Trust Goes Both Ways: The Condition That Makes Genuine Reflection Possible

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." (Adam Grant, Think Again)

I have been thinking about that quote a lot lately. I am currently reading Adam Grant's Think Again, and it is doing exactly what the title promises, inviting me to reconsider perspectives I thought were settled, including my own.

So, I did. I re-read my earlier articles on the Trust Equation and the faculty's role in building psychological safety with students. And something didn't sit right.

It took me a moment to name it. Then it became obvious.

I had written about trust as something faculty build toward students. And that is true. Faculty self-orientation, the degree to which we are focused on our own interests rather than the student's development, is real and it matters. But I had written about it as if trust were a one-way construction project. Faculty lay the foundation. Students stand on it.

That is incomplete. And incomplete frameworks do not serve anyone well.

Trust Is A Two-Way Street

The Trust Equation, developed by Maister, Green, and Galford (2000), describes trust as a function of credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation. The lower your self-orientation, the more trustworthy you are, because you are focused on the other person rather than on yourself.

In my earlier writing, I applied this primarily to faculty. Before evaluating a student's clinical incident, faculty should ask: Am I frustrated with this student for non-clinical reasons? Am I comparing this student to others rather than to learning objectives? These are not comfortable questions. They require a willingness to examine your own motives before you examine someone else's behavior.

That examination is still essential. Faculty must do it.

But students must do something similar.

When a student enters a post-clinical conversation focused primarily on protecting their grade, managing how they appear to their instructor, or avoiding consequences, they bring high self-orientation to a process that requires honesty to function. And when both parties bring high self-orientation to the same table, nothing real gets built. What looks like a reflective conversation becomes a performance. What looks like accountability becomes compliance.

Trust is not something one person builds for another. It is something two people build together, or it does not get built at all.

What Bidirectional Trust Looks Like

This semester I saw what that actually means, not as a concept, but as an experience.

I had a clinical group who sought me out. Before the semester began, a few students approached me, introduced themselves, and asked what they needed to do to prepare. Some of the principles of the Trust Equation had already been established through word of mouth. When they arrived on the first day, trust existed before I said a word. That trust, inherited and relational, became the foundation for everything that followed.

Weeks later, after the semester began, I sat with each of them individually and asked them to reflect on their clinical practice, what happened in those conversations was not performance. The pause to think was real. Some students cried. Most assessed their own clinical performance more harshly than I did. They were not managing how they appeared to me. They were actually thinking. They brought low self-orientation to a process that required it, and because both of us did, something genuine got built.

That is bidirectional trust in practice. Not a theory. Two people in a conversation, both focused on something larger than themselves, the patient, and safe, quality care.

Why This Matters Beyond the Classroom

Nursing students do not stay students. They become nurses. And the relational skills they develop now, including how they build trust, how they navigate accountability, and how honestly they can examine their own thinking, travel with them into every clinical environment they will ever enter.

Quality improvement initiatives fail when team members are more focused on protecting themselves than on understanding what actually happened. Patient safety depends on nurses who can report errors honestly, receive feedback without shutting down, and engage with colleagues in ways that build rather than erode trust over time. The nurse who learned to perform accountability rather than practice it is not prepared for that environment.

The Trust Equation is not a classroom concept. It is a professional survival skill. And like every professional skill in nursing, it has to be practiced before it can be relied upon.

A Final Thought

I changed my mind about my own framework. Not because I was wrong about the faculty's role, but because I was incomplete about the students. Grant would call that progress. I call it the thing I would ask of any student sitting across from me in a hard conversation: the willingness to look honestly at what you might have missed, and the courage to name it.

That willingness is a vulnerability. It requires admitting you are not perfect, that you might be wrong, and that you are open to changing. For most, that is much easier said than done. But vulnerability is a necessary condition for the kind of trust this framework depends on. Not transactional trust, not professional trust built on credentials, but the relational trust that makes genuine reflection possible. The kind of trust that allows a student to cry in front of their instructor and know the space is safe. That kind of trust requires vulnerability from both parties. There is no shortcut around it.

And what I discovered this semester is that when both faculty and students bring that willingness to the same room, something else becomes possible. Something I am still learning to understand and to name. That is a conversation for next time.

Melinda R. Murray, MSN-Ed, RN, is an Assistant Professor of Nursing at Riverside City College and the developer of the Professional Culture Framework for Nursing Education. This article is part of an ongoing LinkedIn series exploring Just Culture, trust, and metacognitive reflection in nursing education.

Grant, A. (2021). Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. Viking. Maister, D. H., Green, C. H., & Galford, R. M. (2000). The Trusted Advisor. Free Press. Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.

© Melinda R. Murray, MSN-Ed, RN | ProfessionalCultureFramework.com