Pioneering Trust Building®
Over three decades ago, nothing in the fields of industrial psychology, organizational development, business or leadership research addressed trust in the workplace beyond basic recognition of its importance. Today, workplace trust is one of the most active and important facets of leadership development and management science thanks to the contributions of Michelle and Dennis Reina.
Featured in Harvard Management Update, ATD, Bloomberg Businessweek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, HR Magazine, and others, the Reinas are globally regarded as the pioneers for building trust in the workplace.
Dennis and Michelle Reina inspired a new direction for the field of leadership development and organizational development. In the early days of their consulting, the Reinas helped organizations fix failed change efforts, form high-performing work teams, and create strategic alignment. Organizational leadership relied on the Reinas when initiatives were failing with no clear reason why. After data collection, interviews, and assessments to determine what employees were experiencing, the Reinas found, again and again, that projects stalled because people didn’t trust one another. It was then, after recognizing an absence of any previous literature or research on trust, that Michelle and Dennis Reina decided to dedicate their professional work to researching trust, writing about it, and teaching leaders, teams, and entire organizations how to build and sustain trust from the inside out.
Their first step was remove all guesswork out of trust. This required creating research-based, concrete, behavioral models and frameworks that provided a common language around trust. This also meant developing statistically validated assessment methodologies to help leaders and employees understand how their behaviors contribute to trust at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Their work led to the only globally recognized, research-based approach that addresses the full organization — one that is systemic, holistic, and completely customized.
Spreading the Practice of Trust Building
The frameworks and approach pioneered by the Reinas have been leveraged across the globe. With global partners such as the Center for Creative Leadership, and a vast practitioner network, the Reinas have partnered with organizations to design and co-create solutions for pinpointing their deepest trust-building opportunities. The result, the Reinas as pioneers of Trust Building®, have lead countless organizations and consultants to identify how trust impacts organizations and how to help those organizations hardwire trust into the strategy, systems, skills, and behaviors that build workplace trust when absent and rebuild trust where and when it has been compromised. The transformational trust development across the organization has led to breakthroughs in the field of industrial/organizational psychology and leadership development — breakthroughs that have brought on an evolution in these fields.
Through the Reina’s pioneering work, practitioners and organizations now are able to provide people across the enterprise an approach that allows them to take ownership of the level and quality of trust that exists with the organization. The Reina’s work is regarded as being the foremost behavioral framework and systemic approach to build, rebuild, and sustain trust for organizational performance, change initiatives, leadership, customer-supplier-organization success measures, employee engagement, workplace culture.
A Trust Building Legacy
The Reinas are considered the global pioneers of Trust Building® in management science. Their research over more than 30 years has contributed to the longest-researched and developed norm database, the Reina® Norm Database. The database, now in its fifth generation, has been validated by independent bodies for statistical reliability and validity for benchmarking and has become one the most prolific cache of assessment data on Trust Building® across the fields of industrial psychology, organizational development, management science, team performance, and leadership development fields. The Reina® Norm Database has helped countless organizations spanning industry sectors. From Johnson & Johnson to Lincoln Financial Group, Starbucks to the U.S. government, the Reina Norm Database has helped organizations understand how their trust levels relate to thousands upon thousands of other leaders, teams, and organizational worldwide. In additional to normative data, the Reinas has helped the management science fields, Reina clients, and consultants across the globe through 30 years of journey results against desired outcomes defined out the outset of initiatives. Success stories are many, varied, and a testament to the contributions of Reina® Trust Building®.