Every school leader carries too much, and most carry it for the same bad reason: nobody ever gave them a rule for letting go. I am Paul Harrell, and here is my rule, refined over fifty years of handing things off well and badly. Score the person you would hand it to, not yourself. At 90 percent, delegate and get out of the way. At 70 percent with the right intent, let them go: give them the ownership and stay close. With the wrong intent, hold on to it. Below 70, it is still yours. Score with your brain, not your heart. That is the whole rule, and the rest of this article is why it works and the one guardrail that keeps it from hurting people.
Why 70 With the Right Heart Beats 90 Without Help
The math looks wrong until you count time. Doing it yourself, even at 90 percent, costs you the hours, every time, forever, and it costs your school a leader buried in work someone else could grow into. Their 70 percent costs some polish today and buys a person who is at 80 next semester and 90 next year, because the last 20 percent only grows in hands that are actually holding the thing. Delegation is not a transfer of tasks; it is the only mechanism by which a school ever gets a second capable person.
Intent is the multiplier that makes the bet safe. A 70-percent person with the right heart asks when they are stuck, tells you when they miss, and treats the work as stewardship. A 90-percent person with the wrong intent hides mistakes, defends turf, and converts every handoff into a fiefdom. Capability closes its own gap; character does not. That is why the rule scores both, and why the intent test is the one that decides.
What Letting Go Actually Means
Release the ownership, not the relationship. Letting them go does not mean disappearing; it means the work is now theirs, visibly, in front of the people they will lead, while you stay close enough to catch what matters. Praise in public, correct in private, and ask about the thing you saw later, out of love, instead of fixing it in the moment over their head. Nothing undoes a delegation faster than a leader who hands off the work and keeps the authority. How you correct depends on the person, which is the heart of leading a school staff equally, but never the same.
And resist the urge to take it back at the first stumble, because the stumble is the tuition. If you rescued the work every time it wobbled, you did not delegate; you loaned. The question at each wobble is the same one that started the rule: is the intent still right? If yes, coach and stay the course. If the wobble revealed the intent was never right, that is different, and the rule already told you what to do.
If you cannot yet tell which of your people are ready, start with your staff retention number and how your leadership roles are carried: Get the School Health Check.
The Guardrail: Score With Your Brain, Not Your Heart
Here is where the rule can hurt people, and where it once hurt someone through me. The capability score and the intent score both have to come from your brain, honestly, and the temptation is to let your heart write them. I once handed a role to a good man I knew was below the line. I knew I had made a mistake right away, but my heart had broken for the guy, and my heart rode right over my brain. I had to take the role back, and that broke his heart.
You are not doing anybody a favor by giving them something your heart says they can handle but your brain says they cannot. The kindest thing you will ever do for a below-the-line person is not the promotion; it is honest development toward the line, so that when the role comes, it stays theirs. Compassion that overrides judgment produces casualties and calls it kindness. The rule exists to stop you, and it only works if the scoring is honest.
What Never Delegates
The rule governs everything below three decisions, and those three stay in the leader's chair no matter how good the team gets. What the school is actually about, because left unanswered, everyone answers it for themselves. Who sits on the leadership team, because the leader lives or dies by it. And which problem parents get the leader's own chair, because some conversations belong to the person whose authority cannot be appealed past.
Everything else is a candidate. Run the roster honestly: for each thing you are still carrying, is there a 90, or a 70 with the right intent, available? If yes, the rule says go, and your calendar is the proof you have not been obeying it. If no, you have found your real problem, and it is a hiring and development problem, not a delegation one.
Run the Rule on Your Own Calendar
The rule becomes useful the day you apply it to a real roster, so here is the exercise I run with leaders. List everything you personally carried in the last month, all of it, from the strategic plan to the thing you fixed in the hallway. Next to each item, two honest columns: what score would you give the person who would take it, and is their intent right? Brain scores only, in both columns; if you feel your heart writing either number, stop and start the column over.
Three buckets fall out. Release now: a 90, or a right-hearted 70, exists, and the only thing stopping the handoff is you. Develop toward: somebody is below 70, say at 50, with the right heart. Below 70, it is still yours. The work stays with you today, and the person gets a coaching plan with a date on it to grow them toward the line; the handoff waits until they reach it. Genuinely yours: the three decisions, plus whatever has no candidate, which quietly becomes your hiring priority. Most leaders find a third of their load sitting in the first bucket, and that discovery is worth more than any time-management system ever sold to a school.
More about Paul Harrell.
