CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
How Discernible Enabled Cisco’s Emerging Security Leaders to Level Up Organizational Communications
If you ask 100 people what a CISO prioritizes most when hiring new talent, you might hear them say technical skills or experience in a specific security domain. However, increasingly, there is another top priority on that list: communication skills, often called “soft skills,” which now ranks high on a CISO’s priority list.
This trend is particularly prevalent in large, complex enterprises where security teams must work across, up, down, and sideways across organizations to do their job and gain support and influence for security within the company.
Experienced CISO Josh Yavor knows this firsthand. “There is an intersectionality between getting stuff done in a corporation and communication and trust. To get people to trust you, you must communicate effectively. It's a huge part of getting things done!” However, finding talent with these subtle yet impactful communications skills isn’t always easy.
“It's usually easier to find the technical skills your team needs compared to finding folks who have the communication skills that are increasingly necessary, especially in a large, global organization,” he told Discernible.
The Challenge
In his former role as the Chief Information Security Officer for Cisco Secure, Yavor was responsible for a large, growing team. With a balance of established and newer leaders in this group, he understood that effective communication skills would be vital to ensure his direct reports were successful as they navigated significant organizational change. He’d seen the difference a proactive communication program makes while working with Discernible CEO Melanie Ensign in her previous security communications role at Facebook, where Yavor led the corporate security team. So, rather than wait for the inevitable stumbling blocks to present themselves, Yavor proactively engaged with Discernible to provide strategic communications analysis, training, and professional development for his new and expanding leadership team.
Like many security leaders, the leaders on Yavor’s team faced an aggressive schedule of deliverables across a large and complex set of stakeholders within the business group. The team needed to deliver on requirements to improve the security of the Cisco Secure products while also enabling accelerated global growth. “I realized that what my team needed was more than I could deliver individually through personal coaching on its own,” he recalls. “We were a globally distributed team with folks working in an office while others worked remotely. We had people in large established Cisco offices and others in much smaller offices tied to previous acquisitions.”
Yavor’s team included the security team from Duo Security and was growing to expand service offerings to all business groups within Cisco Secure. They focused on strengthening their leadership team’s communication strategies and methods with customers and internal Cisco stakeholders to meet this goal.
The varying cultures, locations, skill sets, and appetite for professional development meant that an objective expert with deep experience in security was essential to uplevel communications skills across these disparate employees in a manner that meets them where they are. “The goal was quite simple: to level up everyone individually to where they needed to be,” he said.
After evaluating numerous consultants, Yavor selected Discernible because of Melanie’s experience in security communications and her flexible approach. “I knew Melanie could be a partner in assessing each individual’s needs and doing that in a way that removed biases on my part,” Yavor said. “That and she is a security professional who knows how to uncover and prioritize areas of opportunity for development.”
Solution
Discernible took a multi-phased approach with the Cisco team, beginning with creating a needs assessment with Yavor and his Chief of Staff to identify key communication challenges within the team. Then, they developed a plan for prioritizing, disrupting, and replacing unproductive communication patterns. The plan included tactical details for managers and ICs, program timelines and milestones, and a methodology for measuring progress and impact.
Discernible also analyzed communication styles and information processing methods across the team, then coached team leads to develop individualized communication plans tailored to their business goals.
Yavor recalls a particular aspect of Discernible’s work that was helpful, given how busy his team was. “Melanie sought out those opportunities to say, ‘Hey, what are you working on right now? What communication do you need to get out? What is working well, what are you struggling with?’ And she would engage with coaching on specific, real-world deliverables to make the whole process effective.”
Before working with Discernible, some team members struggled with how to prioritize and effectively use the myriad of communication channels that had been growing over time through numerous acquisitions and the accumulation of various IT collaboration systems. Assumptions had been made at the individual level about which tools were best for which kind of communication, and almost everyone reported feeling anxious about choosing the right tool and the expectation that they frequently check at least half a dozen different communication platforms daily. Discernible worked with one of Yavor’s teams to develop a playbook for effectively using various communication tools, including a list of platforms they were no longer expected to rely on and SLAs and best practices for the handful of tools the team continued to rely on.
Additionally, Discernible developed a customized playbook for CISO and Chief of Staff communications to help the leadership team participate in, socialize, and support future communication plans across the organization. Through listening sessions and private coaching, Discernible created a roadmap for team leads to articulate and recognize how IC contributions connected to the team’s charter.
Results
Yavor’s objective with the Discernible engagement was to increase the quality and consistency of achieving their security goals by ensuring his leaders had the best skill set possible to work with their teams and stakeholders.
“Melanie provided the right balance of structure for predictability with an expectation of customization and tailoring as appropriate for the individual goals we wanted to achieve.” Yavor points out that most security leaders have a budget for annual professional development training, but often these funds are used for “canned solutions” or conference fees. “What Discernible offered made it easy for me to communicate the benefits of this type of customized solution to the parties I was accountable to,” he notes.
Yavor believes that by working with Discernible, he himself learned a great deal about “how to best support the organization and my leaders, who were accountable for delivering against strategic goals across the company on a day-to-day basis.”
Yavor recently ran into one of his former direct reports who received communications coaching from Melanie. He recalled, “She shared that she still uses those skills in her career today and that it was one of the best professional development experiences she ever had.”
- - -
To learn more about how Discernible can turn your team into effective communicators, contact us here.
