CISO: Do The People On Your Team Trust You As A Leader?

People should trust you, right? I mean, you're trustworthy, aren't you?

Sometimes leading is like magic. Magic acts are about misdirection of attention. Get people focused on one thing, which is key to trust, then pull off a trick they weren't expecting -- magic! Military leaders know this well: it's "the suck," as in, the troops are all maneuvering in the mud and it sucks but the key to leading wet muddy troops is to direct their attention to being in it together -- and presto, the effect is like magic!

You can't be a magician without being trustworthy. If people didn't believe you they wouldn't put their attention in your hands. If wet muddy troops didn't feel you were all in it together they would focus on themselves.

What's your CISO magic trick? How do you capture the attention of your team so that they are willing to follow along because what you do seems like magic?

My friend Steve Hunt thinks a lot about leadership. Over on his Substack channel he wrote a recent piece, Building leadership trust in a fast-changing world, that deserves your attention. I'll quote its key parts:

1. If you do not trust your employees, they will not trust you. 

2. Trust depends on sharing both good and bad news with employees.

3. Trust comes from knowing your employees (not just them knowing you).

4. Leadership trust comes through manager trust.

Each of these observations, all based in organizational behavioral science, directly speak to the magic that arises when employees trust their managers. Let's say it now: if you rely on fear or rank to intimidate your people you have lost them, and you may never get them back.

This also means that the trust process requires you to trust your team members. If you just now read that and thought Oh no way man!, well, ask yourself this: how would they know that they should trust you?

Special mention to Steve's final observation. As a CISO you have managers reporting to you who have cyber-defenders reporting to them. Your managers (i.e. direct reports) need to trust you, and their people need to trust them, for the line employees to trust you. Disconnects are going to spell trouble.

Trust is hard but that's why leadership isn't for everyone, and executive leadership more so. You can alter your approach to be more trust-worthy, but you need more than magic to do that.

Ask us how you can become the leader you yourself want to trust.

(image credit: Joseph Morewodd Staniforth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)