Author: Mark Tarallo
ISBN No: 9781032039794
Review date: 08/05/2024
No of pages: 222
Publisher: CRC Press
Publisher URL:
https://www.routledge.com/Modern-Management-and-Leadership-Best-Practice-Essentials-with-CISOCSO/Tarallo/p/book/9781032039794
Year of publication: 19/12/2022
Brief:
price
£27.99, paperback
The sub-title of Mark Tarallo’s book makes it more relevant to security and info-security managers: “Best Practice Essentials with CISO/CSO Applications”. This most welcome book does something that all too few writings (including mine, writes Mark Rowe) about private security do; that is, treat seriously, or simply acknowledge, the ‘management’ half of the term ‘security management’.
It’s understandable, to cover the specialism of security management, the crime and other risk prevention and investigation and the like, because if security managers don’t, who else will? Yet whether you’re doing security in a department of a larger estates or facilities branch of a business, or in a contractor supplying a service, you will make colleagues unhappy – or, more practically speaking, want to leave your employment or actually leave, creating a cost and work in replacing them – if you are a bad manager, or leader (the two are not the same, and a veritable industry debates the difference between the two).
Most of the book is given over to pure management, if you like, from bringing in a new employee (onboarding) to keeping employees engaged, to coaching them (and yourself), motivating people, managing change, and using your emotional intelligence; and managing difficult employees (first piece of guidance (page 82); try not to let it get to a point where someone becomes a problem).
How often is it, and not only in the security function but any other – sales, logistics – someone who shows ambition or commitment or simply someone who’s been around longest is given responsibility of managing others, without more than the briefest training or advice. Yet the qualities that someone showed, by working in security or sales or whatever, may not be the ones that will make them a good or even adequate manager. Hence the value in this book. Although, any number of books on being a manager are around; what sets this apart for the security person are first, about halfway in, the chapter on ‘crisis leadership’. Many of the things that can count as a crisis either sit with the security manager or they will have a say (‘accidents, product recalls, physical and cybersecurity breaches, weather events and natural disasters, negative media coverage, budget shortfalls, and personnel incidents.’)
Tarallo points to a difference between crisis management (‘focused on the immediate effort to respond and recover from the crisis’) and crisis leadership (all of that, plus a focus on the state of your organisation, before, during and after the crisis). In a word, plan (also ‘a great teaching and coaching opportunity’). Tarallo is a journalist, and uses one example he witnessed, the anti-globalisation protest in Seattle in 1999 at a WTO conference:
outside the glass-walled lobby, the animated protest grew, as did the chanting. A few demonstrators pounded on the windows. Inside, US senators, conference delegates, and officials, seemingly dumbfounded by the activism, mulled around anxiously. How could this have happened? said the looks on their worried faces.
The event organisers had had months to prepare; so had the demonstrators. Tarallo is an American, and his examples are largely American, although large enough ones for readers from elsewhere to grasp them – such as Hurricane Katrina, 9-11. His argument is that ‘command and control leadership is dead’ (page 117) and in should and can come listening, learning, ‘two way leadership’.
Leaders gave orders, enforced inflexible policies, and didn’t welcome input from employees. Some leaders saw collaboration as a threat to their territory that needed to be thwarted. That has changed. Employees no longer want to work in organisations where they must do as they are told.
Leadership should also be sustaining, he suggests; given such things as overload and burnout, something aired in Professional Security magazine (on the cyber side) in mid-2022. It makes work sound almost like serving in the military; staff “suffering mid-level burnout may still be able to power through and complete an adequate amount of work by sheer force of will, but their partially depleted state greatly hinders their performance and productivity”. Indeed, physical and mental consequences of burnout can become a security issue; absenteeism, turnover of staff, accident and other risks. As the author notes, to address it properly, you first have to understand it; admit that it’s around.
An American book still, it seems, cannot get through without mentioning former President Trump, and in this case Tarallo quotes Trump’s ‘insufficient leadership and inadequate crisis response’ to the covid pandemic; ‘an abdication of federal leadership’ that may have led to hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths from coronavirus.
As that may suggest, downright deadly bad leadership and management is all around, still, and at all levels. That begs the question; if the most powerful man in the world can be such a good example of bad leadership, in a book about it, how does everyone navigate their way, with integrity, while earning a living, as underlings to these in charge?
Arguably the most useful and interesting part of the book are the case study chapters late on, particularly by a Nigerian security consultant and trainer (and an OSPAs winner), McLean Essiene. He has lots to say about corporate security, and the overlap between physical and cyber security (CSO and CISO) and all in ‘a VUCAH (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and hyper-connected) threat landscape’.
Tarallo closes with some intriguing thoughts about what tech might turn us into; if artificial intelligence develops further, could it wipe out white collar jobs – what then for management, will you even know if the people you’re managing are real?! If they are wearing exoskeletons, might they be augmented people, who ‘use their advantages to become the new elite leaders’?! Tarallo argues that humans will become more valuable; businesses will look to hire and promote those with ‘high emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and the ability to think outside the box and question assumptions’.
But something that Tarallo does not really grapple with here, or throughout the book, is how alienating work and life have become, thanks to tech, made only more obvious by remote working during the pandemic. Nor is this new; this nagging idea that to have a career means a difficult compromise dates back at least to the 1950s in America, as in the Hollywood film The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (starring Gregory Peck).
If people work in security because they like to provide a service, to protect others, how come they’re suffering burnout? And what of the inspiring managers or leaders, suffering burnout too?
