24 Underrated Ways to Build Trust with Faculty and Staff

July 11, 2026

Read Time - 7 minutes

“Trust is built in the smallest of moments.” ~ Brené Brown, “The Anatomy of Trust”

It’s mid-July. Your fall calendar is still mostly empty. In a few weeks it won’t be, and it won’t fill with the kind of appointments that build trust. It’ll fill with budgets, schedules, and the meetings other people drop onto it.

That gap is where this issue lives.

A while back, a friend told me what happened at a college-wide meeting. The dean stood up and announced they were going to start scheduling one-on-ones with faculty, just to get to know them. Then came the apology: “It’s been a busy time.” It caught the room off guard. Because this wasn’t a new dean finding their footing. They were four years into their role.

It’s easy for time to get away from us. There’s always another fire to put out, another deadline to meet, and suddenly the year, or several, has slipped by. Here’s what we often forget: the urgent work always finds its way onto the calendar. The important work rarely does. And the important work matters more than we let ourselves admit. Gallup, studying millions of workers, found that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement. Not the strategy. Or the budget. But the person in the chair, and the relationships they build.

So before the calendar fills, let’s design for the one part of the job that never schedules itself.

The Part of Leadership They Don’t Write Down

Pull out your official job description. You’ll see words like “manage,” “oversee,” “plan,” “evaluate.” What you won’t see is the single most important part of your role: building relationships.

The strength of those relationships quietly determines whether new ideas get shared, whether curriculum changes succeed, whether faculty feel invested or skeptical, whether staff step up with energy or disengage in silence. No matter how good your ideas are, without strong relationships, they stall.

This isn’t just a mood. On a recent episode of the Chronicle’s College Matters podcast, Lee Gardner pointed out that faculty no-confidence votes nearly tripled over a decade, and that only 53% of professors believe administrators respect their work, while 81% of administrators believe faculty respect theirs. That’s not a small misread. It’s a trust gap wide enough to stall anything of significance. Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Adrianna Kezar and Susan Elrod are blunt about who closes it: leaders have to “take the first step in reaching out, repairing and rebuilding where trust and relationships have been broken.” The 24 moves below are what taking that first step looks like on an ordinary Tuesday.

So let me ask you: if you looked at your calendar right now, would it reflect a role that’s primarily relational? Or would it read like a list of tasks and transactions?

Why Relationships Are the Multiplier

It’s easy to measure leadership by the visible wins. Solving a problem. Fixing a process. Pushing through a new idea. I’ll be the first to raise my hand and say that feels good. But the deeper credibility doesn’t come from the outcomes alone. It comes from the relationships you build along the way.

You don’t have to be best friends with everyone you lead. But taking the time to know them, their strengths, what they care about, what challenges them, signals that you’re invested in more than their output.

That kind of investment is your leadership capital. Not because you can “spend” it later, but because it creates trust. And when trust is there, people are more willing to share ideas, take risks, and follow you into something new and uncertain.

It helps to be precise about which trust we mean. A 2025 article in New Directions for Higher Education, What’s Trust Got to Do With It?, draws the line that matters for us: there’s institutional trust, faith in the college as a system, and there’s interpersonal trust, faith in the actual people you work beside. The system-level kind is mostly out of your hands on any given week. The interpersonal kind is the one you build by hand, one interaction at a time. It’s also the one that decides whether your faculty lean in or hold back.

24 Moves Most Leaders Never Try

This isn’t about trust falls, ropes courses, or another new-faculty lunch. Those are events you survive. Real relationships get built in smaller, stranger, and more repeatable moves. A few of these are mine, but most of them have been shared with me by other leaders over the years. Steal any of them:

1. Walk the buildings after lunch with a basket of chocolates or mints. You get the steps, and you hear what no one puts in an email.

2. Take one meeting a month somewhere that isn’t your office. A campus loop, a coffee, a walk to the parking lot. Movement can loosen what offices tighten.

3. Show up to the thing that matters to them. The exhibit, the defense, the poster session, the playoff game. Five minutes can be remembered for years.

4. Write the note by hand. A paper accepted, a grant funded, a kid graduated. Nobody throws away a handwritten note.

5. Open every leadership meeting with a win from someone who isn’t in the room. Recognition travels faster than you think.

6. Keep one detail about each person that has nothing to do with work. Ask about it next time. The follow-up is the relationship.

7. Have coffee with every new hire before their first day. Belonging starts on day zero, not day one.

8. Learn the names of the people who aren’t faculty. Facilities, the front desk, the lab techs, custodial.

9. Eat where the students eat once in a while. You’ll learn what faculty won’t tell you.

10. Forward something with one line: “This made me think of you.” Being thought of is rare, and people remember it.

11. Hold office hours for ideas, not problems. People bring their best thinking when it isn’t a complaint.

12. After a hard meeting, check on whoever got the worst news in the room. Fifteen minutes builds more loyalty than any pep talk.

13. Send a Friday “what I noticed” note that names specific people and specific good work. Specific beats generic every time.

14. Keep a running shared doc with each direct report. Drop in topics between meetings so the relationship stays warm in the gaps.

15. Trade one weekly status meeting for a bullet email. Then spend the time you saved on a conversation that’s actually human.

16. Act on birthdays and work anniversaries. Low effort, absurdly high signal. Let an admin hold the list.

17. Ask for their advice, not just give yours. “How would you handle this?” tells someone you trust their judgment.

18. Mark the hard times, not just the happy ones. A lost colleague, a brutal review cycle. Showing up in the low moments lands harder than the high ones.

19. Hold skip-level coffees. Meet the people who report to your reports. No agenda, just listening.

20. Brag about people upward. Tell their dean, provost, or president about good work, and copy them on it. Praise travels furthest when it goes over their head.

21. Co-teach or guest lecture once a semester. Faculty see you differently when you step into their world.

22. Introduce two people who should know each other, and say why. Connectors get remembered long after the introduction.

23. Walk someone to their next meeting instead of stopping at your door. The extra three minutes is where the real thing gets said.

24. Ask “what’s getting in your way that I could remove?” then actually remove it. Nothing builds trust like a leader who clears the path.

The Hard Part Is Doing Them

None of these are hard to understand, but they are hard to sustain. Good intentions don’t survive a full inbox, so don’t leave this to chance. Design for it:

• Pick two or three. Not all of them. A short list you actually do beats a long one you admire.

• Anchor each to something already on your week. The chocolate walk rides on the 3pm slump. The handwritten note rides on your Friday wrap-up.

• Make the recurring ones recurring. If it lives only in your memory, it won’t happen.

• Hand the logistics to someone else. An admin can hold the birthday list and book the new-hire coffees.

The leaders who do this well aren’t more caring than you. They’ve just built a system, so caring doesn’t depend on having a good week.

The Bottom Line

Budgets close. Reports get filed. Projects wrap up. The relationships you build keep opening doors long after all of it is forgotten. Build them while the calendar is still yours to design. The leaders who do the quiet work in the fall are the same ones who aren’t scrambling to repair trust in the spring.

Try This Before Friday

Pick two ideas from the list above. Just two.

Put one on your own calendar this week. Hand the other to your admin or a colleague to set up.

Don’t aim for the whole list. Aim for a start you’ll actually keep.

That's all for today. I'll see you next week.