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.