Talent Acquisition & Upskilling: Manage

This is the third of four related articles. The others are here: one two three four.

Pythia Cyber was formed to seek a very particular Holy Grail: improving cybersecurity by combining behavioral science with information technology. It was clear to us that human behavior plays a huge role in cybersecurity failures and therefore deserves a large percentage of the time, energy and focus that the technology gets.

Changing individual habits is hard. Changing organizational culture is exponentially harder. One effective way to change culture is through hiring. The problem is that hiring can be effective in either degrading or upgrading your culture, which is why hiring is so fraught. The problem isn't just hiring though: new people need to be integrated into your team and then kept engaged. Internally, we call these three phases Find, Manage and Retain but we bow to convention and call them externally "Talent Acquisition & Upskilling" (TAU for short). In other words, we recognize that sometimes evolution is a better option than revolution and that what you need from us is not a way to revolutionize your cybersecurity program but rather help in building a TAU program that lets you evolve your cybersecurity program at a safe pace with lower risk of vulnerability during the transition.

Whether you want us to help with a revolution or an evolution you will find  a drive toward accuracy and fairness at the heart of our offerings. We are all human and so we make mistakes, take short-cuts required by limited time and fall prey to unconscious bias. This fact means that we often introduction inaccuracy and unfairness into our personnel decisions. Pythia Cyber can help you minimize these failings. How does a firm run by people avoid human failing? We do it by using trainable software that we train to be objective, even if we cannot be totally objective ourselves.

This post is about the second phase, the Manage phase, talent integration. You have just found and hired the best candidate you could. You definitely can take a moment to celebrate. You definitely cannot stop there. The most common scenarios for integrating a new talent into your organization are boredom, bureaucracy or both. By "boredom" we mean the option where you have many introductory meetings and then hope your new hire swims rather than sinks. By "bureaucracy" we mean a barrage of canned web-based "training" to cure your new hire of sexism, sadism and cultural insensitivity and you let them sink or swim. You can do better.

Specifically you can have a tailors 90 plan for success, based on an understanding not only of what, concretely, you want them to accomplish but also of what their talents tell you they can and what their weaknesses tells you that they need.

The ideal plan moves from pretty specific for the first week or so to rather vague on detail but clear on metrics by the end. The goal is to have your new hire up to speed and productive at the end of 90 days, but without so much just hoping that it works out, or expecting them to figure this all out for themselves. Could they figure it all out for themselves? Probably, but what do you gain by making them do that? You certainly lose the chance to set them up for success, to start them off on the right foot, to really try them out for that 90 days. Is it worth the trouble to put together such a plan? We hope that  the answer is "yes" because putting it together is pretty easy once you are in the talent-based mindset. If you can't easily put together a 90 day plan for a new hire then perhaps you need to figure out why that isn't easy. After all, you should know what you want this new hire to do and what resources you have to help and what metrics you expect them to meet once they are up to speed, don't you?

We aren't going to tell you how to manage but we are going to help you be a fairer, clearer-eyed manager and better mentor when you shift to a talent-based culture. We can help. Ask us how.