"Reimagining Trust: Creating Equitable Social Environments"

It can be extremely challenging, difficult, make-you-wanna-holla-and-throw-up-both-your-hands hard to cultivate trust inside of a space that operates with all of the facilities and premium features of the dominant culture. Trust is nearly always assumed, implied, head nodded to by people whose lived experience doesn’t include the critical survival tool of having to know how to read a room in 2.5 seconds and sizing cats up in 1.8. This, first learned in childhood, near the bench, by the fence, around the corner, up the block, across from the park, on the roof, down in the blue-lighted basement.?

Trust in organizations, for all appearances, is easily found throughout the pages of the employee handbook. How it lives and breathes inside of organizations is the 'whoop, there it is' that matters. Period. Appropriate uses of trust are found in places where transparency is an input and clarity is an outcome. Community members feel they have what they need and are empowered to ask for support. Conflict resolution is valued for the insights it produces and prized for its ability to discover, uncover or recover shared values. Folk look forward to regularly scheduled gatherings and cultural exchanges. They eagerly plan and/or participate and freely broadcast highlights. Examples of abuses of trust are outlined in the procedures and protocols and policies. Consequences range from written reprimands to terminations and are the cause of coffee-pod removal squabbles? and straight up knuck-if-you-buck beef. That tension-laced silence weighted with unspoken frustrations, simmering resentments and draining anxiety that impacts the quality of work and performance is usually connected to an incident or incidents where trust was breached or broken.

Trust is neither a matter of entitlement nor should it be viewed as an implication. Trust is a matter of physics, really, in that its presence or absence will inform how organizations thrive and flourish, maintain mediocrity, or falter and fail. As an educator in New York City, I’ve been in schools where trust is implied but misapplied in inequitable and harmful ways that negatively impact students, their families, and the external community. In one particular school where the majority of the adults had spent their formative years within institutions where most individuals shared the same or similar identities, it was assumed that relationships were positive and healthy. For the students, many of whom lived in the neighborhood or who had a firm grasp on the mores specific to the area, trust was contextual, at best; tenuous, at worst. Trust was subjective and favored adults. Trust was withheld as punishment for perceived violations of shifting behavioral codes, designed to protect and preserve adult dignity solely.?

Once while in this school, I went? to observe a teacher that I had personally trained. I was at the classroom a few minutes early to see what the arrival routine was like. Two students were speaking to each other near the door and after offering a greeting, I asked if I was in the right place. They assured me that I was and after some moments of pleasant chatter, one of them asked who I was. After I gave the quick version, they asked if the purpose of my visit had anything to do with the fact their teacher was not a very good one. I asked them why they thought that and one said simply, “She acts like she’s scared of us and doesn’t like us and the only reason she comes here is to hang out with her friends.” The other student signaled their approval of the well-delivered summarization with a high five. I told them what I would be paying attention to through the lens of my? well-informed expertise and offered to provide them with my honest feedback when class was done. I also asked them if they would be willing to suggest any next steps which they indicated they would. That interaction, literally, took all of 47 seconds.?

How is that even possible? I showed up with warm energy, openness and respect; I was authentic; I listened and genuinely appreciated their generosity, which was offered voluntarily. In other words, they felt seen and heard. Even if they had ended the conversation after hearing “Hi, my name is…”, showing up the way I did, as a humble guest in their house, I had earned trust. It is a tangible feeling and one that can make for a clumsily contrived explanation. Again, it is honed while shouting "Mother, May I?!”, playing Taps, jumping rope, and strenuous negotiations with parents around streetlight-enforced curfews. And while the technologies that attend young people may change from decade to decade, that kind of knowing does not. It is a matter of having to navigate the nuanced complexities of safety and security, protection and peace.

