The other day, Robert Khirallah and I had an excellent discussion with a cybersecurity leader. At the end of the conversation, the individual asked – “what are you management superpowers?”.
Thankfully, Rob took the first shot and (as always) gave a very eloquent answer. When I gathered my thoughts, I started with an analogy of rocks and stones.
In each team, there are rocks and stones.
Rocks are people who started in one domain and just want to be the best in that particular domain. This could be being the master of auditing and providing the best evidences so there are minimal follow-ups, or they just want to be the best third-party risk manager and want to keep an eagle-eye on all 3rd parties and SaaS applications, or they just want to be the best customer-questionnaires responder, and so on. And, while doing this over and over, they do become darn good at what they do.
On the other hand, some people are like stones. These folks are never settled. They want to do one thing one quarter and try the other next quarter. This is totally fine too when you are figuring out what gets you out of the bed each morning.
I finished the analogy leading to the response that my superpower is figuring out the rocks and stones in my team and give them the right opportunities accordingly.
But then we continued the discussion and came to the conclusion that some people are like gems. Gems are people who will just shine in whatever they choose to or want them to do. Someone started in GRC, learned everything there and moved to Privacy. Learned all about Privacy, cool let’s move to AppSec. Learned enough about AppSec, awesome let’s move to InfraSec…and so on.
From my perspective, an ideal career would start from being a rock where you start with one thing and become really good at it. Gather the confidence and move on and become a stone, figuring out everything there is to explore, and ultimately aspire to be the gem by becoming the person who can and will do whatever they aspire to.
And as a manager, my new superpower is to find rocks, stones, gems, and let them shine in their own accord.