Written by Bailey Via
A Foundation of Trust
It is often said that collaboration moves at the speed of trust, a sentiment popularized by The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything author Stephen Covey and amplified by institutions like the Tamarack Institute. For collaboratives working on systems change initiatives, trust is an essential component of collaborative health. While many early-stage collaboratives may be eager to jump straight into the work, a foundation of trust is vital for bringing stakeholders together around a common north star and shared goals, strategies, structures, and processes to guide the work. Measuring collaborative health is often just as important as, if not more important than, measuring outputs and outcomes of long-term collaborative work. So, how do collaboratives facilitate trust-building, and how do they measure collaborative health?
Flipping the Script
If you have followed Elevate for a while, you’re probably familiar with our motto: Learn, Do, Together. We ground our work with organizations and collaboratives in learning from community members, organizations, research, data, and established best practices. We help organizations take that learning and translate it into action: clear priorities, usable frameworks, and strategic plans. We invest in relationships and collaboration at every step because we believe it makes each other and the work better.
All of those components are certainly necessary and valuable in all mission-oriented or systems change work. For collaboratives specifically, it may be helpful to think of these steps in a different order, and to add an additional element: Together, Do, Learn, Iterate. Let’s break it down.
Together. If collaboration moves at the speed of trust, investing in trust-building is a crucial early step in the formation of a collaborative. How do we facilitate collaborative trust-building with so many organizations, voices, and perspectives in the space? Let me introduce you to a dear friend and collaborative partner of Elevate, Dr. Amber Banks. Dr. Amber Banks is a social entrepreneur with a passion for all things trust and repair. She is the Founder & CEO of the Center for Trust and Transformation and the Founder of Trust Compass Studio. Dr. Banks’ Trust Compass Framework is designed to help individuals, organizations, and collectives navigate trust and repair through evidence-based trust assessments and capacity building around repair interventions. Assessing trust and repairing breakdowns are often necessary first steps before trust can be genuinely rebuilt and strengthened into relationships that can endure the many stages of collaborative work. Once repair interventions are designed and stakeholders have expressed a willingness to work toward a place of trust, collaborative leaders can begin facilitating relationship-building activities across the network.
Do. Once collaborative members are able to meaningfully deepen their connections to one another and a solid basis of trust has been established, the group can begin setting their shared mission and goals. They can get to work envisioning the conditions of the world they are working toward, and the goals, strategies, and tactics they will lean into to reach that vision. They can also co-design the structures and processes needed to conduct their shared work. Trust particularly undergirds this design process, as members can assuredly rely on one another as they develop roles and responsibilities for smaller teams within the collaborative network.
Learn. Once trust has been established and a significant amount of work has been done, it’s time to implement some collaborative learning processes that assess collaborative health and identify areas for growth. These learning opportunities often work well in cycles, maybe occurring annually or bi-annually based on the cadence of the work. Learning can take many different formats. Collaboratives can utilize surveys such as Frey’s Levels of Collaboration Scale or the Wilder Collaboration Factors Inventory to get a more quantitative assessment of collaborative health. Collaboratives may also choose to develop their own version of a partner survey measuring perceived health on a number of customized domains. These kinds of assessments are particularly useful in comparing collaborative health year over year, and can demonstrate clear areas for growth. There are also many other ways to engage collaborative members through qualitative methods such as interviews or focus groups to gather feedback on perceptions of collaborative health. Regardless of the method, it is essential to build in systems for regularly capturing feedback on perceived trust across the network, conditions that facilitate healthy collaborative work, and areas for growth across the collaborative.
Iterate. Aside from trust building, this is perhaps the most important step in the life cycle of a collaborative. Feedback is only as useful as the interventions designed to address it. It is essential to take feedback from collaborative members and co-design structures and processes to address pain points and facilitate the continuation of areas of strength. This ensures that members’ voices are heard and valued by network leadership, further solidifying trust across the entire collaborative. This also creates healthier conditions for critical systems change work to occur.
Letting Trust Guide the Work
So we’ve gone through the steps: Together, Do, Learn, Iterate. Now what? You guessed it: the cycle continues, each component remaining essential to long-term collaborative health. Starting from a place of intentional repair and trust-building will set a solid foundation for collaborative members to plan and organize their work together. Frequently checking in on perceptions of trust and collaborative health allows those processes to be adjusted as needed in order for the work to be done with fidelity. We build, we work, we check in and learn, we make changes, and we do it all again.
