talent – Kevin L. McLaughlin, PhD

A Note I Wrote to Someone Who Once Worked for Me

I recently had the honor to help provide a strong reference for a person who worked for me as a Cyber Analyst. She got the Senior position she was going for but was just a little worried about what they should do in order to lead a team and be a good leader. Here is what I related to this extremely competent future Cybersecurity leader.

Hi:

First and foremost – you are going to do great in your new role. I encourage you to model your leadership style after the following rule(s):

Use the leadership model of:
Am I doing the right thing
Am I doing it for the right reason
Am I doing it at the right time
Am I doing it in the right way

This is on the back of the Challenge Coin I had made up for our UC team.

Always act with Integrity and walk your talk. You don’t always need to be right but you always need to be honest with the people you lead.

Remember that “We are smarter than Me” and foster healthy discussion and debate on topics. Try to pull ideas and suggestions from those you lead who are more on the quiet side. Don’t let aggressive Type A personalities (like me) dominate the conversation.

When coming out of a meeting get your team members used to doing a 5 minute feedback session (what did we do right, wrong, what should we (or I) have done differently, etc. Remember – Feedback is a gift.

Training of your people needs to be a priority and always remember to help others be Greater Than Yourself. There is enough success out there for everyone, help grow your people so that they can be your boss some day and if that did happen they would be a good boss to work for.

Don’t hesitate to email if you have specific questions. Have confidence, breath deep and believe in yourself – you got this!

The Cyber Security CIA explained via Calvin and Hobbes

Leave it to my son Kody, who is starting his Cyber Security career to come up with this novel way to explain the CIA triad for Cyber Security.

In InfoSec terms, CIA refers to Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. To illustrate how these principles work, let’s look at Calvin and Hobbes.

Calvin and Hobbes create a club called the “Super-Secret-No-Icky-Girls-Allowed” club. During their very first treehouse meeting, they draft a document entitled “member list” and write the names “Calvin” and “Hobbes” on the list. This list is the club’s most valuable asset so Calvin and Hobbes need to maintain the CIA of the asset. The confidentiality of the list is critical as the exposure of the secret member list would cause the entire super-secret club to lose its purpose. The integrity of the list is also important to ensure that unauthorized modifications of the list can’t be made. It would be terrible if Susie’s name were to make it on the list of if Calvin’s name were to be removed. Lastly, the availability of the list is important. When the club meets to have their secret meetings, they need the list do roll call and to ensure that those in attendance are listed.

So now that we’ve got the idea, we can explain how CIA works for business assets. The confidentiality of the asset is necessary to ensure that only those with appropriate privileges and appropriate need can see the asset. The integrity of the asset is necessary to ensure that the data has not been changed and, if it has, a log of changes is kept. The availability of the asset is necessary because it is not of any value if no one can interact with it for its intended purpose.

The Talent Within

11/8/2012

In his book “Topgrading: How leading companies win by hiring, coaching and keeping the best people” (2005) Dr. Smart talks about how important it is for a company to not only hire A level talent but then keep and retain them through the years. I have had the good fortune to work for a company that was very good at this and not only did they hire and retain A players they had a very good internal training program to make sure that the A players they hired were trained and taught the new roles they moved into in order to lessen the knowledge gap and learning curve for the new position. In this environment efficiency, streamlining, being agile, having solid and well followed processes were the norm. Needless to say this is a good environment for a talented knowledge professional to work and grow in. The basic idea was to hire and surround yourself with great and talented A performers and then allow them to make decisions and drive systemic change ongoing. To me this process of hiring smart and talented people and then promoting them as next step openings become available makes a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, throughout my professional travels what I have often observed is that even in companies with great training programs and who espouse the philosophy of growing talent from within there is a strong psychological tendency to seek outside for the next professional with a briefcase (J that’s an old joke about how your own company or organization never views you as an expert or qualified candidate, even if the rest of the nation views you that way), and bypass their internal talent pool.

What a lot of the VPs and directors who are hiring do not realize is that if you have an A player on your staff who is one level lower than the position you are filling they will succeed if you put them in the position, even if they have some knowledge gaps, that is pretty much what A players do. I know, a lot of you who are reading this are scratching your heads and thinking about all the times a resource is promoted beyond their ability and wondering how that fits in. The answer is simple, they weren’t an A player or they were an A player who, inherited all B and C players and wouldn’t aggressively cull the herd.

Both competent B and lower level C performers, especially ones that are non-performing destroy any possibility of creating a high performing team. These lower talented professionals don’t create this less than successful environment on purpose, it is just that they really don’t understand the higher level connections and thought process of the A player and they end up being more of a hindrance and distractor to overall success than they are a key component to the accomplishment of overall success.

There is research study after research study that shows if you have 90+% A players in your management ranks you will be extremely successful in your team and corporate endeavors. That being said I continue to scratch my head when I see organizations with A level talent who are available to move into a next tier open position go out on a public search to fill the position. A level talent is very hard to find, and to think that you are going to be able to search outside and find it more readily than you can identify and find it in the work force that has been with you for an extended period of time is simply naive. What typically happens is that an experienced director or VP is brought in from the outside and they end up after a short amount of time showing that they are a B or low level C talent. Even more mind boggling to me is that none of the people who were responsible for bringing this less than high end performer into the organization want to admit to making a bad hire so they live with the impact an under talented manager brings to their organization. The outcome of such a decision is that their true A players are driven from the organization and they take their talents to a competitor, where they are typically extremely successful working and managing at a level their previous employer would not promote them into.

Organizations really need to take a good look at their talent retention programs and give them more than just lip service and they also need to come to the realization that all forced ranking systems do is allow for the B and C players figure out sly ways to sabotage their talent pool of A players. Like Ken Blanchard says, organizations should help all of their “employees earn a grade of an A”, in my opinion the Blanchard approach to talent management will more readily allow you to identify and distinguish between the A, B and C players in your talent pool.