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How to Keep Your Security Team Happy

Juggling the needs of top performers and less-seasoned team members can be difficult, but it's critical to everyone's growth

Alpha geeks tend to have an arrogance about their technical skills. This also gives them the false confidence that they must obviously be good at everything. I occasionally comment to up-and-coming leaders that there are many facets to running an operation and they only see things at their level of the organization, just like I tend to only see things at my level of the organization. A key ingredient of good leadership is the ability to look beyond that level and attempt to see the larger picture. So, your standard alpha geek thinks he can do everything better than everyone else. But what about the rest of your staff—those "B" and sometimes even "C" players who make up the majority of your team? They may not be superstars but you count on them to help do the daily jobs that are the bulk of your work.

This is especially true in the public sector, where I work as the CISO for a government agency, and the workforce tends to be fairly static and less prone to taking career risks. Unlike the private sector, where you can cut people loose for underperforming, in most public sector organizations you have a civil service and organized labor to be concerned about when dismissing, counseling or disciplining employees. I've found the hard way that it takes a lot more time and emotional effort when you handle a personnel performance situation poorly than when you take the time to do it right.

Saving Careers Through Leadership

A big part of our job as leaders of our security organizations is to grow our people. Call it mentoring, call it training or call it succession planning—working to make our people better is critical not only to our own success but to the success of our organization, and I also believe it's a moral obligation to the people and society in general. This doesn't mean that when an employee has a lack of aptitude or a lack of desire we pour endless amounts of time or money into training him, but it does mean that we make a good faith effort to help our people be productive. It costs a lot more to hire a new employee than it does to make an existing employee productive if the ability and desire are there.

For example, I recently took over an organization that had "leadership problems" at the operational level. Its manager had come in with a great reputation as a technical wizard but was floundering as a manager. The organization simply wasn't getting things done and morale was headed south. What I quickly discovered was classic: While a savant and clear "A" player in the technical arena, he was a mediocre "C" player in his management role and didn't know how to prioritize tasks. He was used to having a very defined role with clear technical responsibilities, and my predecessor just assumed this guy could figure it out. So as this young manager started being inundated with issues, he tried to time-slice each of them into his daily schedule without delegating anything, and the result was that nothing was getting done. My response was to begin providing very defined tasks that allowed him some small management successes. This increased his confidence and also increased the confidence of those working for him that he was going to make a successful transition from technician to manager. A less effective reaction to this situation would have been to simply write him off as a bad manager and put him back into a technical role without attempting to remedy or understand the problem.