Consulting Magazine

Consulting® MAY 2016 7

Q&A: Reina’s Dennis and Michelle Reina

Dennis and Michelle Reina co-founded Reina, A Trust Building Consultancy in 1992. Both hold doctorate degrees in Human & Organizational Systems and have coauthored two business bestsellers on trust in the workplace. Their work has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Harvard Management Update, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and they are frequently consulted by the media for insights into organizational trust. They recently spoke about their work with Liz DeVito, ALM Intelligence’s lead analyst for HR consulting.

: Your firm is a
pioneer in the market for building
trust in the workplace. What led you
to specialize in trust consulting?

Reina: In the early days of our consulting work, we helped organizations forge strategic alignment, fix broken change efforts, and form self-directed work teams. Leaders called us in when their projects weren’t working and they couldn’t figure out why. We’d start with assessments to see what people were experiencing and found that, again and again, projects were stalling because people didn’t trust one another. At the time, there was nothing in the business literature about trust in the workplace beyond recognizing its importance. It was then that we decided to dedicate our professional work to researching trust, writing about trust, and teaching leaders, teams, and entire organizations how to build and sustain trust from the inside out.

: How do you help
your clients build a culture of trust?

Reina: The first step is to take the guesswork out of trust. We have concrete, behavioral models and frameworks that provide a common language for talking about trust, and assessment methodologies that help people understand how their behaviors contribute to trust at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Our approach is systemic, holistic, and completely customized. We partner with our clients to design and co-create a solution for pinpointing their deepest trust-building opportunities. The end-game is to help our clients hardwire trust into the organization. We want them to have a solution in place to build trust and rebuild it when unintentionally compromised. We call this “ transformational trust”, that is, when people across the enterprise take ownership of the level and quality of trust that exists in the organization.

: How do you
measure success?

Reina: We approach trust building
as a management science enabled
by data and business insights. We
monitor clients’ progress through
the trust-building journey with the
Reina Norm Database, a statistical-
ly reliable and valid benchmarking
tool that captures all of our assess-
ment data, which is now in its fourth
generation. We have helped com-
panies such as Johnson & Johnson,
Johns Hopkins Medical Center, and
Lincoln Financial Group understand
how their trust levels relate to thou-
sands of other leaders, teams, and
organizations worldwide. In addi-
tion, we measure journey results
against desired business outcomes
defined up-front. We’ve helped our
clients increase engagement scores
by 25 percent within nine months,
improve sales by 17 percent, and get
at the root cause of a $2 million prod-
uct recall that could have been avoid-
ed if people had trusted one another.

: What are the key
trends in trust management today?

Reina: People assume that only organizations whose business is on a decline are engaged in trust building. In fact, we’ve found an increased propensity by organizations that are growing and expanding to tap into trust building. People are recognizing that growth and a fast pace tugs on trust more so than any other dynamic. Overall, the leaders who call us know they cannot take their current level of trust for granted. They know they need a strong foundation of trust to get engagement scores up, build change stamina, and create an organizational culture of trusted teams and leaders for the digital age.