The concept of trust is crucial in building respect, honesty, and openness among educators to help them professionally collaborate with one another to promote learning. The education leaders are vital in building up trust to create an effective learning and teaching environment. Given that, my current research interest is how school principals build trust and collaboration and what early stages of leadership support for teacher trust and collaboration might look like in post-Soviet Azerbaijan seeking to transform school leadership and teaching practices. Other research interests are supporting aspiring school principals through developing a long-term school leadership program who seek to change the views of micromanagers and become change agents to fully devote themselves to the school improvement process.