You’ve passed through two or three stage interviews and you’ve got the security management job that you, as a capable and ambitious person, had in mind for years. Congratulations! writes Mark Rowe. Your work begins now.
Besides the actual job of protecting assets, you have several other strands to the job that you could do, if you had enough hours in the day. Here are (at least) six.
1) keep abreast of current affairs. Note that in the last few months a couple of senior, experienced security men I have met and talked about how they up with the news, each said that they read The Economist – one digitally (he singled out its Espresso service) and one still the paper newspaper (as they call themselves, although it looks like a magazine). An alternative is to take a daily newspaper, again either digitally or as a paper copy. There’s so much you could read, paid-for content and free, to inform you about everything, you could do nothing else. It’s time-consuming to filter out stuff. Why take the trouble to keep up? Simply to appear as a well-rounded person, when you’re in the lift with a manager from another function, or in a meeting. It also pays to know something of the business you work for (not quite the same as ‘know your organisation’, number three), whether that’s a university with students from many nations (which ones are going through civil unrest which might explain activity on campus) or an investment bank (where it may matter greatly that Peru is in flux, or, to quote a joke from The Simpsons, ‘Indonesia is at a crossroads’).
2) keep up with related functions. If you are working in a small (or, to sound more fashionable, bijou) company, you as head of security may also be the one who’s turned to about fraud prevention, business continuity (BC) and data protection, and might be expected to have a nodding acquaintance with governance, audit and compliance. In a country where the bin men have a tablet in their cab to log their every task, everyone works with IT; can you trust that the IT guy or department has cyber security in hand, or even knows there is such a thing? If you work for a large organisation, it will have a BC and data privacy manager, or department even; yet if there’s a data breach or fire or flood, you will have to work with them. Or at least know who they are. To misquote a Professional Security Magazine reader, a crisis is a bad time to be handing out your business card to colleagues.
3) know your organisation, or; keep up with office politics. The covid pandemic prompted a sudden and mass move in spring 2020 to working from home, that was happening gradually and patchily anyway and has led to ‘hybrid working’. If you’re say a loss prevention manager in a retailer, or an auditor, you don’t have to be present at head office. Not that you should be; you will have work ‘on the road’, visiting regional loss prevention staff or stores. But it’s sensible office politics to show your face at HQ; to have those, to use the cliche, ‘water cooler moments’, to bond with colleagues, to have those chats when useful nuggets of knowledge or openings crop up that wouldn’t on a Zoom call. One experienced retail loss man recently told Professional Security of how hybrid working has prompted some in retail or corporates to wonder whether the ‘big character’ who was head of security is as necessary as was thought pre-covid; take away the face to face, and can the business manage with a part-timer, consultant head of security? Being indispensable and showing those in charge that you are may be two different things.
4) have an outside interest. Again, it’s significant that a couple of people I’ve interviewed lately have enthused about being a youth football coach, while holding down responsible security jobs. One was ASIS UK chair Letitia Emeana (and volunteering for an industry body is a laudable outside interest in itself!). The other said: “Just spending two hours working on football, it’s almost like therapy, because you aren’t thinking about your business, you aren’t thinking about the sector, your in-tray, you are just thinking about the teenagers, enjoying football, and taking them out on a Sunday and so see what you worked on, on a Wednesday and see the success on a Sunday, it’s so rewarding.” Here is the very definition of recreation – what you do in your spare time re-creates you for another Monday morning.
5) be a mentor. That could mean bringing on your deputy or successor. Besides being a right thing to do, there’s self-interest: that better covers you to take a summer holiday or at Christmas, with more confidence that you need not dash back if something flares up – as it can do: the political crises that led up to the two world wars happened in midsummer; floods and fires can happen in midwinter and when premises are empty. As with number four, giving something back can refresh you – mentors speak of how they learn, not only the younger and junior person mentored. This approach also works if you propose new security policy, let’s say for BYOD (bring your own device). Have a diverse panel of workers from your organisation, and you will learn how they will react to the policy in advance (if they’re low-paid, they’re going to take any chance to use free wi-fi, or to use company devices to do home shopping, regardless of what you say about security).
6) keep up with tech. I was recently in conversation with a bright security manager who gave me the impression that they had not heard of one of the world’s largest manufacturers of security products. Does that matter? You don’t need to know how your car or mobile phone works, you just use it. However I think back to the first person I interviewed in 2022, the consultant Richard Sumner; and the first person this year, who was Letitia. Each speaks in terms of learning where wires go, what this camera or that access control device does, literally following the cabling under the desk (no matter how dusty!?). That means that when – after some years, because there’s a lot to learn – you become a consultant, or a sort of internal consultant if you’re a security manager, you speak with authority about why you want x budget to achieve y, and you won’t have installers or others pulling the wool over your eyes.
7) think about your brand. A week after Britain was convulsed by a remark by BBC TV sports presenter Gary Lineker on social media about a public policy, no-one needs reminding that a moment’s click on social can have drastic, even career-ending consequences. I covered this in the March print edition of Professional Security Magazine. Briefly to recap: close protection operatives or security dog handlers and others who are self-employed are on a tightrope. They want to promote themselves, because if you’re not on social, you don’t exist. In his magisterial book on CP, Richard Aitch wrote of how all CP work is posted online. But every time you like someone’s post or link with someone, or take a selfie of somewhere glamorous where you’re working, in the hope of winning more work; you run the risk of annoying someone, and losing work.
Juggling your work with home, home deliveries, childcare while teachers are on strike (something I came across this week), implies all this is not a one-off but a process; that you need to do some time management (an art in itself). It also implies that sparing some time for personal and professional reflection is useful, even if you don’t make any changes to your life as a result; or for CPD purposes (continuous professional development – perhaps even reading this article counts?!).
