Practical Applications of Talent, Part 2

At Pythia Cyber we are about behavioral cybersecurity and when it comes to predicting behavior, talent trumps credentials. By which we mean that your certifications tells us what you have done, but your talent profile tells us what you are capable of in the future.

Specifically, Ted has a series of posts about the talent profile of different cybersecurity roles, specifically

Talent needed to be front line cyber defender

Talent needed to manage cyber defenders

Talent needed to lead a cybersecurity program

As a counterpoint to Ted's behavioral science perspective I present a series of my own, giving examples of practical applications of talent assessment to cybersecurity.

This post is about how a talent assessment can help you solve a common problem with finding and retaining cybersecurity managers: balancing managing ability and technical credibility.

When the time comes to fill a vacant cybersecurity manager position you have two common options: promote from within and hire from without. In either case  a talent assessment is a valuable addition to your decision-making process.

The winning scenario for promoting from within is that you keep a valuable asset (the promoted employee's institutional memory) and change the problem from hiring a cybersecurity manager (usually a more expensive and more pivotal role) into hiring a front line cybersecurity worker (usually a less expensive and easier to fill role). This assumes that your internal candidate has the talent needed to succeed in this new role (see previous post).

The losing scenario for promoting from within is that you promote someone out of their element into a new environment in which they fail to thrive. Then you lose an asset and gain a liability, which is bad twice over.

On the other hand, if you hire from without you face a different problem: determining that the outside candidate is both a talented manager and technologically credible. You can rely on their work history to act as a proxy for these requirements, but as the SEC requires finance companies to remind their customers,

Past performance is not indicative of future results 

What you want in either case is to exercise your human judgement, but to inform that judgement with data. In either case you need to hire someone with the requisite talent and the minimum required competence. Talent should determine rank and performance should determine reward.

Wouldn't it be great if seniority were a good enough proxy? Then you could have a "typical" career path in which all your cybersecurity people start at the bottom of a corporate ladder and work their way up, rising to the level of their competence. But we all know that this is a fantasy: bright, capable, high-performing drones should be rewarded based on their performance. If they are tremendously valuable, pay them what they are worth, even if they are mere drones. The hive needs drones; without drones, there is no hive. Likewise mediocre foot soldiers can make marvelous managers and young, green recruits can also make good managers if those raw recruits have the talent. Having the talented managers serve a pointless term of being mediocre front line workers is a waste.

Without a talent assessment you will struggle to make these judgments, because in the real world very little is cut-and-dried. Your options are rarely a terrific manager and a terrible manager. Your options are often an experienced, talented Individual Contributor who isn't very gifted in the management sphere versus a gifted manager who is a technological ignoramus. Who do you choose? Do you let these imperfect birds escape your hands and hope that the future brings better options? Or do you figure out what talent deficits you can support and what levels of ignorance you can cure and take the best available option?

Making real-world hiring and promoting decisions is hard. Balancing competence and talent is hard. The work history can help you with the assessing competence and we can help you with assessing talent. Make better decisions with greater confidence. Add talent data to your decision-making process.