Navigating the Cybersecurity Career Path

CHAPTER 20How Do I Manage Up?

Summary

• Know your manager: Explicitly ask how they like to communicate. How often? What channels? Verbal or written?
• Educate: Make sure you are personally growing the security acumen of senior leadership. The more they learn from you, the easier it will be to work with them.
• Establish your authority: Take every leadership interaction as an opportunity to demonstrate your competency and leadership. This will help them trust you to make the right decisions.
• Communicate well and often: Report regularly to senior management about the security program, external security events and trends, and your role within it.

Being a security leader is about more than simply managing a security program. A successful leader manages their management chain and senior stakeholders. This part of the job is as important, if not more so, than running the security tools and services that make up the security function. Why is this so important?

Most security leaders report to someone who doesn't understand security. Even a chief information officer (CIO) boss, who you would think might be most likely to understand, doesn't spend their time in the weeds of information risk management, which means they often fail to consider the nuances of security strategy and decision-making. Many security leaders report to a nontechnical executive — a financial officer, the head of the legal department, or even the chief executive officer (CEO) — and those people rarely have ...