In Foundations We Trust: Building the Trusting Relationships to Deliver in Education Philanthropy

Abstract

Coordinating the work of teams depends on members having clear roles and timelines for accomplishing their own tasks, as well as a shared understanding of the goals and processes that drive the team’s full set of tasks. Virtual teams often struggle to achieve this shared understanding because members must communicate across distance, time, and technology. However, building trust on virtual teams can mitigate these communication challenges through shared agreements about how to accomplish the work and transparent documentation of expectations. This capstone describes a strategic effort to build a culture of trust to coordinate a growing, virtual team at the Walton Family Foundation, a national funder of K-12 education. The team, having recently grown its staff to deliver on an expanded strategy, would express interest in better codifying individual roles and expectations for working together. The project would support this interest by working with subgroups to build a dashboard of responsibilities and a set of virtual team norms. Results from the strategic effort suggest that shared agreements and documentation may sustain trust, but trust is first established by a sequential group development process of creating a sense of belonging and normalizing safe dissent among members. Leaders, in particular, set the tone of interactions by balancing directive and facilitative approaches to group development. Once these elements of culture are in place, robust coordination follows. I suggest that the K-12 team at the Walton Family Foundation continue to build the trust to deliver by creating recurring opportunities for the team to revisit expectations, and by prioritizing leadership development to strengthen balanced management of group process. In addition, I suggest that foundations build trust as a key lever for coordinated impact by creating cultures of belonging and safe dissent among diverse colleagues, and by balancing directive and facilitative approaches to serving communities.