Just Announced!
Drawing upon data and outputs produced through the IRC4HR-funded Culture of Trust project (along with Knology’s more general trust research), this new playbook will list, describe, and illustrate effective strategies and practices that leaders of museums, and other organizations, can use to build trusting relationships with staff.
The practical guidance offered in this playbook will empower leaders with ideas for utilizing Knology’s trust framework in ways that help them diagnose and treat trust-related workplace concerns—and for monitoring the impact of trust-building efforts on leader-staff relations.
Researchers
John Voiklis, PhD
John Voiklis is a cognitive and social psychologist and Principal Researcher at Knology. His expertise includes the role of trust and social-moral motives in learning and decision-making. In addition to leading research on Culture of Trust, Dr. Voiklis has studied trust in a variety of organizational settings, ranging from museums, libraries, and schools to implement practices that convey trustworthiness to their various stakeholders. His research on trustworthiness and related topics started almost 20 years ago with funding from the U.S. Intelligence Community and DARPA and has continued with funding from the Institute for Museum and Library services, the National Science Foundation, and IRC4HR.
Elloitt Bowen
Elliott Bowen is the writing and communications lead at Knology. In addition to contributing to the research for Culture of Trust, he leads reporting on Knology’s partner-driven projects and is responsible for presenting Knology’s work product to the organization’s varied audiences. He also manages the Knology website, directs its social media efforts, and produces its monthly newsletter. Before coming to Knology, Dr. Bowen was an assistant professor of history at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, where he published a book exploring the intersections of health and environment in the early 20th century United States.
Nicole LaMarca
Nicole LaMarca, MA is a project manager and researcher at Knology. In addition to managing Culture of Trust, Nicole manages Knology’s biosphere projects, focusing on environmental education, civic engagement, science literacy, and climate resilience. She worked closely with The Nature Conservancy team from 2015 and 2019, evaluating their suite of youth engagement programs to build civic leadership skills and science knowledge, and foster deeper connections to nature. She has worked with the New England Aquarium since 2018, conducting program evaluations, curriculum development, and strategic planning to strengthen their environmental education and climate resilience initiatives.
Knology is a non-profit research organization that leverages social science to drive positive change. Knology’s approach to research is not just theoretical—they work alongside highly networked organizations (including professional associations, media creators, libraries, museums, game developers, and community groups) to simultaneously study and solve real world challenges in real time. Through research, evaluation, convenings, and capacity building workshops, Knology’s transdisciplinary team of social scientists, writers, and educators helps professionals improve their ability to facilitate understanding and advance public conversation. The work empowers education and communications professionals through research-based insights, tools, and resources that can be used to amplify impacts and generate shared community understandings that open new pathways to action.
IRC® + IRC4HR® Project Publications and Learning Materials
The playbook under development will be designed to help museum leaders and employees build, maintain, and restore trust in their day-to-day interactions. Practical and action-oriented, each chapter of the playbook will revolve around a separate leadership practice, which will be explored through discussions of relevant scholarly literature, real-world illustrations derived from the trust-building efforts of museum professionals, a set of reflection questions, and a comprehensive list of “do’s and don’ts” aimed at helping readers reap the rewards of working within a high-trust environment.
Project Details
Responses to the previous Knology project funded by IRC4HR, Culture of Trust, have been highly favorable. Since its launch in late 2024, blog posts associated with the project have consistently ranked among the most frequently viewed pages on the Knology website. Social media feedback on the trust webinar was universally positive, with attendees posting comments such as “great seminar” and “very interesting and timely conversation,” and praising the event for offering “important insight into the current state of our workplaces.” Those in attendance said they “loved hearing the real examples of challenges and solutions” to trust-related problems, and they appreciated seeing how Knology’s trust framework aligned with museum leaders’ efforts and practices. In the aftermath of this public event, a museum association previously outside of Knology’s existing networks requested a hands-on trust workshop based on project findings and outputs. All of this underscores the value of continuing the work begun in Culture of Trust.
To ensure that findings from this study fully connect the dots between research and practice in ways that benefit leaders and staff across each sector of the museum field, Knology is now creating an organizational trust playbook for museum leaders. The goal of this new project is to take emerging trust-building strategies and practices from Culture of Trust and compile them into a single playbook, which museums—and many other organizations—can then use to resolve (and hopefully, prevent) trust-related disputes that arise in the workplace.
This document will distill findings from Culture of Trust into a series of best practices for trustworthy leadership. The practical guidance offered in this playbook will empower organizations with ideas for utilizing Knology’s trust framework in ways that help them diagnose and treat trust-related workplace concerns—and for monitoring the impact of trust-building efforts on leader-staff relations.
Each chapter of the playbook will focus on a specific practice, and will be accompanied by a variety of supporting materials designed to facilitate action around that practice—including:
- Summaries of relevant scholarly research;
- Vignettes illustrating real-world examples and use cases (based on conversations with museum leaders);
- Discussion and reflection questions; and
- Implementation tips (including “do’s and don’ts”)
By taking advantage of the guidance offered in this playbook, organizations across the museum sector, and beyond, can forge an in-depth understanding of the factors that influence trust within their workplaces, and begin to take actions that bring them all of the benefits associated with working in high-trust environments including increased levels of cooperation and job satisfaction, enhanced productivity, and a greater openness to change and innovation.
