As establishing and fostering trust are imperative activities for school leaders, cognizance of the fundamental importance of trust is essential for the leader's moral agency and ethical decision-making. In this article, we use an ecological perspective to uncover the dynamics of the lifecycle of trust as evident from extant literature on leadership in general and educational leadership in particular. Upon describing the role of trust in leadership and moral agency, we outline the importance of trust in school organizations and describe its fragile nature. Furthermore, we review the pertinent literature with respect to lifecycle stages (most often overlapping and without any set boundaries) of establishing, maintaining, sustaining, breaking and restoring trust in educational settings. We conclude that understanding the dynamic nature and ecological lifecycle of trust is an important undertaking for school leaders because they, as moral agents, are called to model and mediate the pervasive trust-related processes in schools.