The Trust Imperative

School leaders face increasingly complex challenges that require the implementation of efficient, collaborative decision-making practices. Developing approaches that nurture a culture of trust throughout the school community allows leaders to face adverse situations with greater consistency and stability. The Trust Imperative:Practical Approaches to Effective School Leadership provides school leaders with a practitioner’s perspective on how best to foster a culture of trust throughout the school community, with specific strategies and ideas to be adapted and followed that can transform the work of the school leader. Readers will leave each chapter with renewed or revised thinking about their own leadership style and practices, improving their work life and creating an organization where students and staff feel trusted and empowered.

Todayes businesses environment is highly demanding and increasingly competitive, requiring organizations to be flexible, responsive, and continually innovative. In order for this to happen, there must be a high degree of trust throughout the organization. Leaders need to trust that their workers will carry out their directives, and employees need a high level of trust in the vision and direction that leaders create for the organization. Without this trust an organization will struggle to reach its goals and attain the success desired. This is the focus of The Trust Imperative: Performance Improvement Through Productive Relationships, by Steven Hacker and Marsha Willard, which explains how to develop trust throughout an organization, while improving performance and increasing productivity. Many organizations have major problems as they try to gain the trust of their own personnel, as well as the trust of their customers and suppliers. In many cases, an organizationes attempts to gain trust lack credibility and create more problems than they solve. The Trust Imperative helps break through these obstacles, by offering a straightforward method for assessing trust across an organization. the book offers simple conceptual models, assessments, and trust tools which will help individuals diagnose, measure, and improve the level of trust within the organization. the authors then provide succinct tips and techniques to support the continuous development of trust within any organization.

Understanding the dynamics of trust is an imperative undertaking for educational leaders. In this book, using an ecological perspective of the lifecycle, the authors situate trust as an essential ingredient of school leaders’ moral agency and ethical decision making. Based on their 15 years of research on trust in education, the authors describe the nature and dimensions of trust, its importance and imperative, and its fragility and usefulness for school leaders, positioning them as trust brokers in school organizations.