What Exactly Is Talent? Part 3, Cybersecurity Executive Talent

The Big Cheese. The Top Banana. The Head Honcho. Number 1.

We previously discussed cybersecurity technician talent and cybersecurity manager talent, and now it's time for cybersecurity executive talent.

The executive in charge of cybersecurity must have technical credibility. It may be more at the level of minimum competence at this point in the person's career as long as the executive can understand what the technical team is doing and communicate it effectively to peer leaders. We propose that talented cybersecurity executives will keep up at more than a minimum competence level simply because they like the subject matter.

In contrast to cybersecurity managers, the cybersecurity executive has an enterprise-wide perspective that allows for understanding, advocating, and communicating the role of cybersecurity within the organization's risk management process. The executive is responsible for the 'profit and loss' (P&L) of the cybersecurity function, which requires sophistication in business processes and valuation. 

In the NIST CSF 'response to AI' framework, we see cybersecurity executives filling the "defend" part of the cybersecurity process. An executive's contribution is not at the technical level ("secure") or counter-cyberattack/systems integrity maintenance level ("thwart"). 

Promoting high-performing managers to executive makes sense in many ways, some good and some bad. But it's tricky to do this because most organizations promote managers who either got "results" through pushing staff or who got good employee attitude survey results. Neither of those metrics is what an executive is evaluated on. Additionally, cybersecurity executives need to partner with other executives who do not have IT systems technical expertise, but who have expertise in their functional or generalist areas. Finally, all executives are known to have healthy, some might say aggressive, egos.

What counts beyond minimum competence at a lower management level is talent. We previously discussed the definition of talent offered by Conchie & Dalton: "A measurable, innate characteristic that a person demonstrates consistently in order to achieve high performance. Talents are strictly defined. A person who has a strong measure in a specific talent will perform predictably better in tasks related to that talent."

We at Pythia carried out a study of over 150 10-K filings in 2025 (soon to be updated to 2026), along with reviews of position descriptions across the Internet and in the NIST CSF. We also tapped into our significant experience with talent-based studies from organizations across the world. This review process identified a conceptual model of five clusters that are required for effective performance as a cybersecurity professional: Direction, Drive, Influence, Relationship, and Execution. They are defined as follows:

• Direction – where do you want to lead?
• Drive – what motivates you?
• Influence – how do you shape the beliefs and thoughts of others?
• Relationship – how do you prefer to work with others?
• Execution – how do you shape the work goals of others and self?

All cybersecurity professionals have talents in these areas. The nature of those talents and degree to which there is more in some areas than others depends on the level of employee.

Different organizations are going to value some of these talents more than others. Smaller organizations are probably going to need cybersecurity executives who are more like line managers with direction, influence, and drive talents; larger organizations are going to need executives with a lot of each talent array, especially drive and relationships.

Based on over 100 years of empirical organizational science research, and based on our process to identify these talent elements, we can state affirmatively that all organizations will reduce their cybersecurity hiring risk by hiring for these talents.

For a cybersecurity executive role, a talent-based approach means that you will hire someone who has a systems perspective on cybersecurity, coordinates with the management of the 'top team' for growth, can identify the different signals within the noise and in turn creates signals, creates value for organizational partners based on cybersecurity risk management, and is looking to advance oneself.

Question 1: Did you have other goals for this person?

Question 2: Can you manage that person's performance?

Ask us how you can use a talent-based process to find and develop an executive who prioritizes, champions, and drives the cybersecurity enterprise.

(picture credit: Big Cheese in Caerphilly by Jaggery, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)