Leading Between Two Systems — A Solo Reflection

In this solo episode of The Common Room, host Joshua Sussex steps away from the interview format to unpack what leading within a British-branded school in China actually taught him about leadership — the mistakes, frustrations, and hard lessons along the way — as well as how it ignited his passion, motivation, and curiosity to research in that space. 

Joshua introduces Culturally Mediated Leadership (CML) — a framework being developed through his doctoral research at the University of Bath — built around five practical lenses: Cultural Reflexivity, Symbolic Sensitivity, Stakeholder Interpretation, Adaptive Bridging, and Strategic Mediation. Each is grounded in examples, from senior leadership decisions to everyday moments any staff member will recognise, regardless of role or country.

This framework is for anyone leading — or working — across cultural, generational, or institutional difference, which is most people in international education, most of the time.

Next episode: Joshua is joined by Izyan Ronedin, Head of HR at an international school in Singapore, for "Behind the Contract"  — HR, Misconceptions, and the Human Side of AI" — covering what to look out for in a contract before signing, common misconceptions about HR, and where the human side of HR is headed as AI reshapes the profession.

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The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Sussex — Deputy Head of Secondary and EdD candidate: researching leadership in international schools.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

International education. The classrooms, the staff rooms, the lives built far from home. This is the Common Room. I'm Joshua Sussex. Let's talk.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome back to the Common Room. I'm Joshua Sussex, and this is episode two. I want to start with a moment, and I think a lot of listening will recognise this one. You're part of the senior leadership team in a British branded school, and together you've just made a decision. A good one. Reasonable. Well thought through. The kind of thing you genuinely call effective leadership. You take it to the staff room, you lay it out, and everyone's nodding, smiling. People look on board, supportive even. You walk out thinking, right, that's it. You've handled that well. This is the moment that things start to improve. And then 24 hours later, that exact same decision has landed four completely different ways. Parents are hearing one thing, the local team is reading it completely differently. Things that never quite surfaced back in that staff room. Your local bureau liaison is seeing something else again, something you didn't even realize was on the table. And the expat staff have landed on a fourth reading entirely, just as confident that theirs is the right one. Same decision, four totally different realities. And here's the thing: none of them are wrong. They're all just reading it through a completely different lens. That happened more than once during my time as part of a senior leadership team in a British school in China. And my first instinct, like most leaders' first instinct, was to blame the delivery. Maybe the tone was off. Maybe we picked the wrong words, the wrong moment, the wrong order to tell people in. And sure, all of that plays a part. But here's what I actually came to realize. And it's the thing that changed how I think about leadership entirely. It was never really about getting better at delivery. It was about something underneath that. It was about how differently the same decision gets interpreted, not misheard, not miscommunicated, genuinely interpreted by people operating inside different cultural, institutional, and regulatory realities, often within the same building. People weren't confused about what was being said. They understood it perfectly. They just understood it through a completely different lens than we did. And that realization is really what sparked something in me. It's what pushed me to stop just living through the gap and start properly researching it. That curiosity is genuinely what became my doctoral research at the University of Bath. And out of it, I've been building a framework whose entire purpose is to help leaders read and hold together exactly that kind of complexity, to bridge that gap, or at the very least, mediate it. I call the framework culturally mediated leadership. So today's episode is a solo one. Just me, no guest. Part story, part, I guess a little more academic than usual, but I'm going to walk you through some of what I experienced in China that got me thinking this way. And then I'll introduce to you the framework properly. By the time we're done, you're going to walk away with three things. One, a completely different way of thinking about why your decisions sometimes land badly, even when they're good decisions. Two, a framework, five specific lenses you can start applying immediately wherever you're leading. And three, a genuine understanding of what culturally mediated leadership actually is and why I believe it matters far beyond China. Right, let's get into it. So a bit of context first. I spent three years working within British branded international bilingual schools in China as part of the senior leadership team. Now, if you've never worked in that specific context, here's what makes it genuinely different from most other international postings. You're often not just leading within