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What Type of Security Leader Are You?

Security leaders, take this quiz to find out if they love you or loathe you

December 01, 2004 — CSO — We tend to lump others into stereotypical roles, sometimes basing our judgment on relatively few data points. Take this quiz to see how others perceive your leadership style. The scoring guide at the end will provide a few practical pointers on how to help others perceive you as well-rounded, not one-dimensional. No peeking until you've circled your answers. (Nobody's going to take you seriously if you're perceived as a cheater.)

1 After a three-cocktail lunch, a top salesperson loses her laptop, full of proprietary customer lists, at a conference attended by several competitors. What do you do?

a) Immediately demand that the sales manager make an example of the employee by firing her.

b) Sit down with the sales manager and look at the employee's past record, which is mostly good. Give her a new laptop and a little lecture.

c) Set up a committee to look at security policies, procedures and employee education efforts.

d) Install encryption on all company laptops, using this incident as your rationale. Let the sales manager decide what to do about the employee.

2 You write up a quick Web-surfing policy reminder e-mail to internal staff. Your style is...

a) ALL CAPS, clear and concise

b) Formal punctuation, grammar, signed with full name and title

c) Polite and to the point; punctuation optional

d) A leadoff joke and a quote from Plato

3 It's Monday morning. You show up at work in...

a) Giorgio Armanidouble-breasted to establish credibility

b) Tommy Hilfigersnappy casual to establish approachability

c) Variabledepending on number and type of meetings scheduled

d) Parrotheada fun workplace gets people jazzed

4 Books/authors you're most likely to read:

a) George Patton, Rudy Giuliani, Jack Welch

b) Pulitzer Prize winners in history and biography, case studies on business mergers

c) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Who Moved My Cheese?

d) Martin Luther King Jr., Deepak Chopra

5 Your investigations team has just completed the background check of a new employee, and the results are not good. The employee didn't list two jobs he briefly held in the last year and fudged his current salary. The hiring manager wants to look the other way, but you have a bad feeling. You decide...

a) You can't ignore your gut. Insist that the person not be hired under any condition.

b) To coach the hiring manager on how to discuss these concerns with the individual, and design a plan to bring the person on board on a conditional basis.

c) To go by the book. What, specifically, does your policy state is unacceptable, and do any of these offenses meet that criteria? Later, you can review whether these policies are still appropriate.