Multi-Dimensional Trust: how beginning principals build trust with their staff during leader succession

Abstract

As part of principal succession, new school leaders must take action to solidify their position as the school’s legitimate lead authority while at the same time, develop and utilize interactive mechanisms designed to nurture staff relations and engender teacher support and confidence in their leadership. For beginning principals, this process highlights the critical importance of understanding the influences and expectations of the leadership context and the need for building and maintaining trust. This paper explores how beginning principals attend to multidimensional criteria when building trust with their staff as part of early-phase school leadership during principal succession. New principals identified using actionable principles and behaviours related to knowledge/skills, interaction, and communication as a means to engender trust with their colleagues. Findings were combined with concepts associated with educational trust in extant research to create the conceptualization of Three-Dimensional Trust. The multidimensional trust model includes three different dimensions of criteria for each of two areas of ability—task ability and interpersonal ability.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms were used for participants’ names with the numbers 0 and 1 referring to participants’ completed years of experience as principal. The letter designations (A, B) were used to denote the two different school boards referred to in the study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shawn Northfield

Shawn Northfield, is an independent scholar, received his PhD in the field of educational leadership from the University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK. Email: [email protected]. He taught for four years at St. Francis Xavier University (Nova Scotia) at both the BEd and MEd levels, and worked as an invited guest professor for the Royal University of Bhutan at the graduate level. Prior to this, he was an award winning teacher and educational leader for 15 years at the secondary level in Calgary (Alberta). He has widespread national and international experience as a scholar, having presented and published in several areas including educational leadership, principal succession, teaching and learning strategies, and special education.