a school, you're often leading in a school that sits inside two systems at once. There's the British curriculum identity, the brand, the pedagogy, the parental expectation of a certain kind of education. And then there's the Chinese regulatory system underneath it. Local bureau oversight, national curriculum requirements for local students, a completely different set of expectations about what a school is for and who it's ultimately accountable to. Those two systems don't always agree. And as a leader, you're standing directly in the middle of that disagreement every single day, often without realizing it, and more often than not, not prepared for it. Let me give you a flavor of what that actually looked like day to day. Something as simple as how much autonomy to give teachers over curriculum pacing, a completely normal, uncontroversial conversation in a UK or even a lot of international schools could become genuinely fraught. Because for one group, flexibility signals good pedagogy. For another, it can signal a lack of structure, a lack of seriousness, even a kind of disrespect for the process. Same policy, wildly different meaning. Or take something like how a school communicates a change in behavior policy. In one cultural context, framing it around individual student well-being lands as compassionate and modern. In another, it can read as prioritizing the individual over the collective, which, depending on who's listening, is either a strength or a genuine concern. None of this is really about right and wrong. That's the first thing I want you to take away from this episode. And it's worth saying clearly. The problem was never that one group was correct and another was mistaken. The problem was that I was leading as if there was one shared reality in the room when there were actually several running in parallel. Now, when I started really reflecting on this properly academically, I went looking for existing leadership theory that explained what I was experiencing. And I found plenty of excellent frameworks, transformational, distributed, instructional leadership. But here's what I noticed. Almost all of them assume something. They assume a relatively stable cultural and institutional backdrop. They assume that if you communicate clearly, build trust, and model the right values, your message will land roughly the way you intended it to. And in a lot of contexts, that assumption holds up fine. But I would argue that it doesn't hold up in a British branded school in China because the backdrop itself isn't stable. It's plural. You've got competing cultural assumptions about what leadership even is. You've got competing regulatory demands, you've got local staff and expat staff, often with completely different professional training and completely different expectations of what a leader owes them. And you've got families who choose an international education precisely because they wanted something different from the local system, while also needing the local system's approval to keep the school running at all. That gap between the leadership theory I'd been trained in and the reality I was actually living is the gap that led me to my doctoral research question. And eventually to the framework I want to walk you through now. Culturally mediated leadership is built around five interdependent dimensions. I'm going to take you through each one with real-world examples. Dimension one, cultural reflexivity. This is the starting point, and it's the hardest one, because it asks you to turn the lens on yourself first. Cultural reflexivity is your ability to recognize your own cultural assumptions clearly enough to notice when they're not fitting the room you're in. Here's what that looked like for me. Early on, I remember genuinely believing that transparency, laying out every reason behind a decision in detail, up front, was simply good leadership. Not culturally specific, it was just good practice. It took me an uncomfortably long time to realize that what I call transparency, some colleagues experienced as a kind of undermining. As if by over-explaining, I was signaling I didn't trust their judgment to simply follow a decision made in good faith. That was me not recognizing that transparency equals respect is itself a cultural assumption, not a universal truth. Cultural reflexivity is catching that in the moment before it costs you. Now, you don't need to be an insane leadership for this one to land. Think about the last time you gave feedback to a colleague or a colleague gave feedback to you. Some of us were trained to believe that direct, specific, immediate feedback is the kindest, most respectful thing you can offer someone. Get it out in the open, deal with it, and move on. Others were raised in professional cultures where the same directness, delivered in front of others, feels like less honesty and more like public correction. Neither instinct is wrong. But if you've ever left the conversation thinking I was just being straightforward and the other person walked away feeling quietly humiliated, that's cultural reflexivity showing up in a staff room, not a boardroom. It's not about senior decisions. It's about noticing that your version of kind or clear or professional was shaped somewhere by something and isn't automatically everyone else's. Dimension two, symbolic sensitivity. This is about recognizing that decisions don't just have a practical effect. They carry symbolic weight, and that weight can be completely different for different