Isabel María Gómez , a Madrid-based CISO , describes the biggest challenges for cybersecurity leaders in the evolving digital landscape , discusses the importance of understanding broader business objectives , and tells us about the importance of regularly reviewing and adjusting priorities based on emerging threats and business needs .

How do you cultivate leadership within your cybersecurity team and foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation in cybersecurity practices ?

Cultivating leadership within a cybersecurity team is an on-going task that requires ethics , empathy and leading by example among others .

Everyone on the team needs different options and a constant ability to change hats . It ’ s important to give each of them the best that can be offered in terms of knowledge , attention , learning , new opportunities and a new vision that helps everyone row towards a common goal .

My team knows my commitment to them and I demonstrate this to them , for example , by providing continuous learning opportunities through training , certifications and access to cybersecurity industry events .

I also promote cross-functional collaboration to broaden perspectives and improve problem solving such as when we all sit down together to look at information directly on a console and an environment of learning and collaboration is generated . They know I ’ m not asking for anything I haven ’ t done before .

I encourage open and respectful communication to facilitate learning from both successes and failures , recognising and rewarding contributions , helping with improvement points in the team ’ s capabilities .

How do you measure the success of your leadership and team development initiatives within the cybersecurity department ?

In the most conventional way , measuring the success of something always involves establishing a scale against which to compare it and therefore involves evaluating qualitative and quantitative metrics .

Various types of Key Performance Indicators ( KPIs ) such as incident response times , number of prevented security breaches and system uptime can provide quantitative data on the effectiveness of the team .

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