Trust has always been a huge part of my practice. As an educator, as a leader, as someone who thinks about learning and leadership development, trust is a mainline in my thinking.
I probably learned this from my doctoral advisor, Prof. Ellie Drago-Severson. Her genuine trust and presence in the room — as a teacher and as a staff developer — creates trust like nothing I have ever seen. So much of her teaching depends on learners admitting vulnerability and mistakes, and this is only possible of there is trust in the group.
This is not to say that I did not think trust was important before I met Ellie. Rather, my many years of work with her and under her direction raised the importance of trust, in my thinking.
Like Ellie, the technical skills that I lay out and teach really just serve as examples or exemplars of deep values and ideas in practice. These are techniques that how frameworks of thinking can be used and lay out what that would look like. This means that I am really trying influence the thinking of those I am working with. I am hoping to plant ideas deeply and nurture them into influence on how they work — on how they think about their work.
Now, some people are more open to this kind of deep learning and some are more resistant. Ellie’s great gift was her ability to move the resistant towards being more open. I know that I originally held a lot of her ideas at arm’s length, but between their brilliance and her own brilliant ability to build trust, I came to appreciate them deeply.
I’ve been thinking particularly about trust and trust-building this week. I am always concerns about these things in my teaching and coaching. This week, though, I am thinking about how trust is built by leaders. Managers and direct supervisors can — and should — work on building trust through their direct relationships with their team members. However, many leaders are not primarily direct supervisors. On larger teams — an in whole organizations — the leaders have rather little direct contact with most of the people they lead. However they might have built trust with those they worked with more closely in the past, they need to find new ways to build trust from a larger group who will never have that kind sustained direct contact with them.
So, that is what I am thinking about today: How does a leader build trust with people without depending on the direct interpersonal relationship?