people. A good example is seating arrangement for a school assembly. Sounds trivial, but where senior leaders sat, who was seated near the local bureau liaison, whether local staff and expat staff were seated together or separately, none of that was neutral. It symbolized hierarchy, respect, inclusion, or exclusion, depending entirely on who was reading the room. What felt like a minor logistical decision to me carried real symbolic meaning to others. Symbolic sensitivity is training yourself to notice that layer before you make the decision, not after someone reacts to it. But you'll see this exact same dynamic play out at a much smaller scale, wherever you're working. Think about group chats or email chains at your own school, who gets added, who gets left off, whose name appears first on the staff list or a newsletter or a thank you slide at the end of term. None of that is really about logistics. It's about who feels seen and who quietly notices they didn't. I've watched a genuinely excellent teaching assistant become disengaged for a long period of time, not because of pay, not because of workload, but because they were consistently left off communication that, on paper, didn't really concern their role, but symbolically told them exactly where they stood. Symbolic sensitivity isn't a leadership skill reserved for big announcements. It's noticing that small, almost invisible choices are often the loudest signals you're sending. Dimension three, stakeholder interpretation. This is the one that maps directly onto the story I opened with. Stakeholder interpretation is the discipline of actively working out how a single decision is likely to be read by each distinct group you're accountable to, rather than assuming one explanation, delivered once, will land the same way for everyone. In practice, this meant genuinely sitting down and asking, how will this land with parents? How will this land with the local team? How will this land with the bureau? How will this land with expat staff? Not as an afterthought, but as part of actually shaping the decision itself. It's slower, it's more effortful, but it's the difference between a decision that survives contact with reality and one that fractures within 24 hours the way mine did. And this one is genuinely universal, whatever seat you're sitting in. Think about how differently a single staff email about, say, a change to the assessment calendar gets read by a newly qualified teacher two months into their first international post, versus a 15-year veteran who's seen five different assessment policies come and go, versus a local member of staff who's quietly wondering whether this changes anything for their own children's education at the school. Same email, same words, three completely different internal reactions, none of which you'll ever see unless you go looking for them. You don't need a title to practice this. Next time you're about to send something to a group, even just a small team, try genuinely picturing two or three different people reading it and ask yourself honestly, will this land the way I mean it to, for all of them, or just for someone who thinks the way I do? Dimension four, adaptive bridging. This is where it moves from awareness into action. Adaptive bridging is about building genuine practical mechanisms that connect competing expectations, rather than just picking aside and absorbing the fallout from whoever you didn't choose. A concrete example, when local curriculum requirements and the British pedagogical approach pulled in different directions, the answer unusually wasn't British winds or local winds. It was finding an actual structural bridge, a way of sequencing, timetabling, or framing the work that let both systems genuinely coexist, rather than just papering over the tension with a diplomatic announcement. Adaptive bridging is doing that structural work, not just the communicative work. Here's a smaller, more relatable version of the same idea. Think about parents' evenings. In some cultural contexts, parents expect a fairly formal, data-led conversation. Grades, targets, clear neck steps, minimal small talk. In others, that same format can feel cold, even dismissive. When what the parent actually needed first was reassurance that their child is known, is liked, and settling in as a person before a single number gets mentioned. Adaptive bridging isn't choosing one format over the other, and it isn't running two completely separate systems side by side either. It's building something structural. Maybe that's training every member of staff to open every conversation the same relational way, regardless of who's sitting across from them. Then moving into the data once the trust is established. It's a genuine bridge, not a compromise where everyone gets a slightly worse version of what they actually needed. Dimension five, strategic mediation. And this is a dimension that sits over the top of all the others. Strategic mediation is the ongoing role of the leader in holding coherence across all of this complexity over time without losing legitimacy with any single group. Because here's the truth. You cannot make every group equally happy with every decision. That's not the goal. The goal is staying legitimate, staying trusted across all of them. Even when a specific decision favors one perspective over another in that moment. That's an active, continuous leadership role. It's not a policy, it's not a one-off assessment. It's something you're doing constantly in the