Highly experienced change Implementation practitioners widely emphasize that high-quality relationships, including trust, are a — if not the — critical factor for achieving positive implementation results. They describe trust between themselves and stakeholders, as well as among key stakeholders, as foundational for successful implementation and the sustainability of successful programs and practices.

Recently, many experienced practitioners have reported shifting their focus from strict adherence to specific frameworks towards prioritizing the development of trusting relationships and building team cohesion around sensemaking to achieve desired outcomes. Trusting relationships are consistently described as “important,” “critical,” “essential,” and “foundational” for creating an environment where change efforts are optimized and sustained.

Research, particularly in team settings, has linked higher levels of interpersonal trust to numerous positive outcomes relevant to the success of implementation teams, including:

Beyond directly contributing to these and other desirable implementation outcomes, trust can also be conceptualized as a moderator of associations between commonly applied implementation strategies and outcomes, potentially magnifying the impact of other strategies. Implementation efforts often involve uncertainty and require stakeholders to take risks and be vulnerable. Trust is thought to be at the center of this phenomenon, as it creates a foundation where individuals feel safe to engage in necessary behaviors for complex implementation work, such as asking questions, sharing diverse perspectives openly and honestly, offering support, and engaging in co-learning.

Although trusting relationships are frequently mentioned as important by implementation stakeholders leading implementation efforts, few studies have explored this topic in depth. This lack of research limits both theoretical and practical understanding of how these relationships can be built and why they are important. Notwithstanding, there is growing acknowledgment in the field of implementation that a wide range of skills, both technical and relational, are needed for effective and resilient implementation support. Building trusting relationships is uniformly identified as a critical skill for progressing implementation by emerging competencies for change professionals.