A good technical base can last decades: While mentees need the most help with aligning to the business, some argue that a technical baseline is equally as important to the role for managing technical staff and enabling business operations, particularly through innovative technologies like cloud and AI.One of those is Cynthia Madden, founder of Artemis Enterprise. “The well-rounded CISO needs an equal balance of technical and business acumen,” she explains. “For example, if a new technology brings specific business risks with it, the CISO needs to understand how to meet the business objective within the business’s approved risk tolerance.”Early in her career, Madden found most of her mentors in the workplace. Her first mentor (a “brilliant” technologist from MIT) helped her understand the basics of neural networks and how to interact with them programmatically. She used her core programming skills in Visual Basic with ODBC to connect to his neural network to predict inventory for a pharmaceutical company.Under this apprenticeship, she learned how to bridge the needs of the business, inventory expirations, and manage costs, in that case using an early form of artificial intelligence. That mentorship proved to be valuable thirty years later for assessing AI adoption capabilities.She found more technical mentors when she pivoted to government, where she applied her masters in cybersecurity to conduct cyber exercises and testing against missile defense facilities. There, too, she felt more technically mentored. But she also learned about mission, responsibility, chain of command, ethics, and more business-related knowledge that serves her today.”Those government mentors were enduring. For me, mentoring people in cyber space is about an extended relationship over time. It’s a trust position to do that, both in the government and private sector. So those become many years-long relationships,” Madden explains.Of all the things she found mentors for, she needed the most direction around balancing her strong sense of ethics with her employers’ ethics, especially when employers put profits over people. For that, she’s currently in a coaching program learning to balance these nuances in a healthy, informed way by building paths where both people and profit thrive.And she pays it forward through her classroom mentoring program, “Girls in Cyber,” on Oahu in her home state of Hawaii, where she helps girls in grades four through twelve build technical skillsets that may someday serve as a baseline for their own leadership roles in cyber.
Becoming a business leader: For mentees from technical backgrounds to grow they ultimately need to step away from their hands-on technical roles and learn executive leadership. But letting go of control is often the most difficult step for would-be CISO’s to make, according to George Gerchow, CSO at Bedrock Data. As a long-time faculty member at IANS, he’s seen this often while working one-on-one with CISO’s (as well as through classroom instruction) under the IANS CISO executive coaching program.”At some point, they’ve got to let go of that technical role in order to step into different business roles and grow,” Gerchow notes. “The reason why so many CISOs don’t get board seats is because they lack understanding of the way a business works, including its strategic positioning and the business longevity plan.”In his own CISO roles at Sumo Logic and MongoDB, Gerchow had direct access to the board, which gives him valuable experience to share in his trainings. To that end, Gerchow feels more like a mentor than a coach. “I love working with people who are up and coming, looking to brand themselves and get into different positions,” he says.He also mentored many people in his former workplaces. As he prepared to leave Sumo Logic, he mentored his deputy CISO by putting his “feet in the fire.” He worked with the deputy CISO to create documentation for the board, hold staff meetings, and co-present to the board. “Automating myself out of a job to me that’s mentoring. Coaching, on the other hand, is more about goal setting and planning a career path. Both are equally needed.”
Mentoring is about the ‘what’ while coaching is about the ‘how’: Like others, Upen Sachdev, principal partner at Deloitte, rose from the technical ranks to direct security, compliance and risk management for a large global brand, after which he was a CISO for seven years at another large global brand.Sachdev found help with mentors as he ascended in his career. But while working with clients at Deloitte, he saw a gap in business leadership skills among what he calls the “next generation of CISOs.” So he helped create Deloitte’s CISO program with his peers, which Deloitte offers at no cost to selected candidates from the Deloitte client base.”Mentors will show you the light because they have walked the path before. They will tell you what to do, which mountain to climb,” he says. “Our job as coaches is to help them understand the how. How do you improve your storytelling skills? How can you have a better executive presence? How do you lead your leaders? And how do you enable the business?”Of the program’s nearly 100 alumni, most of them now rock their executive-level roles. They’re expanding their networks and paying it back, he says. “Our community wants to give back, invest time, connect with, listen to, and support people in advancing in their careers,” Sachdev says. “In some ways, they’ve also coached me back. They’ve made me a better listener, a better teammate, and hopefully a better human being.”
First seen on csoonline.com
Jump to article: www.csoonline.com/article/4099036/coach-or-mentor-what-you-need-depends-on-where-you-are-as-a-cyber-leader.html
