What does it take to move beyond “working together” towards shared leadership?
For many district and school leaders, this question feels increasingly urgent. Leaders are being called to create systems where responsibility is shared, voices are valued and actions are aligned to a common purpose, all while navigating staffing instability, competing priorities and a rapidly changing educational landscape.
During a Leadership Live conversation hosted by KnowledgeWorks’ Lead for Learners network, leaders from York School District One in South Carolina, shared how they have built a culture of trust, collaboration and distributed leadership across their district.
Their insights offer a powerful reminder that collaboration must be intentionally designed to create the conditions where people feel confident that their voices matter and have a sense of shared ownership and responsibility for outcomes.
Trust doesn’t just happen. It’s built.
When participants were asked what makes teams successful, one word surfaced repeatedly: trust. But as the York One team emphasized, trust is not something that emerges accidentally. It’s built through consistent, disciplined actions, shared experiences and intentional leadership choices over space and time.
For York One, trust begins with intentional onboarding. Every year, leaders engage in activities designed to help team members understand work styles, communication preferences and learning needs. According to Elissa Cox, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, these activities are not treated as one-off team-building exercises.
“It’s not just an activity you do that was fun, and you laugh, and you giggle, and you put it away,” Cox explained. “You leverage it throughout the year and throughout the projects that you are immersed in.”
That follow-through matters. It signals that people’s input is valued, and that collaboration is grounded in hearing and understanding one another. Trust is further strengthened through deliberate structures. The team maintains both whole-group meetings and one-on-one meetings throughout the year.
Becky Funderburk, coordinator of instructional design, says that these routines ensure multiple pathways for communication while reinforcing psychological safety.
“What’s shared in an open group might not be shared in one-on-one,” Funderburk notes. “How can I help make sure that we’re all jiving and everything’s moving in the right direction?”
Vulnerability is about the work
Conversations about trust often include advice to “be vulnerable.” But what does that look like in leadership practice?
For the York One team, vulnerability is not oversharing personal details, it’s creating safe conditions for honest conversations about the work. “Feeling safe to share either a challenge or a positive piece around the work that’s moving us forward, or to take a risk,” Cox explained.
That distinction is important. Leaders need spaces where they can test ideas, identify challenges, admit uncertainty and invite feedback without fear of judgment. April Aulmer, director of elementary programs and gifted education, added that vulnerability is only possible when leaders intentionally cultivate relationships grounded in authenticity.
“We have to lead with heart,” she said. “We have to be genuine, and we have to be honest and vulnerable with each other.”
When vulnerability is connected to shared outcomes, particularly improving experiences for students, it’s less about personal exposure and more about collective growth.
Alignment creates the conditions for autonomy
One of the greatest challenges in distributed leadership is balancing autonomy with coherence. How do leaders create space for others to lead while ensuring everyone remains connected to a shared vision? York One’s answer is clear.
The district operates with a Strategic Change Agenda that serves as its North Star and a Teaching and Learning Framework that provides guardrails for decision-making.
“Every single thing we do points back to that,” Aulmer said. These structures create clarity around purpose while allowing for flexibility in implementation.
The district reinforces this balance through several leadership structures, including monthly Connect and Collaborate sessions and regular Listen and Learn visits.
As a district leader, Funderburk explained that the goal is to coach and support principals by better understanding their needs. “We’re not coming in to tell them what to do, we’re listening to them, we’re learning what their needs are and we’re trying to identify the best way to support them.”
Goals are not handed down from central office. They are co-constructed and aligned to district priorities, creating shared ownership and strategic focus.
Accountability works best when it makes sense
Distributed leadership often raises questions about accountability. If leadership is shared, how do leaders ensure progress? For York One, accountability begins with relevance.
“Make it make sense,” Cox said.
Cox points out that when the connection between leadership goals, instructional priorities and school improvement efforts are clear, it is easier to hold people accountable. This approach reduces initiative fatigue and helps leaders see accountability as part of meaningful work rather than an additional compliance exercise. When goals connect directly to student learning and instructional improvement, accountability becomes a shared commitment rather than external pressure.
Collaboration requires leaders to navigate tension
Collaboration sounds inspiring in theory. In practice, it often involves disagreement, uncertainty and resistance. The York One team does not avoid these realities. Instead, they plan for them — proactively anticipating potential challenges and seeking to understand root causes before reacting.
“To work around tension, you’ve got to get to the root cause,” Aulmer explained. Tension, she noted, can stem from many sources:
- Fear
- Distrust
- Miscommunication
- Workload pressure
- Uncertainty
One district norm has become particularly important: “Presume the positive in everyone’s intent,” Aulmer shared.
The team also acknowledges the importance of understanding how individual team members process information and respond to change. “If you know that there’s a certain member that needs more process time,” Cox explained, “how do you frontload?” These practices help leaders move beyond surface-level resistance and address underlying needs.
Building trust quickly in times of change
Many districts are facing turnover, role changes and staffing transitions that make relationship-building more difficult. York One has developed practical tools to accelerate trust-building without sacrificing depth.
One example is a user guide, where team members share how they prefer to communicate, receive feedback and work with others. “It just gives you a good idea of people, and also something to reference,” Funderburk explained. The district has also developed collaborative playbooks that provide protocols, prompts and sentence stems to support productive dialogue.
By providing explicit structures, leaders create more equitable access to collaboration and help teams build trust faster.
Highest-leverage leadership move? Listen.
When asked what single leadership move could have the greatest impact on building trust, collaboration and shared ownership, the collective answer from the York One team was immediate and unanimous: Listen.
Specifically, invest in intentional listening through structured conversations. These conversations are not about directing or evaluating. They are about understanding. “That’s been the biggest return on investment,” Aulmer said. “Make time to go in their building and meet with them and just listen and hear them out.”
The broader lesson is that leadership is not about having all the answers; it is about building the trust, clarity and efficacy to allow for collective problem solving and decision making.
When trust becomes the strategy
Trust is not the byproduct of collaborative leadership. It is the work.
Too often, leaders search for new strategies, structures or initiatives to improve performance. Yet the York One team reminds us that sustainable change rarely begins with a new program. It begins with leaders who are willing to listen before directing, understand before judging and create space for others to lead.
As leaders, the most important question we can ask is not, “How do I get people to follow?” but rather, “How do I create the conditions for people to lead?”
And that work begins with the simple but powerful practice of showing up, listening deeply and building trust one conversation at a time.
What does this moment ask of us as leaders?
To slow down. Listen thoughtfully. Build trust. Lead with heart. Seek shared ownership, not compliance. And remember that every leadership decision should be rooted in a single question:
How will we lead for learners?