Of course, my student-colleagues had offered an astute assessment. The teacher, who had done her best to prove to me that she was a good person with the best of intentions during her training and our subsequent one-to–ones, seemed overwhelmed and ill prepared to manage the class such that teaching and learning flowed seamlessly. Further, her use of sarcasm, which is abusive inside of relationships with uneven power dynamics, was the prevailing response to questions she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. For balance, some of the questions asked by some students in the class, though highly creative, were designed to cause embarrassment and hurt feelings. But the old adage of don’t start none, won’t be none, vigorously applies here.?

When the class ended, the teacher thanked me and hurried out of the room. I briefly conferred with the students as promised and received their permission to share their recommendations with the school’s principal, which I did. They were strong in their belief that high school was the absolutely wrong setting for that teacher but added that she would probably be a better one in an elementary school. The students had even offered to send letters to their younger peers to give them tips for success in her classroom, if and when that ‘promotion’ happened. The principal was shocked to learn that I agreed with his students and was surprised that his prior attempts to elicit the same kinds of responses from students in that same class had not yielded the same results. The teacher did wind up leaving about a year later. For his part, the principal spent a significant chunk of time showing me what the data said about trust, holding meetings to review the data with staff and implementing their ideas for building trust by doubling down on calls home and having, allegedly, restorative conversations with students rather than using that time to build a bridge to trust. That would have required the students’ lived experiences to be recognized as wisdom that yielded a trust that would never be found in a rubric, metric or evaluative tool that they didn’t co-develop.

Whether in school settings, corporations or non-profit organizations, where power is hoarded and where societal inequities persist, trust becomes diluted. When perfectionism hinders progress, confusion prevails, and awareness is lacking, the foundation for trust weakens. Reflection is scarce and effectiveness yields to mere efficiency. It is in these places where? definitions are often reduced to simplistic binaries of good/bad and right/wrong, leading to a trust that is watered down, fragile and questionable in its existence. According to the gospel of Toni Morrison, “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” The same could be said of trust. A thinned trust does little to bolster, to shore up, to repair, to make whole-it lacks heft and is bereft of depth.?

Trust makes everything possible. It allows the potential to become the actual and guides the practical. Trust takes time, requires courage, invites willingness, teaches flexibility and provides mechanisms for adaptability and advancement. Trust is found in the small talk as well as in the big goals. Trust necessitates reciprocity and mutuality. It can emerge from messy conversations but is easily lost when hateration and holleration get it crunk up in the dancery-the? confusion erodes trust and the resultant chaos is a distraction.?

Trust should live clearly and transparently in every facet of your organization. It begins with leaders modeling their trustworthiness through actions, demonstrating integrity and accountability. Leaders also need to build and maintain open lines of communication while also providing consistent updates on any changes or challenges. In these places, commitments are kept and processes are clear. Members of the community honor responsibility in decision-making and feel vested in enhancing outcomes. Here, efforts are recognized and achievements are celebrated, individually as well as collectively. Constructive feedback is welcomed as a way to promote professional development and personal growth; resources for support are abundant. Collaboration is the preferred approach to ideation, innovation and? problem solving. Mistakes are encouraged, risk-taking applauded and issues are identified, addressed and resolved fairly.?

In the wider, open areas that live just outside the walls and cubicles and hallways of your physical or virtual office, trust has become the victim of slander. It has been captured and corrupted into a twisted and knotted version of itself that is barely recognizable to the eye. But because trust was created to be tangible, as an experience of truth, there is reason to be optimistic. Trust really is a matter of physics. It is dynamic and intentional. It must be cultivated, tended to, representing an ongoing cycle of beginnings and renewals. Trust is neither static or passive. It is an action, an endeavor, a breath forward. Its inherent possibility holds great promise for work that is meaningful and purposeful, particularly in times when uncertainty swirls alongside chaos.

We all need to commit, or recommit, to nurturing trust within our teams, organizations, communities, crews and ‘hoods. Collectively, we can create environments where open communication, collaboration, and mutual respect thrive. As we embrace the dynamic nature of trust, let us take intentional steps forward, building and fostering relationships that empower us to navigate uncertainty and pursue life affirming, community uplifting work.