22: The Departure Loop — When Leaving Well Means Arriving Well
Leaving Well (part 4 of 4)
Here’s a human-recorded audio version with Chief Voice Officer Kirk McDavitt. Hit play, or keep reading below.
Where We Are
Every August, a new teacher lands at your school. Maybe they flew in from Amman. Maybe they drove across town. Either way, they’re standing in a hallway they don’t recognize, holding a laptop they haven’t set up, about to walk into a role that someone else shaped for years.
Everything they need to know—the culture, the quirks, the unwritten rules, the reason the schedule changes in February—lived inside the person who just left, taking, perhaps, more institutional memory than any digital archive or physical handbook could ever hope to capture.
The new teacher will spend the next three to six months rebuilding what already existed. That’s not a learning curve, but an institutional reset. And it happens at every international school, every single year.
That’s a systems problem.
Over the past three weeks, the Leaving Well series has explored the Experience Asymmetry (Post 19), the Knowledge Harvest (Post 20), and Designing Better School Departures (Post 21). But there’s one more piece—arguably the most important one—that ties everything together.
The departure isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning of someone else’s.
This week, I’m writing with Ash Pugh, co-founder of SkoolSpot. Ash and I kept arriving at the same conclusion from opposite directions: I see departure design through the lens of communication systems and human experience; Ash sees it through the lens of HR operations and institutional data. The insight we kept circling is identical: offboarding and onboarding aren’t two separate processes. They’re one loop.
And for many schools, the bridge between them hasn’t quite been built yet.
Here's our attempt to build that bridge. Grab a beverage and settle in. ☕️
Two Lenses, One Loop
Picture a relay race where the first runner drops the baton, walks off the track, and the second runner has to go find it in the grass somewhere. That’s the current state of staff transitions at most schools.
Whether these tasks sit within a dedicated HR office or on the desk of a Senior Admin wearing multiple hats, the exit workflow and the onboarding workflow almost never talk to each other.
The exit interview asks: “What is the one thing we could have done better to support you during your time here?” The onboarding survey asks: “How was your first month?” But nobody connects the answers. Nobody asks: “What did the last person say was broken, and did we fix it before the new person arrived?”
That gap — between what one person reports on the way out and what the next person experiences on the way in — isn’t occasional. It’s systemic.
Across schools, we consistently see the same pattern: feedback is collected on departure and experience is measured on arrival. But without a system to close the loop, one doesn’t inform the other. We’re listening, but we’re not hearing.
An example we often see sits across two functions that rarely operate as one system: HR and Academic Leadership.
A departing teacher shares in their exit interview that:
It wasn’t clear when things were due, I was hearing different expectations from different people, and I ended up spending a lot of time just trying to piece it together.
HR captures that feedback as part of the exit process.
At the same time, Academic Leadership focuses on hiring the replacement and preparing orientation materials.
Each function does its job. But they are operating in isolation, not in connection.
Three months later, the incoming teacher reports:
I keep getting mixed messages about deadlines and expectations, and I have to ask a lot of questions to figure out what direction to follow.
From each department’s perspective, nothing failed.
From a systems perspective, nothing improved.
The issue was already known. It just wasn’t made visible to the people shaping the next experience.
It is worth noting the additional layer that can make this harder to resolve in international schools.
In many cases, academic leadership teams are internationally recruited, while operational functions such as HR and administration are locally hired - groups that often carry different professional norms and levels of proximity to the classroom. Over time, these differences can quietly reinforce functional siloes. Intercultural competency isn’t a standalone initiative; it is one of the ways a system helps close the loop.
People as Systems: When Expertise Walks Out the Door
As we mapped out the connection between our two perspectives, we kept coming back to one central realization: When knowledge isn’t codified, the person is the system. When they leave, the system breaks.
In part 2 of the Leaving Well series, we looked at the Knowledge Harvest—the three layers of institutional knowledge (process, relationship, context) and how to capture them.
But our shared framing cuts even deeper.
It’s not just that knowledge walks out the door; it’s that many schools have unknowingly built their operations on the assumption that specific people will always be there.
The secondary principal who carries the logic of the entire master schedule in their head. The admissions director who knows every family by name. The IT manager who is the only person who understands the legacy systems.
In systems thinking, you’d call this a single point of failure. In schools, we call it Tuesday.
The fix isn’t to make people less important. It’s to make their knowledge less fragile. We need processes that systematically convert individual expertise into institutional assets before the person walks out the door—and onboarding processes that deliver those assets to the next person in a way they can actually use.
The Heroics Trap: Why Schools Run on Informal Labor
In most schools, transitions work because someone steps in.
A middle leader notices a new hire is struggling and steps in to help. Before long, they become the informal point of contact for the entire team.
A longer-term staff member once showed a few new hires around the neighborhood. Now they are the unofficial guide for every incoming cohort.
A principal suggests, “Talk to Ayesha, she knows how HR processes work.” Within weeks, Ayesha has a calendar full of one-on-one meetings because there is no shared place where that knowledge lives - and no formal role that owns it.
None of these roles were designed.
But each of them fills a gap. And crucially, each of them fills a gap that exists because accountability was never clearly assigned in the first place. Ayesha didn’t become the informal HR guide because she was appointed. She became it because no one was. The responsibility didn’t move to her deliberately. It drifted there quietly, because the system never defined where it belonged.
This is what we call the Heroics Trap.
The system appears to function, but only because individuals are compensating for a system that was never fully designed.
