Trust is one of those words we use all the time in education. Schools want trusting relationships, and districts include trust in their strategic plans. Most leadership teams talk about building trust among staff. Unfortunately, try as we may, no one has ever built trust by telling people to trust one another.
Trust develops through experience. According to a Harvard Business Review article by leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, there are three core drivers of trust: authenticity, logic, and empathy. Trust, through these core drivers, is most likely to grow when people solve difficult problems together, follow through on commitments, navigate setbacks, and experience success as a team. Over time, those shared experiences create confidence in one another. Trust becomes the result and not necessarily the starting point.
The two of us are consistently trying to figure out if collective leader efficacy develops in much the same way. The late psychologist and scholar Albert Bandura defined collective efficacy as a group’s shared belief in its collective capability. That definition has shaped decades of research on teacher efficacy, collective teacher efficacy, and leader efficacy.
But there is still a question that continues to intrigue us. If collective leader efficacy is a shared belief, how does that belief develop? For nearly two decades, Kenneth Leithwood and Doris Jantzi’s research showed that collective leader efficacy matters. Leadership teams with stronger collective efficacy create stronger organizational conditions that ultimately influence student learning.
One of the great things about research, when looked at correctly, is how it invites new questions. If collective leader efficacy influences school improvement, how do leadership teams intentionally cultivate it?
Tom Guskey has researched and written extensively that educators rarely change their beliefs because someone persuades them to think differently. Instead, beliefs often change after educators engage in meaningful learning, implement new practices, observe positive results, and reflect on evidence of success. In other words, beliefs grow through experience.
That idea resonates deeply with what we have observed while working with leadership collectives across schools, districts, states, provinces, and regions. Leadership teams don’t seem to develop stronger collective beliefs simply because they attend the same workshop or hear the same keynote speaker. Instead, they begin by developing a shared understanding of the problem they are trying to solve.
They engage in genuine joint work rather than dividing tasks and reporting back and continually examine evidence that helps them understand whether their leadership actions are making a difference. Over time, their confidence in one another grows, and it’s not because someone told them to believe. It is because they experienced success together.
How to Achieve That Success
Leadership teams can’t wait for annual assessment results before deciding whether they’ve achieved that success. They need to know quickly whether they should continue, refine, or abandon a strategy. They need to look for leading indicators.
Here’s what teams need to consider:
- Are collaborative team conversations becoming more focused on learning?
- Are classroom observations showing greater instructional consistency?
- Are teachers using common formative assessments to adjust instruction?
- Are students demonstrating deeper engagement?
These aren’t replacements for achievement data. They are the evidence leadership teams use while improvement is still unfolding. At the same time, they should be asking whether those leading indicators strengthen collective leader efficacy itself, like we are.
When leadership teams repeatedly experience success together, that shared evidence may reinforce their collective belief that they can continue improving teaching and learning. That possibility also raises several questions that we believe deserve greater attention.
- How does collective leader efficacy develop over time?
- How do leadership teams move from individual confidence to genuinely shared belief?
- How do leading indicators contribute to that development?
- How does context influence the process across schools, districts, and regional leadership collectives?
These are not questions that challenge the important work that has come before, but it does build on it. Bandura helped us understand what efficacy is. Guskey helped us understand how beliefs often grow through learning and evidence. Leithwood and Jantzi demonstrated why leader collective efficacy matters.
Our hope is to contribute to the next chapter of that conversation by exploring how leadership teams intentionally cultivate shared beliefs through collaborative inquiry, disciplined attention to evidence, and sustained leadership learning. Our recently published research paper on collective leader efficacy represents our first attempt to better understand what happens before leadership teams develop the shared belief that, together, they can improve adult learning, instructional practice, and student learning. For us, we aren’t asking whether collective leader efficacy matters. We are trying to understand how leadership teams intentionally build it.
