Chapter 4: Engagement Principles
Principle One – Building Trust
Principle One – Building Trust
The role and importance of trust in all your engagement efforts cannot be under-estimated or under-valued. Without a purposeful and consistent effort to foster trust and build strong relationships throughout your process, even the best-designed and most thoughtful engagement processes will almost certainly either fail or fall short of the success you seek to achieve.
Quite simply every aspect, communication, strategy, and activity should be seen through the lens of whether it either builds or potentially diminishes trust within your group, between you and the group, and in the process and project itself.
While there are several keys to building trust within any group, the goal of fostering it should permeate every aspect of your engagement program – from design to formation to implementation to evaluation.
As the literature highlights, and most of us realize, trust is the foundation of social relationships. Importantly, it is both relational and interactional – meaning it is based on both existing relationships as well as repeated interactions that involving reciprocity, cycles of reliable exchange, and fulfillment of expectations. This can be a critical consideration given the fact that many stakeholder engagement initiatives involve individuals who may not have previously worked closely together, may not feel comfortable sharing ideas, might have differing perceptions of risk, or involve real or perceived power imbalances. Â
Trust in the Water for Agriculture Project
While facilitators in our sites each approached trust-building somewhat differently – owing to variable levels of trust and relationships already existing among members of the group – there were many commonalities. Beyond creating and expecting a respectful environment, our strategies included ensuring members had ample opportunity to share their expertise and experiences both formally through presentations, and informally through carefully moderated discussions. Additionally, facilitation strategies such as World Café and other exercises allowed members to equally participate in robust and in-depth idea and perspective sharing. Other examples included ensuring that all perspectives, information, and values were freely shared. This reinforced the expectation that the group was exploring the issues they were most interested in a careful and balanced manner, with no one ‘side’ or perspective dominating, or any preconceived outcome expected.
Practice Tips for Building Trust
- Effective communication
- Respecting all voices
- Ensuring transparent processes
- Sharing comprehensive information widely that represents the full complexity of an issue
- Engaging stakeholders in meaningful ways
Each of these circumstances present potential challenges to building trusting relationships and interactions across the group. They also provide opportunities for facilitators to be continuously alert and responsive to a wide range of dynamics potentially affecting their group’s level of trust and develop strategies and activities accordingly.
For this reason, and many others, the need to foster trust is critical as an integral aspect (and design feature) of our Process Model (Chapter 6) and many of the Process Attributes (Chapter 5) of effective engagement. In the Tools and Worksheets tab for this chapter, you can find our Trust Building Worksheet, designed to help you think through the approach you will take to build trust in your context.
Tools & worksheets
Trust Building Worksheet
The purpose of this worksheet is to help you explore some of the ways your initiative can position itself to make the most of its opportunities to foster trust among participants and between conveners and participants.
Additional resources
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