Building trusting relationships: Lessons from labor and management collaborations
If you want any kind of school transformation to be successful, you have to spend time thinking about and building trust – and community schools work requires a lot of it, across all interest holders. In fact, trusting relationships is one of the enabling conditions of community school development in the Community Schools Forward CS Essentials Framework. And the other three enabling conditions – shared vision, inclusive decision-making and actionable data – are, themselves, predicated on (you guessed it) trust.
In effective and sustainable community schools, trusting relationships create the foundation for meaningful collaboration across all levels of the educational ecosystem. When mutual trust exists among people, teams, and organizations throughout the system–from schools to districts to community partners–people can develop the commitment, knowledge, and capacity needed to effectively engage with and work alongside diverse interest holders. This trust allows for authentic engagement with both traditional stakeholders like teachers and administrators as well as non-traditional voices such as families, community members, and students themselves. Most importantly, these trusting relationships provide the safe space necessary for stakeholders to work together through challenges, navigate conflicts constructively, and engage in honest, open conversations about how students and adults experience school. Without this foundation of trust, efforts to address the whole child within a comprehensive system fragment, and stakeholders retreat into silos rather than working together to create the conditions that children need to thrive academically, socially, and emotionally.
How do you know you’ve built trust? Some evidence of trusting relationships include:
Structures and practices for forming trust include strengths-based dialogue, regular meeting times, and shared and accessible language in group conversation (Biddle, 2017).
Trust between staff can build a culture of trust which may include things like: vulnerability, benevolence, reliability, competence, honesty, and openness (Hoy and Tarter, 2004).
Trust can be built through a shared vision, cooperation, and data-based decision making (Seashore Louis, 2006).
Parents and community-based organizations build trust in schools when they have meaningful input and decision-making (Van Maele, 2014; Tschannen-Moran, 2004).
Trust is not easy to build. It takes time and can be easily broken. People have long memories; distrust in systems and the people who populate them often stems from long histories of inequity, disinvestment and conflict. Threats to building and strengthening trusting relationships in schools include:
Top-down decision-making perceived as arbitrary, misinformed, or not in the best interest of the school;
Ineffective communication;
Lack of follow-through on or support for school improvement efforts and other projects;
Unstable / inadequate school funding;
Frequent turnover in school leadership;
High teacher turnover;
Teacher isolation
Even when trust has been broken, there is ample opportunity to repair and strengthen trust. By working through conflicts and having difficult conversations, people can emerge with newfound or rebuilt trust that allows them to partner effectively on community school development and other transformative work.
Take partnerships between labor and management, for example. The popular narrative is that labor and management are always at odds – their interests divided by an unbridgeable gap. But the California Labor Management Initiative (CA LMI) has seen a different story play out across the state. In districts from small rural communities to large urban systems, labor and management teams are choosing to collectively put students at the center. They are working side by side to improve culture, climate, and student outcomes. And they are proving that collaboration outside of collective bargaining not only strengthens their partnership, but also amplifies their professional expertise and experiences to maximize their impact on student success and school transformation, thereby creating great schools for students and the adults that work there.
CA LMI specializes in fostering this kind of collaboration and strengthening relationships within labor-management teams. They describe labor-management partnership as the intentional alignment of management and labor leaders to move beyond adversarial interactions toward deeper coherence, goal alignment, and shared impact. These partnerships make space for educator voices and for the insights of staff closest to the work, along with their union representatives, to meaningfully shape decisions that affect the whole system.
Communities where teachers’ unions and district leadership have embraced this approach offer valuable lessons for community school leaders and practitioners. CA LMI has identified three strategies any community can use to build trust, strengthen relationships, and foster effective partnerships.
Why it builds trust: Trust is strengthened when teams take time to reflect on the past, own previous missteps, and commit to improvement.
Action Step: Hold a structured reflection session to surface and discuss historical challenges in the relationship. Use a facilitator if needed to guide the group in naming harm, validating experiences, and identifying lessons learned. This can set a foundation for a fresh start and mutual accountability moving forward.
Why it builds trust: When all voices are consistently included in designing how decisions are made, it reinforces that every perspective is valued and that outcomes are a shared responsibility.
Action Step: Develop a shared decision-making framework collaboratively, where roles, responsibilities, and processes are clearly outlined. Include protocols for how input is gathered, how decisions are made, and how dissent is addressed respectfully.
Why it builds trust: Consistent communication reduces misunderstandings and prevents the perception of hidden agendas.
Action Step: Create a recurring communication cadence (e.g., biweekly check-ins or monthly updates) using shared agendas, clearly documented minutes, and follow-up action items. Ensure everyone on the team or work group has equal access to these communications.
One last tip. Come to the table with an open mind and the willingness to put in the work it takes to overcome histories of distrust, forge new relationships, and create strong partnerships that enable interest holders to work together. And snacks at meetings never hurt.
1Cori Brewster and Jennifer Railsback, Building Relationships for School Improvement: Implications for Principals and Teachers (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 2003).
Melissa Mitchell is a community school practitioner with more than fifteen years in the field. Her experiences range from Community School Coordinator to leading the Federation for Community Schools, a Illinois-wide capacity building and policy organization. Melissa has supported community school development in a variety of ways, from providing coaching and direct technical assistance to schools, districts, practitioners and community partners to working with legislators and policymakers to develop supportive-state level policies that advanced community school development across Illinois.
Gustavo Morales leads the California Labor Management Initiative, where he helps school districts across the state build strong, collaborative labor-management partnerships that center trust, shared leadership, and equity.
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