by Emmanuel N Barthalomew
This reflective piece, as most of my writings tend to be, is a summary of my musings. Between teacher interviews across subjects, phases, and leadership posts, I’m also updating materials for our second Cambridge PDQ in Educational Leadership cohort. I reread Keith Grint’s “The Cuckoo Clock Syndrome” and found myself thinking about recruitment, specifically, how the way we frame a problem, tame, critical, or wicked, licenses the authority we reach for next (Grint, 2010). I jotted some initial thoughts and shared them with Oliver Kramer, who, as ever, was generous with time and challenging insights. On his reminder of the work, experience, and knowledge in this space, I reached out to Kelley Ridings; our conversation about mindset, purpose, and practice, plus his gift of The Gift Hiring Method, (https://edunetpro.com/books/the-gift-hiring-method/) widened my lens and musings on what hiring in international schools is (and isn’t) in reality. What follows below is a shortened reflection with Grint’s frame as the backbone. Now, I know there are plenty of us who feel that we have this sorted, fair play, but come along anyway and let me know how you have fixed this.
Grint’s claim is straightforward and uncomfortable; organisations develop habits of seeing problems as tame, wicked, or critical, and each framing licenses a style of authority, management, leadership, or command (Grint, 2010).
àTame: “We’ve seen this before; there’s a process.” (management)
àCritical: “This is a crisis; there’s no time.” (command)
àWicked: Complex, value-laden, no single owner or definition of success. (leadership)
He also warns that we can confuse decisiveness with effectiveness, the Action Fallacy, performing urgency instead of doing leadership (Grint, 2010). Recruitment makes this visible.
I have laid this out in short episodes from practice, each followed by Cambridge PDQ-style Key Questions to keep the analysis contextual and usable.
Episode 1: The story we tell ourselves: recruitment as process (Tame)
Key Question: When we tell our board or owners, “recruitment is under control,” are we describing reality, or protecting authority by calling something tame that isn’t?
Our default script: advertise early; preferred agencies; safeguarding/fit; “finish by February”; pipelines for pressure subjects. Comforting, because it casts recruitment as tame, familiar, bounded, solvable by competent procedure. It proves managerial credibility, reassures parents/owners, and keeps control central. Yet Grint cautions that misclassification is common; we choose the frame that suits the authority we prefer (Grint, 2010).
Episode 2: The story we are sold: recruitment as crisis (critical)
Key Question: When we say “it was urgent so I had to act,” was it truly a crisis, or crisis language that avoids explaining why urgency repeats?
Agency scripts rarely sound tame: “Global shortage, decide today,” “Visa rules are changing, you have to confirm this week.” Crisis suspends scrutiny and flatters command. We reward the person who “saved the timetable,” not the person who made the save unnecessary. Crisis framing inflates urgency, absolves context, and breeds dependency. We end up with two useful, incompatible narratives: internally tame (“there’s a process”) and externally critical (“act now”). Are either fully honest?
Episode 3: The lived reality: recruitment as wicked
Key Question: When we report “We recruited well,” whose definition of “well” are we using?
Recruitment plays out as a tangle of competing logics: some owners want every timetable line filled without lifting the salary base; parents want teachers who “look” and sound international; accrediting bodies want airtight qualifications and safeguarding; section heads want steady adults who can stabilise behaviour and mentor; bilingual colleagues want their curriculum reality respected; and incoming expat/“Western” staff want a professional remit—not a marketing prop or a visa problem. These aims pull against one another, while the drivers arrive braided rather than singular: not “just the package,” but housing costs, workload and exam-pressure signals, online narratives, spousal visas, and coded preferences around language and passports, all operating at once.
Interventions then re-shape the terrain: oversell culture to land a scarce hire and you seed early disappointment, which becomes early exit, which hardens into online narrative, which raises next year’s hiring barrier, a modest Hegelian cycle in which each “solution” generates its own contradiction. Nor is there a finish line: April visa refusals, June family recalls, July poaching; recruitment is not seasonal admin but a continuous condition. Underneath sit questions of identity and power, who is presented as “world-class” versus “local support,” which accents count as “proper English,” which passports reassure fee-paying families, who is praised as “loyal” and who is labelled “ambitious.” These are political choices that shape churn; they rarely appear on the spreadsheet, but they govern it.
Episode 4: Why we resist “wicked”
Key Question: When was the last time we said, in a room that matters, “We are part of the reason we cannot keep the people we say we need”?
Naming recruitment as a wicked force leadership; persuading the collective to take responsibility for a collective problem (Grint, 2010). That requires surfacing uncomfortable truths in public and holding them long enough for something to shift. It is reputationally risky. We are not rewarded for telling parents or owners what their preferences and budgets actually do to stability; we are rewarded for “We’ve filled IB Chemistry again.” So we default to management (“workflow updated”) or command (“emergency handled”). Understandably, sometimes necessary, yet both dodge the admission above.
Episode 5: What must change if we tell the truth
Key Question: Are we willing to change what we reward, or only what we say?
Moving beyond the annual scramble requires four shifts that work together rather than as slogans. First, westop romanticising heroics; the photogenic “save” signals upstream failure, not leadership. Second, widen ownership, recruitment also lives in timetable design (burnout), pastoral structures (emotional labour), finance (pay), marketing (message), and parent relations (expectations). Seat all five with HR in a monthly churn-review that maps why people left, not only who arrived. Third, prefer clumsy solutions over elegant single fixes (Grint, 2010): targeted compensation where markets are thin (STEM, post-16, bilingual bridge roles); real induction beyond the slideshow; message, reality alignment; visible progression for bilingual/local colleagues; and parent education on labour supply. Finally, change the question from “Did we fill the posts?” to “Who is still here after three full cycles, and why?”, treating retention as continuity, exam stability, safeguarding and cultural memory, credibility, and cost control.
Episode 6: Our posture this hiring season
Key Question: This year, are we planning to manage, command, or lead recruitment?
At this point in the year, recruitment is our truest mirror. It shows what we will say to parents, fund for teachers, and admit to boards, and what we will tolerate in ourselves. Three postures are available:
·Manage it: call it tame; keep it technical; reassure upwards.
·Command it: call it crisis; centralise decisions; perform decisiveness.
·Lead it: call it wicked; expose it; share it; seat the people who cause, carry, sell, and suffer it in one room, and keep them there.
Only the third posture changes next year (Grint, 2010).
Leadership, concretely, sounds like this:
·To SLT: “Align the job we promise with the job we deliver, role, load, and parent interface. If they don’t match, churn isn’t bad luck; it’s design.”
·To parents: “A ‘native-only’ rule narrows the pool, raises the chance your child meets a new teacher next year, and embeds inequity. If stability matters, broaden what ‘international quality’ looks like.”
·To owners/boards: “Top-tier post-16 outcomes without funding globally scarce specialists isn’t underperformance; it’s underinvestment.”
·To staff: “Opening with ‘They sold you something different’ doesn’t protect new colleagues; it destabilises them. Induction is everyone’s job, welcome well, teach the ropes, surface issues through the right channels.”
Is your context different? What exactly did you change, who owned it, and what three-cycle retention evidence shows it’s holding?
Source:
Grint, K. (2010).The Cuckoo Clock Syndrome: Addicted to Command, Allergic to Leadership.
Further reading:
Ridings, K.The Gift Hiring Method. https://edunetpro.com/books/the-gift-hiring-method/
Emmanuel N Barthalomew, Director of School Improvement, Hangzhou Dipont School of Arts and Science
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