. Sit with the front office staff, the custodian who has been there fifteen years, the teacher everyone quietly defers to. Ask what is working, what nobody talks about, and what they wish the last principal had understood sooner. Write it down. You are not committing to act on all of it. You are building the map you will need for every decision after this.
This matters on the exam, not just on the job. A recurring pattern in Domain I is a principal who moves before gathering the perspective of the people the decision affects. The framework rewards the option that builds understanding and trust before it builds a solution, and it does that consistently enough that it is worth training yourself to notice.
Decide how you decide before you decide anything big
The second thing a new principal needs is not a decision. It is a way of making decisions, stated out loud, before the first hard one lands on your desk.
Staff do not just judge whether your call was right. They judge whether it was consistent with the last one and whether they understood why you made it. A principal who explains the reasoning, even briefly, survives an unpopular call. A principal who announces a decision with no visible reasoning behind it teaches people to guess at your logic, and a staff that is guessing is a staff that is anxious.
Domain IV frames this directly: communication and decision making under incomplete information, which is the actual condition of the job, not an edge case. You will rarely have every fact before you have to act. What the framework rewards is a principal who names the tradeoff, makes the call, and says why, rather than one who waits for certainty that never arrives or one who decides and never explains it.
Pick one visible win, not five invisible ones
New principals often try to signal ambition by starting several initiatives at once. Staff cannot tell the difference between five real priorities and zero priorities, because both look the same from a classroom: nothing gets finished.
Pick one thing that is visible, achievable inside a semester, and connected to something the staff already told you mattered in those first two weeks. Finish it. A single completed, visible change does more for a new principal's credibility than five started ones, because it proves you can follow through, and follow-through is the thing a new staff has no evidence of yet.
What this means if you are studying for the 268
The exam does not test whether you know these moves exist. It tests whether you can pick the option that reflects them when a stem gives you four choices that all look like something a real principal might do.
The weighting for Domain I and Domain IV, along with the other four domains, is on the 268 boot camp page, and the case for reading that table before you build a study plan is in what the 268 actually tests. Domain IV is a smaller slice of the selected-response section than Domain I, but it shows up inside scenarios across every domain, because almost every stem eventually asks what the principal decides to do next.
If you are reading this because you are about to start the job rather than take the test, the overlap is not an accident. The method I teach candidates is built from watching what actually separates a strong first year from a rocky one, and Christie Ray, who has sat in this exact chair, is the person who keeps the training honest about what the job really feels like on day one.
Ninety days is not long enough to fix a building. It is long enough to show people who you are and how you think, which is the only foundation anything else gets built on. Get that order right and the rest of the year gets easier. Get it backward and you spend the rest of the year earning back what the first two weeks cost you.
If you want to see how this thinking is taught in full, the free seven-day trial opens the strategy module and all of Domain I. More on the leadership side of the job, not just the test, is in instructional leadership is not observation.