How to Generate Trust In Leadership

Why is trust so critical to leadership? The reason is that the need for trust has the same origins as the need for leadership. The role of school leaders is to ensure the proper functioning and constant improvement of all aspects of a school. As such, school leaders have to make decisions for other people, and for different people. However, this situation comes with agency problems, which can degenerate into distrust.

Sources  of  Distrust

One of the reasons why leaders are needed is to solve problems that have to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, and with good judgment, which creates a risk of inconsistency and unpredictability.

More generally, the reason why leaders are needed is because decisions have to be made for an entire community that can hardly be made directly by its individual members. Yet, one the most obvious problems associated with agency is the risk that “agents”, or trustees, be perceived as serving different interests than the ones of their trustor. This is particularly true for school leaders, who have to serve a community with different constituents and individual members.

Another issue associated with agency is the risk that those entrusted with responsibilities be seen as misusing or even abusing their “authority” or decision-making ability. Who will “watch the watchmen”?

Finally, leaders are needed when complex problems require a level of expertise to be effectively addressed. The risk, here, is that leaders might be seen, either as failing to tackle pressing issues, or to the contrary as dispersing their efforts without proper prioritization and strategy, and thus with poor results.

Sources  Of  Trust

The previous sources of distrust are the exact opposite of the definition of trust proposed by McKnight and Chervany (2001): the belief that another person is willing and able to make good decisions. More precisely, these authors lay out the following sources of trust:

• Predictability - Trust requires the belief that a leader’s decisions are consistent enough that one can forecast them.
• Benevolence - Trust requires the belief that a leader cares about their community and its individual members and has their best interest in mind.
• Integrity - Trust requires the belief that a leader is honest and fair.
• Competence - Trust requires the belief that a leader has the ability to do, or get done, what they say.

Importantly, trust is the combination of such personal attributes. A leader perceived as predictable could still be distrusted if they were not also perceived as making consistently good decisions. Of course, this expectation of good decisions has to be rooted in a belief in the benevolence of the leader. However, a general goodwill would not be enough if the leader wasn’t also believed to be transparent and ethical. Finally, all this good intent would be irrelevant if the leader wasn’t perceived as being capable of delivering on such great promises.

As McKnight and Chervany (2001) put it, “a trustee who is consistently (predictable) shown to be willing (benevolent) and able (competent) to serve the trustor’s interest in an honest, ethical manner (integrity) is indeed worthy of trust.”

Generating  Trust

Based on this definition, how can leaders generate and cultivate the trust they need from the community of individuals they have to serve? As obvious as it sounds, the only way for leaders to appear trustworthy is to be trustworthy, and to communicate this trustworthiness:

• To communicate predictability, leaders must make sure to be consistent in their decisions by following clear and explicit rules.
• To communicate benevolence, such rules have to be rooted in clear and explicit values. Such ideals must, of course, be the ones laid out in the mission and vision of the school, but it is also important for leaders to make visible efforts to learn about the needs and issues faced by the different constituents of their school community.
• To communicate integrity, leaders must be transparent in their decision-making processes, treat everybody equitably, and most importantly hold themselves to whatever standards they set for others. This includes asking feedback about their leadership, and owning necessary adjustments.
• To communicate competence, leaders must follow clear and explicit action plans that stem from a global analysis of the performance of the school and are focused on specific improvement goals. 

Conclusion

Because issues of trust are so pervasive and critical, leaders must be acutely aware of the issues associated with agency and constantly mindful of the effects of their decisions on their long-term credibility. The only way to generate and cultivate trust is to be intentional about it. Part of it involves making sure that one’s decisions are rightfully perceived as being in line with the best interest of the community as a whole; but the other part also involves helping its different members see this group-level interest as their own.

References

McKnight and Chervany (2001) - Harrison McKnight D., Chervany N.L. (2001) "Trust and Distrust Definitions: One Bite at a Time". In: Falcone R., Singh M., Tan YH. (eds) Trust in Cyber-societies. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2246. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45547-7_3