Once upon a record-breaking cold Chicago morning, my husband, Bob, then a young inner-city pastor, got a call from a church member with a disability saying that she would like to go to church. Being kind-hearted, with an indomitable spirit, Bob was determined to get her to church despite the obstacles. He had to borrow a car, start it, and warm it up in subzero temperatures. With persistence, he was able to get the car started and running. Presently, however, the engine light came on and the smell of smoke ignited an alarming realization: the oil was frozen in the oil pan. Without lubrication, the engine had overheated and died—resulting in a costly repair to replace the engine.

This incident has much to teach us about trying to run a school without trust. Trust serves as a lubricant of organizational functioning; without it, schools are likely to experience the overheated friction of conflict as well as a lack of progress toward their admirable goals. There is no way to lead schools successfully without building, establishing, and maintaining trust within and across the many and varied constituencies they serve. With trust, schools are much more likely to benefit from the collaborative and productive efforts of their faculty and staff, which in turn help generate the results for students that educators yearn for.

Schools once enjoyed the implicit trust of their community and school leaders felt they could take for granted the trust of both their internal and external constituencies. School leadership was, by and large, a high-status, low-stress job. Now, too often, it is the reverse. We live in an era in which all of our social institutions and their leaders have come under unprecedented scrutiny. As a result, trust has become increasingly difficult for leaders to earn and maintain in our complex and rapidly changing world. This trend away from trust poses a special challenge for school leaders because trust is so vital for schools in fulfilling their fundamental mission of teaching students to be engaged and productive citizens. Understanding the nature and meaning of trust in schools has, therefore, taken on added urgency and importance. School leaders need to appreciate and cultivate the dynamics of trust to reap its benefits for greater student achievement as well as for improved organizational adaptability and productivity.

Without trust, schools are unlikely to be successful in their efforts to improve and to realize their core purpose. I have written this book to offer school leaders practical, hands-on advice on not only how to establish and maintain trust but also how to repair trust if and when it has been damaged. To illustrate how the dynamics of trust play out in schools, I have integrated into this book the case studies of three principals: one who succeeded in cultivating the trust of her faculty, and two who, although well intentioned, were unsuccessful in harnessing the vital resource of trust, and whose schools therefore suffered impaired effectiveness. Through these case studies, I hope to show the role school leaders play in fostering high-trust relationships among teachers, students, and parents. Although the names used in these stories are pseudonyms, the case studies themselves are based on real principals and interviews with teachers who worked in their schools. Each of the three principals led an elementary school with a population of primarily low-income and minority students; the three schools were within a few miles of one another in the same urban school district. But the similarities ended there. The approaches they took to school leadership—and, subsequently, the relationships they built with their faculty and staff members—were very different. These cases provide vivid examples of the ways in which even well-meaning school leaders can end up engendering the distrust of their faculty and the high cost that is inevitably paid when that occurs: morale plummets, productivity declines, and schools lose good people.

Chapter 1 explores why trust matters in schools. This chapter introduces the three principals. Gloria Davies was an overzealous reformer who alienated her faculty and was engaged in an intense power struggle. Fred Martin, the “keep-the-peace principal,” lost the faith of his faculty by avoiding conflict. The culture of distrust that resulted had a negative impact on his school’s effectiveness. Gloria’s and Fred’s stories evidence, respectively, the “fight” and “flight” responses to conflict. These two cases are contrasted with the story of Brenda Thompson, a “high-support, high-challenge principal” who, through caring and hard work, earned the trust of her faculty. Whereas Gloria took too much responsibility for the task of school improvement and Fred took too little, Brenda successfully balanced a concern for the task of improving school performance with the concern for cultivating positive relationships within her school. As chapter 1 illustrates, because changes in the social and political environments of schools have transformed the context for building trust in schools, school leaders need to be more attentive and exercise wisdom when it comes to issues of trust.

Although people generally have an intuitive understanding of what is meant by trust and have some basis on which they make trust judgments of others, trying to articulate a precise definition of trust is not easy. Chapter 2, in which I draw on my own experience as a school principal as well as a solid literature review, provides a comprehensive definition of trust: it is the willingness to be vulnerable to another based on the confidence that the other is benevolent, honest, open, reliable, and competent. Each of these facets is illustrated with stories of Brenda’s leadership, which touch on both her leadership style and how that style played out among her faculty. Brenda demonstrated proficiency in all five facets of trust. She extended care to her faculty, was respected as a person of high integrity and commitment, avoided hidden agendas, worked hard, and distinguished herself as an educational leader. These attributes enabled Brenda to evoke an extra measure of effort from her teachers. As a result, in part, of Brenda’s trustworthy leadership, the students of Brookside Elementary achieved better-than-expected performance in both tangible and intangible ways. Their achievement scores improved significantly, and the building as a whole enjoyed increased engagement and success.

Trust is a complex and dynamic process. Chapter 3 explores factors that influence the development of trust. The dynamics of initiating trust include such elements as institutional supports for fostering trust and the role that reputation plays. Personal factors such as one’s disposition to trust, values and attitudes, as well as moods and emotions are also explored. Authentic trust is the goal of this development process.

Chapter 4 explores the dynamics of betrayal—including what happens to provoke betrayal in a previously trusting relationship. This is illustrated by the story of Fred, a well-meaning and affable principal. Fred’s unwillingness to make hard decisions or to hold teachers accountable left his faculty feeling unprotected, vulnerable, and betrayed. This principal’s steadfast avoidance of conflict allowed a pervasive climate of distrust to emerge. The costs to the school of a culture of distrust included constricted communication, limited access to faculty insights through shared decision making, and reduced organizational citizenship and commitment.

