Five Key Things for Security Risk Leaders: The Benefits Of Boosting Risk Culture
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One of the main challenges that security leaders face when attempting to introduce an effective Security Risk Management framework across their organization is fostering and maintaining a robust security culture.
The ASIS International ESRM Steering Committee recently hosted an ask me anything webinar focused on developing effective protection strategies. Amongst the key considerations for leaders – the presence of a strong and steady security culture was highlighted as one of the most relevant elements to build and scale effective risk management operations.
A reliable risk culture is often the key differentiating factor of successful and resilient organizations. Its presence ensures that managers at all levels of an organization are aligned on a joint commitment to safety and security. Alongside this, an effective culture is the foundation of embedding proactive risk management activities across teams, guaranteeing that risk awareness never falls into the background.?
So What Do We Mean By Risk Culture?
Risk culture refers to the overall climate and attitudes towards risk across an organization. More specifically, how managers and employees view and prioritize their risk management responsibilities alongside other priorities such as short-term financial incentives and functional objectives.
An embedded and effective culture is reflected in the collective approach to managing risk across key teams. In larger organizations, a high level of variation in attitudes and approach to risk often materializes due to different departments utilizing individual approaches to achieving objectives. Once embedded, a strong risk culture encourages open discussions about potential hazards between teams, promotes accountability, and ensures that everyone from the top executive to the newest hire understands the importance of effectively managing risk.
And once effective risk management practices fall into place, a positive cycle comes to life: individual employees begin adopting better risk-aware behaviors, learning from mistakes, and responding to incidents quickly, which in turn influences wider teams and functions. This cycle supports the wider organization both in consistently hitting goals, and keeping people, operations and reputation protected.
The Benefits of a Robust Risk Culture
In short, an effective risk culture unmasks the real function of risk management as a success driver, rather than a roadblock.?The relevance of maintaining an effective risk culture stems from the numerous benefits that it can generate across an organization.
From the outset, improved risk identification as a result of staff proactively reporting issues as they arise lowers incident occurrence rates and often increases job satisfaction. Benefits also extend to risk mitigation – driven by a greater awareness of individual responsibilities when incidents materialize and a deeper understanding of critical dependencies across value chains. In this way, a strong risk culture likewise embeds resilience, ensuring that interdependent teams are able to bounce back from crises with fewer residual impacts.
So What are the Key Challenges?
Fostering a culture of security that will drive business leaders to proactively embrace security objectives and be open to collaboration with security teams is often a challenging process, which can complicate effective security risk management efforts.?
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One major challenge arises from human biases: people have a tendency to focus on risks that are obvious or relevant to them personally. This selective approach can lead to narrow views, where familiar and existing risks draw the focus of management attention, and new and emerging threats remain ignored until an incident occurs. It also leads to a tendency to avoid taking responsibility for risks that do not impact one’s tasks directly, which can create a divide between different teams and departments — an “us vs. them” mentality that hinders effective cross-functional management.?
Pushback can also be driven by business leaders not being able to fully grasp the underlying causes of crises or the broader risk management process. Security leaders often use specialized language that can feel inaccessible to non-experts with limited capacity, further isolating the risk management department.?
Furthermore, even in organizations that have taken active steps to foster engagement in an effective risk culture with awareness programs, resourcing engagement and collaboration efforts over time often remains a key challenge, often putting at risk the maintenance and continual improvement. The focus of security teams is often reassigned – hampering regular engagement with the wider business.
So How do You Foster a Robust Security Culture? 5 Key Things
While the challenges that arise from fostering a risk culture are often deep-rooted, the benefits from embedding a proactive approach to security risks are well worth the investment. We’ve identified five key things to prioritize. The ‘bread and butter’ of an effective engagement program:
1. Focus on Building Partnerships: Building strong partnerships with colleagues from across the business is crucial for security practitioners, and is a process that can start with simple, everyday conversations. These initial steps aid in the process of consultation, which in turn helps to establish a comprehensive set of risk criteria aligned to stakeholders’ objectives – helping make security more relevant to their day-to-day operations. At the same time, effective partnerships help ensure every team understands their role in the security risk management process, making the task of providing high-quality insights easier for everyone involved. By engaging an initially small number of staff, it is possible to scale up and gain influence over time.
2. Make Risk Management Accessible: In order to establish clear communication channels that will allow a robust risk culture to grow, it’s vital to avoid technical jargon and instead use straightforward language tying security risk management objectives to the language of the business. Training and awareness sessions will always be a key tool in the practitioners’ toolkit, alongside practical tools such as the Human Risks Platform to make participating in the Security Risk Management Process accessible and engaging.?
3. Highlight the Benefits: Ensure you are appealing to senior leaders by highlighting the strategic and resiliency benefits of implementing more effective security risk management objectives within their departments beyond operational requirements. For example, estimated cost savings from decreasing incident rates and ensuring effective controls are in place to minimize disruption.?
4. Scenario Planning: When it comes to engaging team members across the organization, scenario planning is a highly effective tool to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of proactive risk management procedures, allowing individuals to quickly identify the impacts of potential problems and see their roles in potential solutions. Scenarios can be built around either historical or hypothetical events, forming a solid foundation for driving deeper engagement in resiliency and response strategies across departments.
5. Track Culture Over Time: What gets measured gets managed. An effective way to maintain high levels of risk awareness is by tracking engagement and risk culture over time, both to monitor the performance of engagement programs and clearly communicate value (or the need for targeted resourcing) to senior leaders. Tools such as surveys and questionnaires to measure compliance and engagement are crucial, as they support diagnosing problem areas that can be utilized as a basis for the security team to target further engagement. The ISCA-approach framework is a good starting point for teams aiming to measure culture over time.
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