background, decision after decision. But you don't need to be leading the whole school to feel the weight of this one either. If you've ever been ahead of department or even just the person other staff quietly come to for advice, you'll know this feeling. Someone from the local team tells you one thing off the record. Someone from the expat team tells you something almost contradictory. And you're the person left holding both conversations, trying to keep the trust of each side without betraying either. That's strategic mediation at a smaller scale. It's exhausting. It's rarely acknowledged, and it's one of the most important, least visible things that keeps the school functioning. If that's ever been you, quietly holding two versions of the same story so that the whole team can keep moving forward, that's not you being indecisive or caught in the middle. That's genuinely a form of leadership, whether your job title says so or not. Now, I'm sure some of you listening might be thinking, okay, that's a fascinating, quite extreme case study, but I'm not leading in China. Why does this apply to me? Here's my answer. Every school, everywhere, has multiple stakeholder groups reading the same decisions through different lenses. Every school has cultural assumptions baked into what good leadership looks like. They're just less visible when everyone around you happens to share them. The moment you're leading across any kind of difference, cultural, generational, linguistic, institutional, these five dimensions are quietly in play, whether you're naming them or not. So let's bring it together. Three things I wanted you to take away today. One, when a decision lands badly, it's rarely because the decision itself was wrong. It's usually because it was interpreted through cultural, institutional, or symbolic lenses you hadn't accounted for. Two, culturally mediated leadership gives you five lenses to work with cultural reflexivity, symbolic sensitivity, stakeholder interpretation, adaptive bridging, and strategic mediation. Start with the first one. Before your next difficult decision, just ask yourself, what am I assuming is universal that might actually just be mine? And three, this isn't a framework for extreme unusual context. It's a framework for anyone leading across difference, which, if you think about it honestly, is most of us, most of the time. I want to end with something a bit more reflective, because I think it matters, and I don't think I say this enough out loud. International education at its heart is an industry built entirely on difference. We move across borders, we work alongside people who were trained in completely different systems. We serve families who've chosen a version of education that is, by definition, not the local default. And I think sometimes we treat that difference as background noise, something to politely navigate around on our way to the actual job of teaching, leading, running a timetable, hitting our targets. But the difference isn't the noise, it's the job. Every single one of us, whatever our role, is quietly doing the work of interpreting across it all day, every day, whether we've ever had the language for it or not. And I think that's actually the real gift hiding inside everything I've talked about today. Because once you start seeing it, once you notice that the parent in front of you, the colleague across the staff room, the local team member, the newly arrived expat teacher are all genuinely, legitimately reading the same world differently. You stop taking frictions so personally. You stop assuming someone's being difficult or slow or unreasonable when really they're just standing somewhere you haven't stood yet. That shift from frustration to curiosity is quietly one of the most useful things international education ever teaches you. It certainly took me long enough to learn it. So if you take nothing else from today, take this. The next time something lands badly, resist the urge to explain harder. Get curious instead. Ask what someone else might be seeing that you're not. That question alone will take you further than almost anything else I could tell you. That's it for episode two of the Common Room. If this gave you something to think about, follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, and I'd genuinely love to hear which of those five dimensions resonated with you most. Now, next episode is a proper change of pace, and honestly, I think it's one you won't want to miss. I'm joined by Izzy Anronadin, head of HR at an international school in Singapore for an episode called Behind the Contract. We get into three things that I think will genuinely matter to every single one of you listening, wherever you are in your career. What to actually look out for in a contract before you sign it, the details most of us skim past and shouldn't, the misconceptions staff often have about HR from the other side of the desk that quietly shape how you're treated and how you're heard. And with AI increasingly automating so much of HR, where does the human side of the profession actually go from here? And what does that mean for how you're managed, supported, and represented at work? If you've ever signed a contract without fully reading it, ever felt frustrated by an HR decision you didn't understand, or ever wondered what your workplace looks like five years from now, that conversation is for you. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it. I'm Joshua Sussex. Thanks for being with me in the common room.