Dr. Dennis Reina & Dr. Michelle Reina, Chief Trust Building OfficersGetting the change you want hinges on trust building. It’s the key that unlocks greater potential in people. With a wealth of trust in the workplace, people want to work together to produce lasting change. But getting there is not an easy task!
Leaders and team members first need to understand what trust is, how to build it and how to sustain it. That’s how Reina Trust Building® serves people.
For over three decades, this Vermont-based research-focused consultancy has earned an ever-growing list of clients by providing field-tested trust assessments, scalable behavioral development approaches and coaching. They help guide organizations to build world-class cultures and deliver outstanding results…all through trust building.
The editorial team at Manage HR met with company founders, Drs. Dennis and Michelle Reina. Together, we talked about insights about trust they’ve accumulated over many years of research, and about how they apply that knowledge through Reina Trust Building® to help guide every client as they build a stronger, trust-based culture.
Let’s start by talking about your consultancy. How did you translate academic research about trust into a thriving business?
Trust and the power of strong relationships were lessons we learned early in our lives. Those lessons prompted us to pursue trust as our chosen area of academic study, leading both of us to each earn a Ph.D. We also saw what the business world was focused on: hiring, rewarding and firing employees based almost solely on performance. We wondered where trust ought to fit in their decisions. As a result, we were the first to take this hard-to-define concept and identify sixteen specific, observable and measurable behaviors that define trust in healthy relationships—at work and elsewhere. We studied low-trust environments: how they negatively affect workplace communication, collaboration, engagement and productivity while contributing to workplace toxicity. We found a high correlation between workplace toxicity and poor business results. Our consultancy was created to help solve this chronic problem.
How does your research help solve that chronic problem?
Through a carefully constructed trust model: the Reina Dimensions of Trust. It pinpoints what we call The Three Cs®: Trust of Character®, Trust of Communication® and Trust of Capability®. They’re preconditions for a trust-based environment. Next, we identified sixteen behaviors that define trust. With this strong behavioral framework, we turned theory into workplace applications. That’s what has made our business a success.
What are the major challenges your clients face?
First, leaders need reliable data to make good decisions. Insights from our work are central to providing that reliable behavioral data. The second challenge is about relationship dynamics. Today, business silos are up, collaboration is down. Resources are strained. People feel uncertain. All these contribute to low energy, low engagement, high stress and disillusionment. These challenges grow bigger as leaders come to understand there’s no quickfix.
How do you help make trust building happen for your clients?
Trust building is not a “check the box” process. It doesn’t start and end with a workshop. It takes effort, but the shift you see and feel is immediate. Next that shift shows up as a measurable change. It’s a process: one that requires courage and compassion first for you to fully understand how leaders, teams and others in an organization behave. Trust is emotionally provocative: we make it safe for people to go there and express those emotions, creating learning moments. The only way people can get there is by following a behavioral approach and a research-based methodology – which is what our model is all about.
After we understand a client’s organizational dynamics, we then administer assessments to gather reliable data about where trust lives. They learn where trust is strong, where it’s vulnerable. And we can compare their data to our global, normative database. From this, we co-create, with our clients, a series of Trust WorkOuts®. Only Reina does this. Trust WorkOuts® are about people gaining the skills and tools to put trust-building behaviors into practice. In essence, these show you how to practice behaviors that build trust and drive high performance.
Often, we provide coaching to client leaders throughout an engagement, and we’re passionate about transferring capability. We want them to do more than just model new behaviors. We also want them to teach others to be more effective while earning heightened levels of trustworthiness.
Our newest trust-building tool is launching now. It’s called the Reina Trust Building® Journey Online: a digital platform for both synchronous and asynchronous learning journeys to sustain trust-building behaviors and make trust building a part of the way people work together to drive results and higher productivity.
Can you share an example that showcases how your approach to trust building helped a customer overcome challenges and attain desired outcomes?
We have a lot of success stories! Here’s one of our most recent ones. We were engaged by Rob Grubka, Voya Financial’s President of Employee Benefits (EB), and his Senior Leadership Team, in a project called “Evolution of our Business, Culture and People through Trust Building®.” This was a transformative process … and it came with some great surprises. We took the first steps together by studying the state of trust within Voya EB. We equipped leaders with the tools needed to teach trust building to their employees. This raised awareness within each member on how to build stronger working relationships. It helped them develop a shared understanding and a common language to talk directly to each other about trust in an open, compassionate way. But it also did something more: it helped them identify action steps to solve problems and work together more collaboratively to give attention to their customers using a “One Team” approach. With that cross-functional approach, Voya EB employees benefitted by becoming significantly more familiar with the entire service value chain.
And then another incredible thing happened. A year after we assessed EB’s employees, 80% of them told us that their trust building journey—the one they went on with our help—had positively affected their ability to serve their customers. Also, 84% said that journey had a positive impact on their ability to collaborate and work together with teams throughout the enterprise. What’s more: 76% expressed an increased desire to work within their business unit due to the high-trust culture that had been created within the organization.
Against the backdrop of these results, EB has emerged as the fastest growing and most profitable business unit in their company. So, we’re excited to see the additional outcomes to be produced from this important collaborative work.
What does the future hold for trust building and for your organization?
Trust is a universal human need. It’s at the top of nearly every organization’s cultural priorities list and is a common thread in every important business conversation people are having right now. Committed leaders and team members all understand that unless they’re seen as trustworthy, their organization’s brand is at risk. And many brands today, in fact, are at risk! Given these challenges in the marketplace today, there’s considerable need and demand for Reina Trust Building’s insights. We’re working feverishly to upskill more organizational development professionals and to equip more coaches to do impactful trust-building work worldwide.
This coming year we’ll be launching our third book as part of our best-selling series. This one’s focused on Trust of Self. As with all our work, writing and research, the focus will be on leaders and teams as they strive to become more effective and trustworthy in the workplace.
