Now, I know you’ve heard that opener more than a few times, and you’ve probably heard it both in personal and professional conversations. In fact, you might have even been tempted to use it yourself when you were trying to get some critical information about a project or a program.
If you have used it, and especially if you’ve been on the receiving end of it, I’d like you to take a minute to recall that situation.
It’s ok. I can wait. Just think back if you can to a time when someone was trying to speak with you, or you were trying to get their attention.
I bet you don’t have the fondest of recollections of that interactions. In fact, unless you were the one saying “No, thanks,” you probably have terrible memories of how well that conversation went.
You probably were at least a little bit anxious or nervous.
You were obviously not sure they would talk to you.
And they may have even literally set a timer and cut you off at the 5 min mark and either cut the call or shooed you out of their office.
In any case, it’s highly unlikely that meeting was successful.
And it’s even more unlikely that what you really wanted the most out of that meeting wasn’t even remotely achieved.
What am I talking about?
No, I’m not talking about information.
And I’m not talking about support or agreement.
I’m talking about the most valuable commodity you have a security leader:
Respect.
We talked about this a while back, but without gaining the respect of the people you interact with, it’s going to be very hard to get anything meaningful done. You’re going to struggle to accomplish even little things, because you won’t have the two things we talked about before that come from respect: trust and support.
And because it’s so critical, it’s what we’re going to spend the entire September issue of the Security Sanity newsletter talking about: how to successfully engage with your security customers so you gain the respect you need to be effective.
In the August newsletter, we introduced The Agile Security System™, and we talked about the 7 core principles of the system. The 2nd principle of the system is “understand your customer’s world,” and it’s pretty hard to do that if you can’t successfully engage with them. That’s why I’ll be talking about it in September’s issue.
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Stay safe,
ast
—
Andrew S. Townley
Archistry Chief Executive
