Tim Reijnders

Q: What does Tim Reijnders do at Accenture?

A: Tim Reijnders leads the cybersecurity practice at Accenture in Amsterdam. He is responsible for everything Accenture does in security, from strategy and implementation to managed services. He has been with Accenture for fifteen years and watched the field shift from a fairly technical domain to a much broader one, where regulation now plays a large role. He grew up in Maastricht and studied in Groningen.

Q: How did Tim Reijnders become a managing director at Accenture so young?

A: He points to three things. Cybersecurity is a fast-growing field, so good people are in high demand. Accenture also chose early on to combine industry knowledge with technical expertise. One group of consultants knows security for sectors like banking or consumer goods, another group consists of technical specialists in identity and access management, SOC or incident response. Together they form a matrix of domain and industry. Reijnders fits the first profile and is good at seeing what clients in a specific industry need. And finally, he says there is always a bit of luck involved.

Q: Did Tim Reijnders choose cybersecurity as a strategic career move?

A: No, it was more coincidence. When he started, cybersecurity was still a technical niche and anything but glamorous. What drove him was an intrinsic motivation to make the Netherlands safer. His thesis was already about how consumers can use privacy enhancing technologies to improve their lives. He sees that organisations move faster when their security is better, and sums it up in one image. When you have good brakes, you dare to drive faster. With AI speeding up digitalisation even more, that only becomes more relevant.

Q: Which traits helped Tim Reijnders stand out?

A: Curiosity first. Cybersecurity changes so quickly that the technologies and solutions of fifteen years ago have been turned upside down, and AI forces the field to rethink how security is set up all over again. The passion has to come from within, so that you read articles in your own time to keep up. The second is a motive. He gets energy from solving a problem for a client. Clients only come to Accenture when their problems are big and complex and they can no longer solve them themselves, and that is exactly what he enjoys thinking about.

Q: Why is simple communication so important in cybersecurity?

A: Joeri Everaers calls Reijnders' communication exceptionally strong. He knows nobody who does not enjoy working with him, someone capable but never threatening. Reijnders explains it from his field. The security world invents a lot of cool-sounding terms for fairly simple problems. If you really know the subject, you can bring it back to a simple step-by-step plan of what needs to happen to solve the problem. That helps clients more than jargon does.

Q: Is there one type of top performer at Accenture?

A: No. Reijnders does not believe there is one type of consultant or employee who succeeds at Accenture. He deliberately looks for different profiles, from someone who knows everything about identity and access management and how to apply it to AI, to someone who knows the specific security controls of the oil and gas industry. For him, diversity goes beyond gender and includes cultural background and technical expertise. Someone with every trait at once barely exists, so he builds teams in which profiles complement each other. The managing director group is diverse too, with subject matter roles like his own and roles that own the full client relationship.

Q: How does Accenture decide who gets promoted?

A: As a group. Twice a year all managers in his practice sit down together and review every analyst and consultant. Who performed well and who is ready for the next step? That happens at every level. The higher you go, the broader the assessment. Hard KPIs such as sales count, but so does how well someone builds a new service, such as OT security where Accenture invests heavily, how strong their client relationships are and how they grow their own team. A leader should not only move forward themselves, but take the whole team a step further.

Q: What makes a good leader according to Tim Reijnders?

A: Three things. Daring to make mistakes and admitting them, so everyone can learn from them. Subject matter expertise, because in a client meeting about a complex problem you need to know what you are talking about. And autonomy and entrepreneurship. At Accenture you get a lot of freedom, you can talk to any client and use the brand to get a seat at any table, with experts on even the smallest topics to back you up. That freedom has to suit you. He calls entrepreneurship hard to select for, but decisive for your career.

Q: Why is 80 percent often good enough?

A: Because the last ten to twenty percent takes a lot of energy, while many clients mostly want momentum. Start quickly, iterate, make a mistake and keep going. Aiming for a hundred percent in the planning phase takes far longer than starting with the eighty percent of knowledge you already have. He calls himself fairly precise but no perfectionist. Risk-based thinking is standard in security. No company can guarantee one hundred percent security, it would be far too expensive, and risk almost never goes to zero. It is always a trade-off of time, money and effort, although it depends on the project, because some work allows no margin for error.

Q: Which three traits of top performers does Tim Reijnders choose?

A: From a set of twelve cards he picked focus, emotional intelligence and ambition. Focus because a leader has so much to do every day that a team going in every direction does many things not quite well. He would rather do fewer things very well. Emotional intelligence because he works with a very diverse group and has to motivate different people in different ways. He links ambition to passion, an inherent drive to make things better. Many people join Accenture because they do not want to run the same audit every year, but actually want to fix the problem for the client. In the previous episode Bernard Welten also picked focus as his first card.

Q: How does Tim Reijnders assess ambition, emotional intelligence and focus in a job interview?

A: Accenture's hiring process usually has three interviews. The first two cover subject matter, such as how much someone knows about a security topic and what industry background they have. Reijnders often does the third interview, which is about these traits. He has no fixed list of questions and keeps it a conversation. He asks why someone works in security and why they choose a company like Accenture, and checks whether those are the right reasons. A question he often asks is which project the candidate is most proud of. That shows their ambition and passion, and also the focus they applied at the time.

Q: Which trait does Tim Reijnders find least important?

A: All twelve are relevant, he says, although some overlap. Daring to make painful decisions sounds hard, but he does not believe those decisions are always that painful. If you explain well why an organisation is where it is or why it needs to change course, it often turns out fine. Even parting ways with people turned out to be mutual in almost every case he handled, and an honest conversation about whether this is the right place is then a good conversation. Joeri Everaers sees adaptability as very context-dependent, but for consultants who move to a new client every three, six or twelve months it does matter.

Q: Do you need to work 50 to 60 hours a week to reach the top?

A: Not always. Joeri Everaers wonders whether 50 to 60 hours a week is an outdated way of thinking, although his intuition says it still gives an edge at the very top. Reijnders compares it to elite sport, where the best athletes are also the best at resting. He believes in steady effort over time, with occasional peaks for a deadline or a project that has to be perfect. Those peaks can even give energy, but you cannot sustain them at a high level, so quieter periods are part of it. And it comes down to passion. If you really enjoy your work, spending more time on it also costs less energy.