Trust through Community

“Whatever the problem, community is the answer.” – Margaret Wheatley

Every school year brings challenges. Last school year was no different in that way for my school community. Facing challenges when you are a leader who is new to a community can be particularly challenging but not insurmountable.

Some of the challenges we faced last May left me with a feeling of unrest. I was unsettled. Things were not sitting well with me as we went into summer, and I knew that I needed to meet those challenges head on as we moved into this school year.

There was a particular team of individuals that didn’t trust leadership. They had reasons not to and whether those reasons were valid or not is really not for me to say. At the end of the day, trust was not there, and we all know that trust is absolutely foundational to the work we do every day.

Building trust can feel daunting. It can also feel unfair. People make assumptions about us as leaders on title alone, or they may believe versions of stories about the past or present that don’t align with what we believe is the current reality.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is whether we have their trust or we don’t. And if we don’t, we must humble ourselves to that reality. We must stop worrying about who is right and focus our energy on getting our response right.

There’s no playbook or one way to build trust but as someone who has been navigating what feels like shaky ground with a team. Here are some small steps forward that I’ve committed to this school year:

Proximity

To quote Ariel from the little mermaid, “I wanna be where the people are.” In The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, he talks about how the highest performing teams aren’t always the most talented, they are often the ones who have high trust and that in a study of teams who worked next to each other and then teams who worked on different floors of a building, the teams that worked in closer proximity to each other performed at a high level even if their skills weren’t as strong as the other teams.

Visit Classrooms

Not only is it paramount for us to spend time in the schools as district leaders, but it’s important to be in classrooms. When we schedule time with a teacher for a conversation, we should take every opportunity to connect with them in their classrooms and not in our offices. If you want to grow trust, spending time together in a space where someone already feels safe and where they have the most agency is key. They are more likely to be vulnerable and share openly when this is true. Without openness in the conversation, we cannot get a true feel for how people think, root causes of perceptions and realities, and we cannot move forward in a meaningful way.

Ask Open-Ended, None Leading Questions

Over the summer, I had the opportunity to attend two days of learning with the talented authors of Otherful, Mike Kleba and Ryan O’Hara. A couple of questions they mentioned that I’ve been using in my 1:1 classroom conversations have opened up the dialogue in significant ways.

Questions such as, “What is something I might be missing right now?” And, “What is something that you believe people aren’t telling me right now?” These questions are very open-ended, do not lead the speaker in a specific direction, and demonstrate a true desire to hear hard things and learn from them. I’ve added another question at the end, “Who do you think I should talk to next?” When they share, I simply ask them to “Tell them that you sent me.” This helps me, as someone who is a new leader to the district, open doors to more conversations, but it also makes the invisible more visible. Relationships and connections that I might not have know about become more apparent. It also grows culture, making people feel seen and valued when their colleagues tell a leader that they should hear from them.

Trust does not require us to stop doing hard things or to stop making decisions that we believe are right even when others disagree. We do, however, need to consider diverse perspectives, allow plans to be influenced (when appropriate) by those perspectives, use a solid decision-making process, and communicate clearly not only why a big decision was made but the process which led to it. We also need to communicate how the process gathered input from those closest to the work and most impacted by the decision.

As I say in Legacy of Learning, my expectations for learning are high. My expectations for how we treat each other are even higher.

So much of this is communication, folks. We are never done growing our communication skills.