How Establishing a Security Management Team Allows Leaders to Focus on Strategy

CSO — For many years, as I grew in the executive ranks of several companies, I heard that it was lonely at the top. Once you achieved the highest position in your department, people said, you were the leader responsible for all the make-or-break decisions and their consequences. At the same time, those people said, there was a need to tip your balance of responsibilities to a more strategic role, so that you could spend less time and energy being tactical.

This creates a taxing dilemma: How do you make all the decisions while still becoming more strategic? Spend more time on the job? Maybe. Some might say that’s why we CSOs get paid the big bucks.

Having found myself in that situation, however, I’ve been working on another approach: improving my team’s dynamics so that I can comfortably delegate more decisions, thus freeing myself up to focus on strategy. After all, being responsible for each and every decision is different from actually making each and every decision.

There’s an added bonus too. Especially for CSOs who manage a team of executives who oversee security in various and divergent functions of a major organization—for example, a leader who oversees both the IT security and physical security functions, or who directs physical security across diverse business channels—this approach can be rewarding not only for you but also for the rest of your team, because it allows them to participate in the decision-making process across a broad scope of the business.

Of course, it’s not easy building trust with the group and divorcing yourself from the day-to-day operations of the business. But after a solid year of working toward empowering my team, I’m finding that it’s starting to pay off. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Building the Team
The first task at hand is assembling a team, typically your direct reports or all management at a certain level. For example, my team consists of my direct reports (four) and all other director-level members of my department (four). For our purposes here, I’ll refer to this team as the Security Executive Team, or SET. As leaders, perhaps our most important focus is making sure that our top managers have a strong balance of hard and soft skills and are capable of decision making, communication and program execution without our direct intervention.

It is important that you establish the SET with a couple of critical points in mind. First, the SET must be responsible for setting the direction of the department and making all key decisions that affect any aspect of the department’s business—regardless of how divergent the organization that you support.

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