ProLadyLife
The Professional Side of Life
Welcome to the professional world of, you guessed it, ME!
Throughout almost 25 years in my current profession, I have traveled many roads. My professional life is the place where my pride and value as a woman has flourished. Though the other sides of my life have influence this one, I find the most comfort and purpose here. This is the life that makes sense to me. This is the life that lets me use all of the skills, knowledge, and experience I have gained to make a difference.
Here is where I get to share the thoughts that lead me to finding simple clarity from daunting complexity.
Are you too close?
The tomato plant scenario
I’m standing here, staring at my little tomato plant, wondering why it isn’t thriving the way it should be. I have given it water, talked to it, provided support for its stems. I’ve kept it warm when temperatures dropped, added the right fertilizer when it needed food. I have given this tomato plant everything! And yet, it wilts. Its far behind all of the other plants out there in the garden. Its cost me considerably more time and money than any plant should have. But here I am, staring at this plant. Hyper focused on it until everything else fades out. Every day, more of my surroundings disappear, until the only thing I can see is this expensive, stressful, underperforming tomato plant.
So, what do I do? Well, what any self-respecting non-professional gardener would do. I double down on my efforts to save this little tomato plant. Worked harder, put more resources into it, and even threw some extra money at it. Not literally, of course, but you get the picture. I am not going to give up on something that I have put my heart and soul into. I can’t possibly back out of all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into getting this plant to grow from the tiny seed I pulled from a seed package with the picture of beautiful, fat, red tomatoes on it. I know what I want. I have a darn picture of it, and I am not backing down until I slice that juicy fruit (That’s right, I said fruit, against the 1898 Supreme Court Ruling) and toss it on a burger at the BBQ I’m hosting this fall. I can’t see the irrigation system that clogged a few weeks ago and stopped giving my plant enough water. I can’t see that the sun has shifted with the seasons and no longer shines on this part of the garden. I can’t see that the support I put in the ground last week has damaged the main root. All I see, is the plant. The plant that I have focused all of my time and energy on… not meeting my expectations. And who is the master mind that brought all of this to my attention? That’s right. My husband. He walks over, see’s my anguish, looks around for five minutes, and says… “Hey, I think I know what’s wrong.”. Why am I ranting about plants, you ask? Well, maybe its too much time in my garden. Maybe it’s my irritation that my husband was right? Who knows, but this event got me thinking. Isn’t this what I do every day at work. I walk into someone’s garden, take a look around, and have the nerve to say “Hey, I think I know what’s wrong.” Trust me, the principle is the same. Replace “Tomato Plant” with something like “My Project” or “My Software Application” or even “My Organization”, and you have the exact environment that I walk into all the time. You work hard to encourage growth in your companies. You research the best ways to foster a great working culture for your teams. You spend countless hours deciding the most efficient and cost-effective ways to enhance your technology. You nurture the plants in your garden. That is why it’s hard to take a step back and ask someone to come in and bare it down to its roots. This is your house. You can figure this out on our own. But when you are too close to something, everything around that one thing starts to blur. In the end, just like with my plant, you might be too close to the fruit, to see what’s affecting the roots.
Cyber Threats
The rise in threats continues with remote workforce
As someone who has been dancing in the Cyber Security world for a long time, I tend to lean on the side of caution when it comes to my own information making its way into the hands of nefarious individuals. Unfortunately, I get to see those individuals take advantage of organizations almost every day. As data footprints expand, and that data becomes more and more valuable, we are only increasing our risk.
Add to that the fact that we are moving into a landscape where working from “home” is the new norm, we are looking at some of the highest increases to risk that we have ever faced. How we manage and protect the data that our clients, customers, and employees trust us with, is more critical now than it has ever been.
What are the top threats to our “work from home” environment? 1.Unsecured home network connections – Most of the “at home” workforce doesn’t have the knowledge or skill sets that would allow them to install managed networking equipment. Nor do they have the means to purchase and maintain such devices. This also isn’t something that employers often provide. So, that leaves our remote workers vulnerable to attacks. I know, for a fact, that my neighbors (who do work from home) have not even taken the time to change their device names and passwords since the day they were installed by the local cable company. These types of attacks were fairly uncommon in the past because most people worked from a secured location behind the defenses of their organization’s infrastructure. Now, they are on the rise, as attackers can often remote into their networks with little effort. Thus, gaining access to every device connected to their modems and routers. 2.Losing sight of Security Concerns – That’s right, as we have shifted to our home offices, kitchen counters, and living room workplaces, we have lost sight of the importance of security. We leave our laptops logged on and sitting on the desk or countertop. We stop thinking about how important it is to lock our screens or shut down at the end of the day. Sometimes, we have to, or chose to, work from the local coffee shop where prying ears and eyes are waiting to take advantage of us. Social engineering and opportunity breaches will continue to increase as access to critical information becomes more readily available. 3.Personal Devices – Personal devices continue to be the easiest way for someone to get their hands on our data. As more people move to working from home, we have also seen a huge shift in personal devices being used for work. The mobile application warehouse has expanded so much in the past few years, that it is most likely that you, and everyone you know or work with, is using their personal devices to manage their work lives as well. And we all know that our personal devices do not require anywhere near the level of security that our work devices require. 4.Increased Use of Online Tools – Well, we all need a way to communicate with each other, right? We aren’t using those meetings rooms anymore, and as I look up from my computer, I see exactly three other people occupying the hoteling cubes around me. That is why tools like Zoom, Teams, Hangouts, and others, are so critical to the new way of managing business. We also need a way to transfer information to one another which is why we have shifter to O365, Google Docs, and other solutions for documentation creation and storage. The more we use these online tools, the more susceptible we become to remote hacks. 5.Unencrypted File Sharing – I get it! It’s a pain in the backside of everyone to add any type of encryption or passwords to the files we share. I hear the same complaints over and over again about how much the added level of security impedes performance. But, you have to think about the information that a file contains. The data points stored in a file might actually shock you, and when you don’t secure it properly, that data is out there for everyone to see. And, to use against you.
