Kees Rijssenbeek

Communication and leadership specialist | Trainer at High Tech Institute | Owner, DIT training & coaching

Kees Rijssenbeek is a Dutch communication and leadership trainer with more than fifteen years of experience developing and delivering soft skills programs for engineers and technical professionals in the high-tech industry. He is owner of DIT training & coaching, trainer at VIStrainingen, at Settels Savenije & Friedrich and a trainer at High Tech Institute in Eindhoven, where he has been teaching since 2018. He holds a Master of Law from Leiden University and was trained as an ICF certified ontological coach at the Newfield Institute and in the evedance based skills training methodology of Karin de Galan en School voor training.

Rijssenbeek began his career as a lawyer at Baker McKenzie in Amsterdam, handling mergers, acquisitions and employment law, before moving into marketing at Rituals during the brand’s early years when the company operated from a single Amsterdam office. Neither career was a final destination. What drew him toward training was a growing conviction that the skills determining whether someone succeeds professionally have little to do with technical expertise and everything to do with how they communicate, build trust and navigate relationships. He entered the professional training domain around 2010 and has since focused on engineers and technical professionals, alongside professionals in other industries.

The starting point in all of Rijssenbeek’s training is the observation that engineers tend to approach communication the way they approach technical problems: as something with a correct answer that, once found, stays solved. In reality, communication is dynamic, context-dependent and requires ongoing calibration. He teaches it through what he calls knobs: a set of adjustable behaviors including active listening, reading nonverbal cues and managing self-orientation that can each be turned up or down depending on the situation. The first and most important knob is active listening, which in a technical environment means genuinely absorbing what (and how) a stakeholder is saying before formulating a response rather than waiting for a pause in which to deliver a prepared argument.

A recurring framework in his teaching is the Trust Equation, developed by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford: trust is a function of credibility, reliability and intimacy divided by self-orientation. The equation translates soft skills into something engineers find credible precisely because it is expressed as a formula.

His training uses intensive practice rather than theory: participants try out new communication behaviors in the room and leave with concrete habits they can apply the next day.

At High Tech Institute, Kees Rijssenbeek teaches:

• Stakeholder Management in High Tech (the power of reasoning) – influencing without formal authority and building buy-in across disciplines and hierarchies using the “De Galan” didactic model.
• Leadership Skills for Architects and other Technical Leaders – navigating the two core dilemmas of technical leadership: making directional decisions under uncertainty and shifting from hands-on problem solver to delegating coach.
• Time Management in Innovation – managing priorities and focus in complex multi-disciplinary high-tech development projects.

What distinguishes his teaching is the combination of a career spanning law, brand marketing and more than fifteen years of professional training, applied exclusively to the specific communication and leadership challenges that engineers face in the Dutch high-tech industry, with an approach grounded in practice rather than theory.

Kees Rijssenbeek is owner of DIT training & coaching and a trainer at High Tech Institute in Eindhoven, where he has taught communication and leadership skills for engineers since 2018. He holds a Master of Law from Leiden University and trained as an ontological coach at the Newfield Institute.