RSI Security recently hosted our latest Executive Development webinar, Cybersecurity Culture, on October 24th. Our founder and managing director, John Shin, began with brief introductions to get audience members comfortable before leading into an icebreaker and contextualization of previous Modules—to catch up, read our Module One, Module Two, and Module Three recaps.
Shin also established the main focus of Module Four: how leaders can and must build trust and a culture of accountability to manage effectively, especially in high-stakes contexts like security.
Leadership and Culture in the Context of Cybersecurity
Shin led the presentation with a quotation from the ‘father of management,’ Peter Drucker, asking attendees to reflect on it and share their thoughts. The quotation reads:
“Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.”
One attendee remarked that business often functions similarly to the laws of physics, with matters going from order to entropy absent an organizing force. Another said it reminded them of Murphy’s law, that things that can go wrong will, and that it takes a special skill set to lead through challenges. In general, attendees agreed that Drucker’s insight is spot-on.
Shin then explained how it relates to cybersecurity and culture.
Within the context of cybersecurity, an incident usually causes friction and confusion. Keeping performance up and preventing prolonged chaos requires taking ownership of responsibility. It also requires trust between leaders and all other teammates. That’s where culture comes in.
The RSI Security Executive Development Program
Before digging more deeply into trust, culture, and how they relate to other principles the executive series has touched on, Shin took some time to outline the broader RSI Security Executive Development Program (EDP). It’s a liberating structure (namely, a trellis) helping cybersecurity leaders realize vertical growth and development for both security and efficient management.
In particular, the structural elements of the EDP include:
- Monthly workshop (11 modules)
- Peer learning and support
- Online class portal (coming soon)
- Implementation plan (coming soon)
Awareness, Attention, Execution, and Trust
Shin would then move into a longer-form recap and contextualization of prior webinar subjects, beginning with the concept of diminishing happiness as people age and why it’s imperative to expand your capacity. Effective leaders are learners rather than knowers, and getting to that point requires committing to the mastery approach across as many of your pursuits as you can.
Shin then asked attendees to reflect on what approach they aim to take, with most answering that they try to take the mastery approach as much as possible. But Shin reminded returning attendees that mastery requires deliberate practice—he compared the dedication required to elite athletes’ practice of watching their own and others’ game film even when not training.
Building culture and trust requires walking the talk and careful management of attention.
To that effect, Shin recalled a conversation that began in Module 3 about the importance of committed action. One of the most critical aspects of communication is making effective requests. And, despite most leaders knowing that they need to set expectations upfront, it doesn’t always happen in practice. He asked attendees why that is, and their responses included things like poor structure in meetings and misconceptions about others’ feelings.
Another big reason, though, is a lack of or poor culture of trust in an organization.
The Role and Responsibility of Business Leaders In and Beyond of Cybersecurity
Moving ahead, Shin explained that there are many different ways to think about trust. Two competing ways many people approach trust are evaluation and illumination. Often, we look to judge others as untrustworthy rather than illuminating elements of trustworthiness within them.
Becoming an effective leader, especially in times of crisis, requires a smart approach to trust.
Shin asked attendees to reflect on how they approach trusting strangers. Answers varied widely, with some noting that they base trust on delivery relative to expectations. One attendee called this a “do/say gap”—the delta between what people say they’ll do and then wind up doing. A person starts out at 100% trust but then might chip away at it as that gap gets bigger over time.
Shin shared that his own approach to trust has changed over the years, moving from a binary “all in or all out” approach to a more holistic understanding that trust is a continuum. He then introduced the Reina Trust Model, which centers around character, communication, and capability. Most critically, trust needs to be dynamic and mutable rather than static.
This is especially incumbent on business leaders, who bear the responsibility of upholding the public’s trust in institutions. Shin shared statistics from the Edelman Trust Barometer, which found that a majority of people across the world distrust leaders in government and other roles, including business. However, trust in business leaders does tend to be higher than trust in other officials. As such, managers and executives need to put in the work to build and maintain trust.
Trust as a Continuum Rather than a Binary
Looking more deeply at how leaders can build trust, Shin introduced a formula for trust from the 2000 masterpiece The Trusted Advisor. In it, the authors propose the following equation:
TRUST =CREDIBILITY + RELIABILITY + INTIMACYSELF ORIENTATION
In this context, intimacy is transparency and empathy. Trust for a person should be determined by adding the numerator qualities together and then dividing them by the denominator. This kind of thinking makes it clear that nobody is perfectly trustworthy or untrustworthy; instead, people fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum and can become more or less trustable over time.
To illustrate this point, Shin had attendees perform a thought experiment. He asked each of them to think of people in their personal lives and assign them scores from 1-5 for each value (1 being the lowest and 5 the highest), then compute their trust value based on the equation. A “perfect” score would be 15 (over 1), whereas the worst possible score would be 0.6 (3 over 5).
In doing the exercise, most attendees were surprised to find that the denominator made the biggest difference in a person’s trust value. Even a person with perfect marks in credibility, reliability, and intimacy could score relatively low with high self-orientation—and vice versa.
But the important takeaway is that effective trust is not about seeing people as better or worse; it’s approaching each component differently. Credibility relates to capability in context but has very little to do with intimacy, which itself relates to emotional intelligence and maturity.
Effective leaders steer the ship away from dysfunctions, and the most fundamental one (per The Five Dysfunctions of a Team) is an absence of trust. Stemming from invulnerability, it leads to more acute issues such as fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Removing or damaging trust builds a foundation for all other problems.
Effective leadership means avoiding binaries, building on (and preventing breaking) trust in a continuum, and leveraging behavioral data and systematic processes to create a culture of trust.
Looking Ahead: Channeling Trust and Culture for Cybersecurity Leadership
Wrapping up, Shin noted that the next module would continue to develop these ideas of trust building, looking at specific actions leaders can and should take to improve their organizations.
He asked the audience to reflect on what their biggest takeaways were from this conversation and, critically, what actions they would commit to moving forward to build trust and culture at their respective organizations. One attendee noted that it’s often hardest to commit to action when things are running smoothly. Another committed to making more effective requests by tallying up the specific and vague requests they make in an effort to maximize the former and minimize the latter. All audience members agreed that trust is absolutely essential to culture.
To learn more, request access to our recording of this event here. Catch up on previous sessions with our recaps on our blog, and be on the lookout for an invite to our next event.
And don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions you have!
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