Every time you communicate with someone, they come away trusting you a little more, or a little less. Most of the time you can feel this happen, even if you could not put it into words. You send a message or have a conversation, and afterward the relationship feels a little stronger, or a little more strained, and it is hard to say exactly why. This happens with every kind of communication you have, no matter who it is for or how it goes out. This chapter explains what is really happening in those moments, and it gives you a simple way to see it for yourself in anything you send or say.
Start with what changes in all of those moments. Each message or conversation can make the relationship feel stronger or weaker. The plainest word for what is changing is trust. We use the word all the time without stopping to define it, so it helps to be clear. To trust someone is to be willing to depend on them, because you expect good things from them. Researchers describe trust in much the same way. Rousseau and her colleagues, in a paper in 1998, defined trust as a willingness to depend on another person, based on positive expectations of them. When a family, a coworker, or a community member trusts you, they are willing to count on you, because they expect you will come through. Every time you communicate, you give them a reason to count on you a little more, or a little less.
The first important thing to understand is that trust is not just one feeling. Trust is built out of several separate parts, and you can name each one. A feeling that seemed like a single thing turns out to have pieces you can point to. Once you can name the pieces, a vague sense of "I trust this person" or "something feels off" turns into something you can actually read.
Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman, writing in the Academy of Management Review in 1995, point to a few basic things that trust rests on. People weigh whether you seem able to do the work. They weigh whether you seem to genuinely care about them. And they weigh whether you come across as honest. Other researchers have looked closely at how trust works inside schools and districts, where relationships are personal and last for years. Hoy and Tschannen-Moran, writing in the Journal of School Leadership in 1999, found five parts that come up again and again. People trust you more when they can count on what you know how to do, when they believe you care, and when they find you honest. They trust you, too, when they can depend on you to follow through, and when you stay open with them.
It is worth slowing down on those five, because each one is doing something a little different. Competence is whether you seem to know what you are doing. Care is whether the person believes you have their interests at heart. Honesty is whether you tell the truth, including the parts that are uncomfortable to say. Dependability is whether you do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it. And openness is whether you share what you know freely, so people are not left guessing. Each of these matters on its own, and full trust is all of them together. They are what people are weighing, almost always without thinking about it, every time they decide how far to count on you.
Now for the part you can use. Because trust is built from parts you can name, any single thing you communicate can be read by which parts it builds and which it spends. Watch how this works on one ordinary example.
Think about a time someone asked you a hard question, and you gave them an honest answer when you said you would. You told them plainly what you knew. You were just as plain about what you did not know yet, and you told them when you would know more. Then you followed through and did the one thing you had promised to do. Now look at that exchange through the parts of trust, one at a time. Because you answered when you said you would, you showed the person they could depend on you. Because you took their question seriously, you showed them that you cared. Because you were honest about what you did not know yet, you were both honest and open with them. And because you handled the question well, you showed them you were good at your work. That single answer made several of these deposits at the same time.
You can use the same approach with anything you communicate. A clear message that people understand the first time shows that you know what you are doing and that you care enough to make things easy for them. A promise you keep builds your dependability. A hard piece of news you share early and plainly builds your honesty and your openness. You do not have to think it through part by part in the moment. With a little practice, you can feel which way an exchange moved, and now you have the words for why.
The same approach also shows how communication can weaken trust. Picture a promise that is quietly dropped. Someone said they would follow up by a certain day, and the day comes and goes with no word. The promise may have been warm and completely sincere when it was made. But even if it was, failing to follow through still makes you seem less dependable. You can see the cost as soon as you name the part it touched, and it is the same cost no matter who let the promise slip.
This is the idea at the center of the whole book, so it is worth stating plainly. Every communication is either a deposit into trust or a withdrawal from it. You can picture the trust you share with the people around you as a kind of bank account. Some of what you communicate adds to the balance. Some of it draws the balance down. Most of the time the change is small, and no single message decides everything. But the account is real, and it is always moving, a little at a time, in one direction or the other.
You might reasonably wonder whether this is worth thinking about on an already full day. It is, and the evidence behind it is unusually strong. Bryk and Schneider, in their book Trust in Schools in 2002, ran a long study of Chicago elementary schools. They found that schools where people trusted one another were far more likely to improve in reading and math over the years. Schools low in trust mostly did not. This was a pattern watched over time, not a controlled experiment. So the honest way to say it is that strong trust goes with stronger schools, not that it has been proven to cause them. A large review by Roorda and colleagues, published in School Psychology Review in 2017, points the same way. It gathered 189 separate studies, covering about 250,000 students. Warm, close relationships between adults and students are linked to more engagement, and, more modestly, to higher achievement.
Other researchers have tightened the picture without overstating it. Goddard, Tschannen-Moran, and Hoy published a careful study in the Elementary School Journal in 2001. They accounted for students' past scores and for poverty. Even then, trust predicted higher reading and math. Adams and Forsyth, in the same journal in 2013, studied 56 urban elementary schools and found part of the reason why. Trust seems to help students manage their own learning, and that carries some of the benefit. None of this proves that trust by itself lifts a test score. What it shows, over and over, is that trust and good outcomes travel together. For anyone who wants the fuller picture, Forsyth, Adams, and Hoy gathered three decades of this research into one book, Collective Trust, in 2011.
Most of this research looks at students and test scores, because that is what schools are measured on. The reason it matters reaches everyone, though, including those of us who never sit down with a student. A school district runs on trust between the people inside it, and you are one of those people. The trust you build with a colleague, a teacher, a principal, a district leader, a parent, or a partner you rely on is part of the same trust account. When the people in a system can count on one another, the system holds together, and it holds together for the students it serves. That is why the work is worth doing, wherever your desk sits.
Trust is worth protecting, and every message or conversation gives you a chance to strengthen it.
Look again at the communications you will have today, whatever they turn out to be. Every one of those moments adds something to this shared trust account, or takes something out of it, and now you can see which one it does. Pick one thing you communicated today and read it the same way we just read the others. Ask yourself which part of trust it built, and which part it spent.