As the 2022 recipient of the ASIS Foundation Executive Scholarship, ASIS CSO Center member Terri Govang, CPP, shared her experience with the IE Business School Executive Education program “Effective Management for Security Professionals” and the important takeaways she gathered.
The security industry is at a critical junction - experiencing a massive shift in mindset, growth, and potential. Simultaneously, shareholder expectations of security executives swiftly progressed beyond the traditional approach thanks to the inrush of security convergence, ESRM, and cyber-alliances.
Modern security executives face standardization, digitization, and modernization due to threat evolution, mergers, acquisitions, resizing, or lifecycles. Effective enterprise programs must establish unified physical and digital controls, processes, and structures to ensure reliable and accurate data informed decisions. Above all, effectively communicating challenges and opportunities across stakeholders is paramount.
Undeniably, ineffective holistic security leads to higher breach rates and loss of assets. Yet, despite industry growth and the importance of safeguarding the physical and digital environment, adoption across enterprise lags.
Designed with the ASIS Foundation, the IE Business School Executive Education program “Effective Management for Security Professionals” guides participants through opportunities and challenges impacting the modern market. Moreover, EMSP’s syllabus advances tenured security executives to gain and refine the skills needed for and vital to navigating the corporate landscape.
Over four days, the curriculum succinctly explores essential interdisciplinary competencies supplementing tactical and technical security expertise. It upskills security executives to strategically align their security posture with organization, c-suite, and shareholder expectations. The four sessions focused on strategy, finance, executive negotiation, and transformational leadership.
Strategy traversed competitive and corporate strategies, forces, and the value chain, to specific issues related to innovation and business model changes. Going beyond strategic alliances, post-merger integration and acquisition, the session addressed failed operations by how to prepare for and mitigate them. Interactive methods explored power and incentive structures, professional skills, abilities, and attitudes towards the effectiveness of lifelong learning, teamwork, conflict-reducing abilities, and leadership.
Finance included a lively debate surrounding corporate security as an investment rather than a cost. The session looked at how firms quantify ROI and examined real-world cases to understand the main concepts in financial management and capital budgeting. Takeaways of solid knowledge in security financial management, metrics, and value creation empower security executives to articulate risk and opportunity appropriately, meeting the priorities of the CEO and CFO.
Executive negotiation instilled a constructive problem-solving approach to situations rather than fleeing or fighting. Emotional intelligence applied to negotiations and conflict resolution, spotlighting personalities and variable actors in the negotiation. A process template tailored individual negotiation styles with a process-driven exercise that prepared for real-world scenarios and extreme negotiations, underlining the impact of emotional intelligence, as soft skills are power skills.
Transformational leadership elevated individuals and organizations to higher levels of development by articulating an emotionally compelling vision for the individual and the organization. The session encompassed best practices of transformational leaders, analyzed exceptional leaders, built trust and psychological safety, and leveraged coaching to develop sustainable results of high performance.
EMSP’s participants comprised security professionals from around the world. In a sophisticated fashion, exemplary conduct and candor, meaningful and impactful discussions enhanced value by sharing ideas through discussion, challenges, business planning, and honouring personal development in a collaborative environment.
The deepened insight from IE’s world-class instruction is an essential step for security executives aiming to establish themselves and their security function throughout the modern enterprise. A strategic enterprise vision reduces capital and operational expenditures, further aligning the security executive as the business partner of choice.
The rules of engagement are changing, necessitating a different standard for achieving business. The hands-on methodology ensures that participants leave the program as enablers of success through actionable strategies, innovative and transformational leadership. The global landscape is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The value of this program presented immediately proactive takeaways, empowered through developing vision, understanding, clarity and agility to successfully build security programs and advance corporate objectives to succeed in the evolving market. “Effective Management for Security Professionals” is a world-class program for the security elite.
As the 2022 recipient of the ASIS Foundation Executive Scholarship, thank you. My extensive experience in the industry, coupled with my commitment to professional development, ensured my preparedness to participate in the program. IE’s curriculum shined towards expanding my strategic executive skills, further well-rounding what I can return to the industry.
