What are the best ways for senior information security professionals to develop teamwork skills?

Information Security is a broad discipline, so it's important for senior Information Security professionals to try to strengthen their team’s skills by first accessing their current skills and capabilities to identify the gaps and close them through, training, on the job development and knowledge share. Also guiding them to choose mentors and coaches that can drive their career journeys to strengthen their unique skills in the field. This will creat an atmosphere where everyone will learn from eachother and have special attention on areas of development as well as feedback where necessary.

As cyber professionals we need to take a look at the skill set of the group. Should I take a look at my skill set, I’m not comparing that to those I supervise. There are team members and team leaders. The skill sets between the two should be different. Team members for example have 3-5 years or more experience, a CISSP, fully understand RMF and the multiple NIST pubs governing cyber/infosec. Team leaders should have at least 3-5 years as a team leader plus the additional 5-8 years as a team member. This shows team members that their lead has more experience and thus a greater understanding plus a legacy understanding. The team leader should have a minimum of a CISSP, EtH, and several others.

Goals are a great way to manage your career and other aspects of your work environment. When I first started out in security (mid 1980’s) sorry, I am dating myself but, not in a 1000 years could I anticipate the rapid growth of the internet in the 90s, a pc in most consumers homes, and businesses relying more and more on licensing and server farms. Our ability to determine team members security experience at such an early stage was difficult. I based it on their time using classified information be it military or Fed Gov, I would also look at the results of their back ground investigations to ensure that what was stated by the applicant was in fact true.

This is much harder to view from an aspect point of view. I say that as even though we feel we can trust our team members with the quality and quantity of their work, can we trust them with words said in confidence? When team members are scattered remotely, the lack of face to face communication makes it harder to gauge responses, or determine a persons feeling through their body language. Sure they say they’ll trust you or won’t pass on information but having been bit several times I found the only way to truly trust remotely located team members was to keep conversations and communication work related and not to get too personal. You can still celebrate achievements and successes but be careful if sharing personal information.

Team members need to know you’ve got their backs and this can be done by showing support, promotions, listening and most of all by not talking to team members about other team members. Gossip can hurt morale and low morale creates negativity and the more a leader complains, the worse it can get. As a supervisor I never complained to those I supervised. If they wanted to complain they knew they could do so to me and I wouldn’t hold it against them but, if they complained to other team members about something neither had control over, I would put a squash to that.