A longtime professor at a liberal-arts college called me to discuss an important decision he had to make: The faculty senate had scheduled a “no confidence” vote in the president and he wasn’t sure which side to take. I didn’t know the particulars, but I heard him out. In the end, he decided to vote “no confidence” because, he said, “I just don’t trust the guy.”
Trust is hard to come by in the chaotic and uncertain early 21st century, whether between nations or individuals, in the public or the private sector. But the state of perpetual crisis in American higher education lately — over political issues, budget shortfalls, program cuts — has created a situation in which there is little encouragement to trust one another and lots of reasons not to. And yet on college campuses, trust is a fundamental basis of accomplishing anything, whether it’s a grand strategic plan or a single tenure-track hire.
I’ve been writing about administrator anxiety lately in the Admin 101 column — about how to find good mentors and how to make sure that your work matters — but now I want to touch on a primary reason for so much disquiet in leadership circles: the decline of trust.
Working in a trusting culture is really the only way to diminish the fear, uncertainty, and angst prevalent across so many campuses. Which is why a key mission of every administrative position today is to find ways to build trust and to avoid actions that break it. Here are some core principles and best practices to guide you, as you stay alert to the political factors that can undermine your best efforts to establish mutual confidence.
Tell as much of the truth as possible. My academic identity is that of a journalism professor. Primary among the fundamentals I teach is that journalists should try to uncover and report the truth as best as they can. When the public begins to doubt the veracity of journalists, as we’ve witnessed in recent years, it’s hard to win it back. Likewise, after some 20 years of administrative service, I continue to believe that people with titles and responsibilities beyond “professor” — chairs, deans, vice chancellors, presidents — will lose the trust of their campus constituents if they gain a reputation for obfuscation and secrecy.
The academic ecosystem makes deception both difficult and perilous. First, you are surrounded by smart people. As a department chair facing your faculty, you know that nearly every person in the room was an “A” student. Yes, they may not understand every nuance of the budget system or detail of a tenure denial, but they can smell a rat as well as any herd of cats.
Equally important, few faculty members think of a dean, or even a president, as “the boss.” A chief executive in the business world might get away with misdirection because no one in the company is willing to challenge them for fear of getting fired. In contrast, the vast majority of tenured professors — while they might not be eager to challenge a chancellor — typically don’t have the same job-security fears and vulnerabilities of corporate white-collar workers.
All this is to say: Just tell the truth. People may disagree, or even get mad at you for saying it, but they can’t argue you aren’t trustworthy.
Be candid about the limitations on what you can say. Constraints on your speech are part of the job of being an administrator. In any leadership position, there are details you simply cannot share (however much you’d like to) for legal, ethical, or privacy reasons.
As an administrator, you are a duty-bound agent or overseer of many legal, regulatory, and internal procedures and processes that restrict you from telling everything you know about a situation. A professor who goes on leave after a cancer diagnosis can share that news — the chair can’t. A dean who is a co-investigator in a sexual-harassment grievance must respect the confidentiality of the process — or risk ruining the “trust” of those involved and hindering the outcome.
When you are trying to build a culture of trust in your department, college, or institution, it’s clearly a disadvantage not to be able to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Your only option is to be equally truthful about the borders of the truth. Do your best to convey: “You can trust that what I’m saying is the truth that I can share, and here is why I can’t share all of it.” Build trust by being honest about the constraints on what you can say.
Resist the urge to overpromise. Fans of the television show The Office know that one of the flaws of the “world’s worst boss,” Michael Scott, is that he is a perennial overpromiser. He desperately wants to be liked. So he tells people what they want to hear even if delivering it would be impossible. The uncertainty and anxiety prevailing today in higher education tempts many campus administrators to overpromise. Too many leaders then blame someone else if what they’ve “guaranteed” does not come to pass. The department chair promised you a pay raise? Well, you would have gotten one if it hadn’t been for that mean old dean — no matter that the funds were never available and the chair knew that all along.
Administrative turnover means that leaders who pledge something may not be around when the bills come due. A case in point: The president of a small liberal-arts college claimed to have “fixed” its enrollment troubles. Turns out he did so by discounting tuition catastrophically to bring in more students. That president was able to use an empty “metrics win” to score a presidency at a better-endowed institution. Meanwhile, the one he left was holding the bag of losing much more money per student than was sustainable.
If you want to be trusted, therefore, only offer what you can deliver — without chicanery or secret manipulations. Always err on the side of conservatism in your projections. When your best-laid plans go awry, explain the failure and take the blame.
Tone and context matter. In building trust, you will face not only political and bureaucratic constraints, but cultural ones, too. In more than 30 years in higher education, I’ve worked at different institutions in different parts of the country, and talked with colleagues globally. And it’s clear that trust between the administration and the rest of the campus is a matter of tone as well as facts and actions.
To take an example, I know a department chair at an urban campus on the east coast. Most of his faculty members are New Jersey and New York natives, and are incredibly direct. If they have a problem, they state it immediately. They get loud at meetings. That level of bluntness helps build trust within this particular circle of people. They would see an overly polite, taciturn chair as hiding something.
Conversely, direct confrontation is perceived very negatively in some parts of the world, such as the Midwestern United States or East Asia. In “quiet” cultures, you can’t assume that a lack of challenges or protests about your idea means that people trust and believe you. In advocating a new program or policy, you may have to raise potential problems and questions about it yourself — giving voice to critics who might not feel comfortable speaking up. Let those concerns go unsaid and you’ll court trouble down the road.
Trust is a marathon, not a sprint. A dean I know told me that he thought he had established a relationship of trust with one of his associate deans at a university in the Western United States. For five years they had worked together amicably through day-to-day issues and crises. Then he found that the associate dean had seriously misrepresented how some important funding had been spent, not quite to the point of fraud but certainly constituting deception. The dean, after much rumination, released the associate dean from his administrative appointment to return to the faculty. He told me, “You only get one chance to lose my trust.”
We’ve all seen plenty of situations in which people manage to work together, even though they fundamentally distrust one another. But all of us tend to accomplish more, and feel more job satisfaction, when we’re not spending a lot of work time worrying about a dodgy boss or colleague.
Especially as a new leader, you can’t treat trust as a one-off. “Winning the trust of the faculty” is something you need to do every day, not just during your honeymoon period. Self-awareness is key to this long-term mutual satisfaction. You might feel that you trust the people around you and that they trust you, but you should still think about everything you say and do as if it is a continual referendum of confidence in you — and them. Good people will even accept a “no” from you on something they really want, if they think you are fundamentally fair and trustworthy.
In the end, to paraphrase Robert Browning, trying to achieve universal trust in any culture is always going to be an exercise in one’s reach exceeding one’s grasp. Still, you have to try. You are never going to secure everyone’s trust all the time, nor are you going to find everyone trustworthy. Part of being a professional is getting along with people who may very well have different behavioral codes from your own. But if higher education is going to get past its current trust deficit, all of us must take steps every day to instill confidence in one another.
