Building Efficient and Collaborative Work Environments for Today’s Cyber and Tech Units
Team building for cyber and tech units presents special challenges and prerogatives. The most direct challenge occurs when a specific cyber or tech team — or complimentary functions which are critical interaction points — are geographically dispersed.
One priority should be coordinating simulation or collaboration activities for teams that are geographically separate. Keep in mind that this will require more overhead than it would for geographically centralized teams. Encourage and improve their use of the real-time collaboration technology provided by your company. As you improve your team’s coordination skills and their interactions become a daily fluid event, their camaraderie and trust in each other’s skills will increase and the difficulties of geographic dispersion will melt away.
That dispersal has benefits as well. Cybersecurity has become integrated in all areas of business, so the more your team understands of your organization’s business activities and strategic vision, the better. Culturally integrating your team members throughout the company should be priority, but you may have to fight for support for their inclusion in other group’s activities.
To successfully protect your company from attacks, your team needs to be constantly studying your networks, applications, and remote channels with the most critical eye. But that eye needs contextual understanding of the products and business processes driving all that technical activity. A strong team will have a good pipeline for moving ideas and analysis rapidly through the group. As the Chief Information Security Officer, you should work to engender a culture that encourages constructive criticism as well as the appropriate reactions to constructive criticism. Any good cyber pro understands that there could always be an angle that someone else’s eye sees more clearly.
Many discussions of team building in cyber and IT seem to start with the difficulties of team building with a group that prefers interacting with technology to interacting with each other. I have found that the best IT and cyber professionals are excellent communicators who understand technology and are able to articulate it to laymen and experts alike. They also know how to use collaborative tech channels to connect to their partners and peers.