In many schools, this is framed as a preference for being “less bureaucratic”, “more organic”, and sometimes suggesting that their staff “prefer flexibility over structure”. But in practice, it often means the structure was never defined, and accountability shifts quietly onto individuals to figure things out.
What looks like flexibility is often just a lack of clarity. And that lack of clarity doesn’t disappear. It gets absorbed by people.
People don’t resist clarity. They resist confusion.
Without that clarity, individuals are left to interpret expectations on their own. Responsibilities accumulate informally. Job descriptions drift from reality. What someone actually owns becomes a matter of habit and assumption rather than explicit agreement. And that is where inconsistency, frustration, and unnecessary tension begin.
People don’t disengage because expectations are high. They disengage when expectations are unclear.
The problem is that heroics don’t scale.
They create inconsistency, because the experience depends on who happens to be around. They create burnout, because the same reliable people carry the load again and again. And they create fragility, because when those people leave, the system they were holding together leaves with them.
When a school hires someone, it makes a promise of clarity and support. When the lived experience is confusion and informal workarounds, that promise breaks, and dissonance becomes disengagement. Not because people don’t care. Because the system doesn’t match the promise.
The alternative isn’t to remove the human element. It’s to support it.
When systems are in place, people still care. They still step in. But they are no longer compensating for gaps. They are building on a foundation.
The shift is from relying on heroic effort to designing reliable systems. Not as a way of making schools less human. As a way of making them more honest.
Less heroics. Better outcomes.
From Compliance to Contribution: Closing the Loop
In the first part of this series, G introduced the shift from a Compliance Mindset (”did they return the keys?”) to a Contribution Mindset that honors a person’s legacy. When we look at staff transitions through this lens, we see a loop that moves through four phases. It begins with the logistical baseline of Compliance, but then deepens into the Capture of knowledge and the active Contribution to the role’s future.
The final, and most vital, stage is Connection.
This is where the loop actually closes: when the outputs of the departure (the video time capsules, relationship maps, and role histories) become the primary inputs for the new hire’s arrival.
When this connection is working, the departing staff member isn’t just leaving; they are actively setting their successor up for success.
But the feedback loop sits on top of something more fundamental. And if that foundation is missing, the loop has nothing solid to close around.
Role clarity is itself a system.
Not a bureaucratic exercise, and not a one-time HR task. A living structure that makes visible what each person owns, what they are accountable for, and where their responsibilities end and someone else’s begin. Without it, everything built on top — the processes, the handoffs, the data flows — rests on assumption rather than agreement.
Which returns us, quickly, to heroics.
A platform like SkoolSpot can make the feedback loop possible. Exit data can be structured and made accessible. Onboarding can be designed with that input in mind. The conditions for the loop to close can exist.
But if the underlying roles are unclear, the data reflects that ambiguity. Departure feedback describes an experience shaped by blurry expectations. Onboarding materials prepare someone for a role that doesn’t match what they will actually be asked to do. The loop closes — but it loops around the same confusion.
The system has to be designed at every layer.
That is what makes the loop worth closing. Not just that information moves - but it is information worth moving.
Brand Stewardship: Your Alumni Are Your Recruiters
Your departing staff are your most credible marketing channel. In the tight-knit world of international education, the question travels fast: “How was it there?” The answer isn’t shaped by the branded tote bag they got at orientation. It’s shaped by the last month. A teacher whose knowledge was honored becomes an ambassador. A teacher who felt like a line item on a checklist tells a different story.
Every goodbye is a press release you didn’t write, delivered to an audience you can’t control.
Breaking the Silos
Someone needs to own the continuity.
Not all the tasks—just the connection. This requires a person or a team who sees the full arc of the staff journey. Someone who can ask:
What did the last three people in this role say was the biggest challenge, and have we addressed it in the onboarding for the next person?
The Departure Loop: A Timeline
November-March (The Announcement): Launch the Departure Experience Audit. This is the moment to move beyond simple logistics and begin mapping the institutional legacy that needs to be preserved.
April (The Harvest): Activate the Knowledge Harvest. This is when the “hidden” logic of the role is codified through video time capsules and stakeholder maps while the expert is still on the ground.
May-June (The Sunset): Design the Sunset. Execute closing rituals and student bridge communications, ensuring the departing staff member leaves with a sense of dignity and accomplishment.
June/Orientation Planning (The Connection): Close the Loop. Leadership and receiving teams review departure intelligence to customize the onboarding plan, ensuring the next arrival is informed by specific context rather than generic templates.
August (The Arrival): Complete the Loop. The new hire receives a curated set of transition assets built specifically for them, providing a clear path forward rather than a “cold start” or a link to a cluttered shared drive.
This Week’s Move
Pull together your school’s exit checklist and your onboarding checklist. Put them side by side. Draw a line between every item on the exit list that should inform something on the onboarding list.
How many lines did you draw? If the answer is zero, you’ve found the break in your loop.
Pick one connection. Maybe it’s routing the Knowledge Harvest assets to the incoming person’s welcome package. The loop doesn’t close overnight, but it starts closing the moment you decide departure and arrival are two chapters of the same story.
Systematically yours,
G and Ash
About the Authors:
Gitane Reveilleau (a.k.a. “G”) is co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at EKG Collective, helping international schools turn communication complexity into systematic clarity.
Ash Pugh is co-founder and CEO of SkoolSpot, a platform designed to help international schools manage people operations with "Less Heroics."
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