Against the background of the recently published Policy on the South African Standard for Principals, the aim of this article is to determine whether distributed leadership is catered for in the South African regulatory and policy framework. It is argued that due to the accountability demands of a fundamentally bureaucratic education system, distributed leadership with its heterarchical features will most likely not be applied by South African public school principals. In addition, the article argues that there is ambiguity in the leadership/management function principals are expected to perform. This is manifested in the existence of a policy-practice gap, conceptual (con-) fusion pertaining to the actions of school management and leadership, a managerial mind-set of education authorities and a divergence of top-down and bottom-up expectations of a principal's role. Furthermore, the post-apartheid capacity deficit and the contextual diversity of schools will require development of new attitudes, skills and knowledge by principals, staff members and district and provincial officials for distributed leadership to be a viable approach.