“Halfway through the interview I will slide a pen across the table and say you have 30 seconds to sell me this pen, go! And it’s quite interesting to see what they do. It tells me they can think on their feet, that they can market — are they persistent? It gives me some real insight into those individuals.”

It also gives some insight into the kind of leader Handren is and how he managers his staff. He wants free thinkers who are not afraid to be inventive and can see all sides to an issue before they execute on a project.
“When you interview someone you are looking to see what knowledge, skills and abilities they have that are transferable, but you also look to see if they are motivated — are they independent thinkers within the team and do they understand the vision of what we are trying to build?”

And when the team members are in place, Handren, 58, hands responsibility to them, but with the caveat that they know they can always come to him if they have concerns that they aren’t ready.

“Some of our people have strong skills in certain areas but all have been cross-trained,” says Handren who is a big proponent of his people earning professional designations.

“If you don’t have it [certification], you have to work towards it, and I send people on courses for what it will do to bring value to the enterprise, but also value to them as an industry expert,” he says.

The RBC protection services team includes Frank McKenna, manager of U.S. operations, heading up personal protection and physical security. He has recently taken on the Caribbean and Latin America due to RBC’s growth in those markets.

Lina Tsakiris and Jason Caissie manage the physical security side, while Tracy Montgomery and Mark Illy handle executive protection and personnel security.

Tsakiris, who has worked for Handren for four years nominated him for Security Director of the Year but says the nomination was a team effort.

“We all want to be Ric when we grow up,” says Tsakiris with a laugh. “We really saw him inspire our team in terms of what needed to be done in balancing everything we do along with preparing for the 2010 Torch Run,” she says. “He’s a visionary, a strategic thinker and humble in his communication style but clear and effective.”
Handren’s career began when he joined the RCMP shortly after his 19th birthday, right out of high school. He grew up in a small town in rural New Brunswick — Martinon, population at the time, about 200 people, located between Fredericton and Saint John.

For the next 25 years he worked in various units of enforcement across Canada and retired from the force in Nova Scotia. About 10 of those years were focused on financial crime. During his time on the force he went to night school and earned an under grad degree majoring in business administration.
He then got into financial work and found his calling — secret commissions, fraud, political corruption — he found it challenging and exciting.

Eventually, he was commissioned into the senior ranks of the force and transferred to Halifax to head up operations for commercial crime and federal policing for the province of Nova Scotia. Three years later he was approached by Imperial Oil — they offered him a position in Toronto overseeing fraud and theft cases for the company.

Four years into that job he was then tapped by Deloitte and Touche to build on the accounting firm’s fraud investigation team. 

“I soon discovered that instead of being reactive, there was an opportunity to be proactive and I started selling management on putting proactive programs in place and doing sound threat-risk assessments and putting good integrated security systems in place,” says Handren.

Then, one day in 2003 he received two phone calls from two different people telling him RBC was looking to fill a senior security position. A week later he took the job.

“The real challenge in coming to RBC was that I was coming to build an international program for a major organization that now stands at 80,000 people in 51 countries and being able to hire a good team,” he says.
The first six-months with RBC he spent understanding the business and knowing where the gaps were.
“I put a major report in after that and said, ”˜This is where we need to go and who we need’,” he says.
He broke the team into executive protection and personnel security and physical security.

Last year he and his team completed what is probably the largest project of his career — an intrusion and access control integration at 1,100 RBC branches across Canada.

It was an almost five-year project from start to finish. When he arrived at RBC he was trying to learn what system were in existence and how best to standardize them.