Reto Steiner is dean at the ZHAW School of Management and Law in Winterthur/Zurich (Switzerland). Additionally, he teaches at the University of Bern and at the ETH Zurich.

He has extensively published on the management of agencies, state-owned enterprises, artificial intelligence in the pulic sector, decentralization and local governance and serves on various international academic boards.

The Scholar worked as a senior lecturer, professor and member of the management board at the Center of Competence for Public Management at the University of Bern (2002-2016), as a managing director at the Swiss Institute for Public Management (2016-2017) and as a Contract Professor for Strategic Management in the Public Sector at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (2016-2018). He was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong in 2013. In 2020, Reto Steiner was Visiting Professor for "Global Governance" at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Reto Steiner is involved in the governance of higher education institutions as well as in education and training.

In 2022, Reto Steiner chaired the conference of the European Academy of Management (EURAM). In 2028, he will chair the organizing committee of the colloquium of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS).