Talent Acquisition & Upskilling: Upskilling

This is the fourth 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 third phase, the Retain phase, talent upskilling. You have a recent hire who has come up to speed and is crushing it. How do you keep them engaged? Note that when we say "retain" we don't mean "the person hasn't quit" which is a bit of a low bar.   We mean "person is still as engaged and effective as they were before AND has not moved on." Talented people want a challenge, they want recognition and they want to make a difference. Keeping them moving forward is not as easy as giving them good performance reviews and predictable pay increases.

When you hire talent you expect excellence. But in order to get excellence and to keep getting that excellence you have to give support and encouragement. Specifically need to make sure that the talented person is learning, stretching and being recognized. This is the long-term version of the 90 plan for talent integration: you need to know what it is that you want your people to learn this year, to master this year, to improve at this year. Luckily for us, cybersecurity as a domain provides us with a literally never-ending supply of new challenges, new solutions and new technology to master. You need to keep up and you need to make sure that your direct reports keep up and ideally those two goals fit together.

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