Pleasers! Don’t proffer. Negotiate.
By Carole Theriault, The CyberWire
I've worked in the technology industry for more than twenty years. I have worked at big corporations in both junior and senior roles, and I've consulted with dozens of others through my own firm. And there are a number of behaviors I wished I had knocked on the head much earlier in my working life: one of these is being a pleaser.
In my experience, a lot of pleasers are women, like me.
Pleasers tend to look for the best outcome to a situation, which is great. However, they often do this to their own personal detriment, hoping that the service they proffer will put them in good stead.
Imagine the boss asks you at the end of the work day to get a presentation ready for tomorrow morning's board meeting. A pleaser will loathe the request - I mean, who wouldn’t - but smile and say something like “no problem”, and get the job done.
Now, if you are good at what you do, you can become a dumping ground for a plethora of tasks outside your immediate remit. Pleasers that can’t say no (or at least negotiate terms) leave themselves wide open to being taken advantage of.
Think about it: If there is only benefit for the request party, and you seem agreeable to the request and perform the task masterfully, why wouldn’t they hit you up again? And again. And again.
Oh, and typically these tasks are on top of all your tasks that make up your job for no extra pay or perks.
But there is another hidden, and more deadly, cost: the resentment against those that ask repeatedly grows within the pleaser. Pleasers rarely give themselves an outlet, and this negative feeling builds. And builds. The outcome can affect your mental health, your performance, and your attitude, all of which affect how you are perceived by bosses and colleagues alike.
So a word from a life-long pleaser who’s been around the corporate block a few times: stop proffering and start negotiating.
The goal is always for a win-win situation, one where all parties walk away feeling they struck a good deal. Perhaps you want training, or a Friday off, or a voucher - it doesn’t matter. Recognize that when someone hits you up for a work favor, they will respect you more if you negotiate rather than offering it up for free.
Moving forward, or more of the same?
By Regina Johnson, The CyberWire
While the better part of the last two years have seemed like life in stasis, the last 3 months have flown by in a blur. We have borne witness as the world begins to emerge from a pandemic that has ravaged humanity, both physically and emotionally, turned economies on their heads, and weakened infrastructures of all types. It seems that for many people, life is snapping back to how things were in pre-pandemic times and the brain’s unique ability to forget painful experiences is taking over. While I try to be optimistic, I find that I am more of a realist in situations such as these.
As we watch the world open up and gain quite a bit more freedom than we have had over the last 17 months, we are also watching the ramifications of a lack of diligence when it comes to hygiene come to fruition. I could go on and on about how personal hygiene and a cavalier attitude about virus transmission is leading to a rise in COVID cases, but I won’t because we all know that it’s happening and I hate beating dead horses.
Cyber hygiene is a different story. In the course of this pandemic, we have become much more dependent on our tech devices and the need for them to run as cleanly as possible. For most companies and families, a breach of any scale can be devastating, and for as many high-profile breaches that have been covered in myriad news outlets, there are even more that were not, which means that we don’t know who or what was behind them. Like G.I.Joe said, “knowing is half the battle” . If nothing else, these stories should be a steadfast reminder that keeping our networks and devices as safe as possible is crucial to our “new normal”.
We are moving from the work-from-home era back into the office and schools. It’s time to remember that we all benefit when we emerge from a major crisis with more knowledge and resolve that we went into it with, and we use the lessons learned to improve processes. Now that we have started to come out on the other side, one of the best lessons is one of the oldest: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
A peek behind the curtain.
By Jennifer Eiben, The CyberWire
Want a glimpse into the lives of cybersecurity professionals and learn how they got to where they are in our industry? The CyberWire’s Career Notes podcast steps inside the diverse and fascinating worlds of cybersecurity professionals around the globe and gives you the opportunity to hear their personal stories in their own words.
We are proud that half of the episodes for this show are women, a much better percentage than we represent in the industry. We hope our industry numbers continue to grow, and in the meantime, we will shine a light on them through Career Notes.
It’s interesting to see the variety of professionals in our industry and hear their cyber origin stories and even their places in the industry. We’ve had threat hunters, CEOs, journalists, podcast hosts, program managers, data scientists, and more. One that I found interesting is Dr. Jessica Barker who has a PhD in civic design and is a founder of Cygenta, a cyber risk firm she started with her husband. Jessica is interested in the human side of cybersecurity. Jessica shared, "I do look at these problems in a different way to the people I'm working with who are more technical. And I started to see actually the way in which cybersecurity has such a huge people element to it." Check out the episode with Jessica for yourself. Follow her on Twitter.
Want to share your story with our Women in Cyber community? We’d love to hear about it. Please email us and we may feature it on our Career Notes podcast.