Cross-Team Collaboration
One of my favorite memories of being a low-level support technician many years ago, was a conversation that I had with a surgeon. He was having a lot of problems getting his new cable modem to connect to the internet and was extremely frustrated with the entire process. After walking him through some, to me, very basic steps, he was online and raring to go. Right before we ended the call, he says “I cannot believe that I can perform complex surgery on a heart and could not manage to figure out this modem thing.”
I took a pause after that call. He had a good point. We can’t all be good at everything. We all have our place with the work that we do. And yet, we all rely on the special skills of the people around us. So, why are we still working in such strict and unrelenting business silos? Don’t we need everyone that we are working with? Wouldn’t it make more sense to start breaking down those walls and lines of business so that our organizations can be more effective? Every day I see more articles, training, and blogs about team dynamics, organizational culture, and inclusion initiatives. I see those bits of information being implemented at some of the world’s largest companies within their teams, but what I don’t see, is that knowledge being applied to how we actually manage the way our individual teams work together. It doesn’t matter what project you are working on, what initiatives your company is trying to implement, or what business unit you sit in, you are not doing it alone. As a consultant that is constantly asked to walk into an organization and help find areas for improvement, or to identify the root cause of a broad scope of issues, I see the separation everywhere. I also have observed, almost 100% of the time, that the issues can be found in that separation. Every analysis, every retrospective, and every recommendation I make, could be solved if organizations started bridging the gaps between their business units. Now, in the example of the surgeon I mentioned, I am not going to walk into his operating room and start trying to learn what he is doing. However, spending a day in the observation deck to watch where he struggles and to see things from his perspective, absolutely. It’s an extreme example, I get that, but the concept is the same. How many times have I been sitting at my desk thinking “Why can Bob just get his crap together and stop clicking on things he shouldn’t be clicking on?”. I mean, I know its bad mojo to click random links, why doesn’t he know that? How many times have you been sitting at your desk thinking “Why can’t Terry in accounting figure out how to process this payment?” or “Why does it always take so long for the IT department to get someone access to our financial system?”. We all do it. We all say the exact same thing. “If the *insert business unit name here* would just do their jobs properly, we wouldn’t have these problems.” But the actual problem is we have absolutely no idea how their job gets done. We are so segregated into our own business silo (or team) that we only know that what they aren’t doing, is our only issue. If I go and sit with Bob to see why he keeps clicking on things he shouldn’t, this is what I learn. Bob has never been trained on identifying potential threats via email. Bob is the guy that makes sure that the building stays safe from physical intruders. He is the reason that I feel safe when I am sitting at my desk, criticizing his clicking skills. Spending just 5 minutes with him to explain why it’s a bad thing, and he was all over those threats going forward. He was sitting at his desk thinking “Why is the company always sending me these ridiculous emails, I have already confirmed this information!?” Taking 15 minutes to sit with Terry in accounting, I learned that her financial system was horribly buggy. It was constantly moving payments around, flagging them incorrectly, and not sending them to the bank processing center on the appropriate schedule. She was having to process payments multiple times, but always had to wait to confirm when a payment didn’t process before trying again. We got her in touch with one of the developers for our financial systems and they were able to work out the bugs. She was sitting at her desk thinking, “Why can’t our application team figure out what is causing this and fix it!?” Now let’s go sit with our IT people. You have submitted a request to add your new employee to the financial system so they can help Terry process payments. IT has the request, and they have a list of steps that they have to take in order to keep your organization compliant with government regulations. Since this is financial data, they have to ask two different people for approval to grant this access. The first person approved the same day. The other person decided to take the afternoon off and hasn’t responded. The next day, they call in sick. When they return, they have five emails from the IT department reminding them that your new person needs access. They delete these emails because they look automated, so must not be important. We found that providing transparency into the process of requesting and approving access to the entire organization encouraged faster responses from approvers, and more tolerance from requestors. What helped in each of these scenarios, is cross-communication between business units and teams. You do not have to go out and learn how to do everyone else’s job, you just have to figure out how your specialization can help make their job easier. Breaking down those business silos, opening your teams up to talking to each other, and blurring the lines that have been drawn between your teams is the best way to solve most problems. Not only can your teams become more tolerant and accepting of what it takes to do the work that they rely on, but it starts to alleviate pre-existing tensions between those teams. Overall, I know I am pushing some boundaries here. We have worked with the understanding that we have to work within these silos because everyone has their own set of skills, and it’s not like we can cross-train the whole company. I have been a part of world-wide organizations that have tried to break down these walls, literally. Setting up workspaces that have no walls so that teams can be more collaborative. Even in those instances, over time, I started to see business units separate themselves into groups. Almost like the high school cliques we are all familiar with. It was practically organic the way that they started to shift from being all over the floor to being huddled in their perspective groups. This is what we know. I am not saying that this shift in the way we work can happen over-night. I’m not saying that every organization should stop having “departments” that define the work people are doing. What I am saying is, lets start building some rope bridges or something. Make efforts to highlight the work that other departments are doing. Build transparency into our business, not continued division.
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