Chapter 5 examines revenge and the range of victims’ responses to betrayal. This chapter tells the story of Gloria, who was determined to make positive change when she took charge of an underperforming school. Her methods, however, were seen as manipulative and unfair; they broke trust with the faculty. These tactics left teachers feeling alienated and distrustful, leading to resentment, power struggles, and sabotage. Gloria’s leadership resulted in a school impaired by a culture of control. It is hard to imagine her ultimately being successful in realizing those hopes.

Chapter 6 explores the leader’s role in fostering high-quality relationships among teachers in a school. This chapter also examines some of the positive outcomes of trusting school environments, such as greater collaboration and a robust sense of collective efficacy that can fuel stronger motivation and persistence. Chapter 7 examines the dynamics of building trust with students, noting how barriers to trust can be met and overcome even in a challenging and diverse urban environment. Trust hits schools’ bottom line: student achievement. This chapter reports research that demonstrates this link. Alternative ways of thinking about student and teacher misbehavior that stem from attachment theory are also explored. Chapter 8 discusses the challenges and rewards in building bridges of trust with families. How the facets of trust play out in these complex and often emotion-laden relationships are investigated, as are the consequences of trust in terms of family engagement.

Chapter 9 focuses on the hard work of trust repair and gives practical advice for repairing trust when it has been damaged in schools. Contemplating the high cost of broken trust and the arduous process of rebuilding trust once it has been damaged may enhance school leaders’ commitment to building and maintaining strong bonds of trust in the first place. Trust is rebuilt through the “four A’s of absolution”: Admit it, Apologize, Ask for forgiveness, and Amend your ways. Trust restoration is also facilitated by constructive attitudes and actions, clear boundaries, communication of promises and credible threats, and strategies for conflict resolution.

The final chapter focuses on the behaviors that make school leaders trustworthy. Trust plays an important role in principals’ functions of visioning, modeling, coaching, managing, and mediating. The advice in this chapter aims to help school leaders harness the powerful resource of trust in their day-to-day work so as to make their school more productive.

In addition to the ten chapters, this book contains two useful appendixes. The first appendix presents three trust measures for school leaders and scholars interested in assessing the level of trust in a school: the Student Trust in Faculty Scale, the Parent Trust in School Scale, and the Faculty Trust in Clients Scale. These surveys are accompanied by scoring directions and norms so that practitioners can compare the level of trust in their own school with that in other schools. The first appendix concludes with suggestions for how school leaders might constructively approach the reporting of these survey results. The second appendix provides additional resources for exploring three areas of thought that may be unfamiliar to readers: attachment theory, appreciative inquiry, and nonviolent communication in education.

There is no simple recipe for fostering trust. Building trust is a complex process requiring reflection and attention to context. The section titled “Putting It into Action” at the end of chapters 2 through 10 provide practical advice for putting the chapter’s ideas to work in your school. Further, the key points of each chapter are summarized in a bulleted list for easy reference. Finally, each chapter concludes with a section titled “Questions for Reflection and Discussion” that invites you to explore how the chapter’s ideas might be applied to trust development in your own setting, and might prove helpful if you are using this book as part of a class, professional development series, or collaborative study group.

The positive response to the first edition of Trust Matters has been one of the most gratifying aspects of my professional life. The most rewarding feedback has come when people have told me that reading Trust Matters gave them the language and structure to have conversations that they desperately needed to have in their school but hadn’t known how to have. It has also been rewarding to have my fellow professors of educational leadership share with me their graduates’ feedback that Trust Matters was among the most impactful and memorable content in their leadership preparation program. And it has been exciting to see the dramatic growth of new research on trust in schools, by both seasoned and young scholars alike. We are certainly noticing trust in every aspect of our society, and particularly in education. I cannot take credit for this uptick in interest in research on trust, but I am pleased to be part of the conversation.

I have learned so much from the success of the first edition of Trust Matters—not least the power of story. I did not set out to find three prototypical school leaders who would fit into a two-dimensional theory of leadership, with leaders falling either high or low on the task and relationship dimensions. It wasn’t until I was well into the analysis of the data that I realized I had in my three principal representatives of three quadrants of the model: a high-task, low-relationship principal (Gloria); a low-task, high-relationship principal (Fred); and a high-task, high-relationship principal (Brenda). The stories of these three principals provided a vivid backdrop on which to explore the multifaceted model of trust that is at the heart of this book. As exciting as that was, I still did not realize what classic leadership styles those three leaders represented until I began to travel around the country and around the world giving lectures on the content of this book. Person after person would tell me, “I recognize Fred, I worked for someone just like him!” Or, “I had the good fortune to work for a Brenda.” The stories of these three principals began to take on symbolic significance and a life of their own. I remember one afternoon when one of my educational leadership interns sat weeping in my office, exclaiming, “I’m just so afraid I’m going to be a Gloria!” It is my hope that this book has helped her and will help others avoid the pitfalls of trying to reform schools without trust.

This book taps into insights from both theory and research across a variety of fields to argue that school leaders need to attend to establishing and maintaining trusting relationships in their school. It provides practical advice on how to repair damaged trust and helps school leaders learn how to overcome low trust within their school and community so as to establish effective working relationships. My hope is that this work will serve to ignite greater interest in learning more about the dimensions and dynamics of trustworthy leadership, so that school leaders acquire the knowledge and skill to better cultivate trust as a vital resource for school success.