Reinier van Dieren
During my studies at Hotelschool The Hague, part of the programme was five days in the Belgian Ardennes: an outdoor leadership course, self-built tents, a group of strangers learning to work together through things like building a bridge or abseiling. What struck me wasn’t the activities. It was watching people who didn’t know each other start talking, in the evaluation afterwards, about how they’d actually worked together, and then do it differently in the next exercise.
That’s where it started. My motto since has been simple: play a role in growing the leadership of tomorrow. A lot of people have had a bad manager, a bad teacher, a bad leader. If the companies I work with build the kind of leadership that makes people’s working lives genuinely better, safer, more pleasant to be part of, I’ve done my part. It’s the same idea hospitality taught me long before consulting did: I’m here to make your day just a little bit better.
Background
Hospitality, then fifteen years of my own.
After Hotelschool The Hague, I spent a few years in hospitality before moving into training and development. Hospitality left me with something I still carry in my work with leaders: you are there to make someone’s day a little better.
From there, more than fifteen years of entrepreneurship. I started my own business, co-founded a training agency along the way, and have spent the years since working as a strategic L&D adviser and interim L&D manager for organisations across sectors and countries.
What I bring
Strategy, leadership, and culture.
My work sits at the intersection of strategy, leadership, and culture. I have a sharp eye for what’s actually happening in a team or an organisation, the undercurrent, not just the org chart, alongside where it’s actually trying to go.
The work is both conceptual and practical. I can sit in the strategy conversation about where learning and leadership development should sit in the business, and I can stand in the room with a team or a leader and do the work itself. I don’t hand off a plan and walk away.
How I work
I bring calm to the room, and get the real issues on the table.
I listen for what is not being said, and ask the question that needs asking.
After the talking, there are real decisions people stand behind. Months later, what clients report is that it worked.
I work from respect and equality, with genuine curiosity and good humour.
I am at my best when there is a real business goal behind it, and room to shape the answer, not only to deliver it.
Outside work
Piano, family, and 14,122 kilometres.
One of my passions is music, and playing the piano, which has been part of my life since I was five. Outside work, that’s where a lot of my time goes, along with my wife and our two children.
In 2009, with Mark van Rijmenam, I co-initiated a charity bike ride around Australia. Not across it, around it: 14,122 kilometres along the entire coastline, in exactly 100 days, for KiKa, the Dutch foundation for children with cancer. It took two and a half years to plan: the route, the logistics, the sponsors, the daily updates back home. We averaged 175 kilometres a day, and raised over €25,000.
I don’t tell that story to prove I can suffer on a bicycle. I tell it because it is the same thing I do for a living, on a different field: set a real goal, build the plan that gets you there, and see it through once it stops being fun.