Cybersecurity Talent: Raging To Master Cybersecurity

We at Pythia Cybersecurity focus on cybersecurity talent. It's one of our core areas of expertise. In today's post we will continue our discussion of identifying and bringing your cybersecurity edge to your craft.

What do you like doing? Are you a birder or a quilter or a soprano, a pediatric neurosurgeon or a social worker or a police officer? Do you feel like you're in a 'flow state' when you do what you like doing, almost like time has slowed or your consciousness expands while you focus on what you're doing?

Do you continually work to improve your skill at what you like doing? Maybe you watch videos or listen to podcasts or go to conferences or read; maybe you reflect upon what you do and think about new ways to do it better.

Do you feel that when you do what you like doing that you're doing something that you're good at and would like to do more frequently?

These are all among the signs that you're engaging in mastery-related experiences.

Being responsible for cybersecurity in an organization requires you to master many domains. You're a technical lead first, but you are managing a team and coordinating with other leaders (most not at your level of technical expertise) and aligning your functional area relative to demands from executive leaders.

You were selected to be the CISO or CIO or CTO because you excelled as an individual contributor and maybe in entry-level supervisory roles. Another way to look at it is that you demonstrated mastery superior to other candidates.

You will find that functional leadership has its ways of de-selecting people. Sometimes, and this is significant, life events (illness, family responsibility) de-select leaders. But you also find that -- as we say frequently -- you were hired for your skills and fired for your personality.

What that means for many leaders is that your mastery focus has dimmed or flamed out. Behaviorally, that shows up in many ways: you are not tracking changes in your market or your platforms, you compete against your team, you micro-manage, refuse to take any risks, you're over-enjoying the perks of your position, you bully subordinates, and you lose focus of what your function is or how it contributes to the larger organization. These are all "derailing" behaviors, and we'll cover them separately.

If you want to be successful and not derail you need to keep your focus on mastery. You need to 'rage to master,' as our friend Dr Brett Steenbarger would put it.

(I must pause here to address a career or personal development topic. You might wonder whether you should focus on your strengths because you've heard that's how you will grow and be successful. Listen up because I have some expertise here: the bottom line is that you will in fact succeed because of your strengths, but you will fail because you did not mitigate your limitations. That's reality. OK back to this post.)

Brett notes these facets of people who focus on mastery: 

"They have an unusually broad range of interests; they are open to novel and complex ways of viewing things; they are capable of defocused attention: thinking about one thing while focusing on others; they display flexibility in their work habits; they tend to be introverted and prosper during periods of relative isolation; they generally are independent and unconventional.

In combination, these qualities enable creative geniuses to draw upon a broad range of experience to understand things in new, enlightening ways."

I'm sure that in your area of interest, you exhibit a lot of these qualities that Brett cites. But let's focus on cybersecurity.

Be honest: would others describe you in your cybersecurity role as "drawing upon a broad range of experiences to understand things in new, enlightening ways"? 

In one of his recent posts, Brett poses these questions regarding raging to master performance as a trader. You can easily scale these to cybersecurity (quoting here at length):

1)  Does your trading give you energy, challenge, and excite you or does it leave you drained and frustrated?

2)  What is one significant way in which you have grown in your trading over the course of this year?

3)  What is the one way you could most improve your trading and how are you working on that each trading session?

4)  How many people can you identify whose trading you are making better on a regular basis?

5)  How many people can you identify who are making your trading better on a regular basis?

6)  What have you learned this month from your greatest trading mistake?

7)  What have you learned this month from your greatest trading success?

How would you answer these questions?

Rage on you crazy master. Ask us how we can work with you to master your mastery.