He Said/We Said: Win Tomorrow By Leading Your Cybersecurity Program More Effectively Today

(Note: this post is about you working with your leadership. In the next post in this series, we will cover you as a leader.)

We follow an HR guru, JP Elliott, whose blog post this week was epic. At least it echoes with themes we promote at Pythia Cybersecurity.

In this post, JP discusses executive team-building. This quote struck us: 

Most CEOs are building teams to win today. The best are building leaders to dominate tomorrow.

According to JP, this is what the best CEOs think of when they seek to 'dominate tomorrow' (quoting at length):

They wake up every morning asking themselves four critical questions:

• Are we focused on the right strategic imperatives?
• Are we operating our business effectively and efficiently?
• Are we optimizing our business model for competitive advantage?
• Do we have a plan for sustainable, profitable growth now and in the future?

And while these business questions are foundational to winning in the marketplace, they are also your roadmap to building a business-focused HR strategy. You just need to know how to translate them.

Doesn't this sound familiar? Yes that's right, we routinely discuss cybersecurity program leadership here in our blog.

You've see it on our blog and you see it with JP. Shouldn't your boss hear about it from you?

Let's translate JP's 'four critical questions' into cybersecurity program leadership questions that you need to answer for your boss:

1. "Are we focused on the right strategic imperatives" = "How is our cybersecurity program aligned with what the organization prioritizes?"

2. "Are we operating our business effectively and efficiently?" = "Is our cybersecurity spend focused on what really matters?"

3. "Are we optimizing our business model for competitive advantage?" = "How do our cybersecurity processes enable us to offer more to our customers because they can trust us more than they can trust people we compete with?"

4. "Do we have a plan for sustainable, profitable growth now and in the future?" = "What is our 2- to 3-year business plan for a more effective cybersecurity program?"

You must be able to answer these questions because these are the questions executive leadership have. If you can't answer them, they will find someone else who will answer them.

Hint: the wrong answer to these questions is "nothing happened." Don't say you weren't warned.

Be epic. Have people look up to you like you're a Michelangelo. Ask us how to help you answer these cybersecurity program leadership questions.