I have, for a quarter of a century now, facilitated review and preparation seminars for those who, already established and working in the field of information security, wish to challenge the examination for certification as professionals. (This exam is probably one of the hardest that you will ever encounter. One of the candidates in one of my seminars, towards the end of the seminar, said that, if he ever encountered a candidate for a job for which he was hiring, regardless of what the job was, who held this certification, he was going to hire that person. He felt that the material and requirements that we had gone through during the week had been sufficient that, anybody who could pass that examination was worth hiring, for anything.)
I always start the seminars with the section on security management. This is because a lot of the candidates who come to challenge for the exam are well familiar with, and experienced in, the information technology that is required. Fewer of them have had management experience. I start with the section on security management, to point out that you can have all of the security tools that you want, and have those tools working to optimal efficiency, and if you are not managing the system properly, you may have no security at all.
This same point needs to be made for any kind of management position. You have to manage, if you are a manager. And, basically, management means that you have to do the whole job. It means that there are things that you may think that you know, when you are managing volunteers, because you yourself have been a volunteer for a number of years. You understand the cause. You understand the objective. You understand the tasks necessary to come to accomplish the objective. You have worked, as a volunteer, for many years, and have a great deal of experience in that frontline role.
That doesn't mean that you can manage it.
There are new requirements for you as a manager of volunteers. You have to understand not only the cause and the objective, but you now have to see that in a new light, and understand the resources that are available to you. Primarily these resources are the volunteers in your charge. You only have a certain number of volunteers. Each volunteer can only do a certain amount of work. And, of course, the amount of work that an individual volunteer can accomplish is going to vary. It is going to vary depending upon their own level of experience and training. It is going to vary according to other demands on their time, and interests. It is going to vary depending upon their commitment to this particular cause or objective. There can be a number of other factors that modify how much work a given volunteer will be able to provide for you. You are, even though you may not have a budget to pay salaries for your volunteers, still needing to do some kind of budgetary planning and management, in the much *more* complex analysis of how much work your resources; the volunteers; can provide for you. You have to know what the cause is, and what the objective is, and you have to understand how to direct your resources (that is, your volunteers) to best effect the objective.
If you come from a management background, and, having managed different departments and offices, you now find yourself managing a volunteer organization, or a volunteer office within your organization, you have a different set of problems, and new skills are required. I frequently say, in teaching security management, that any manager, of any organization, no matter what it is that they are managing, is really managing two things: personnel, and risk. As an experienced manager in charge of an office or department, you have been used to handling issues of personnel management. You need to get to know your workers, you need to get to know their interests, and you use that knowledge of them, as well as the fact that you or the company is paying them, in order to direct them towards the objectives required by that department or office. But now you are managing volunteers. Motivating volunteers is somewhat different than motivating employees, and we will go into the issues of motivation in more detail, later in this series. The same skills and processes that you have used in managing employees, in terms of learning your employees and their interests and skills, do apply in this situation. The thing is that they become much, *much* more important in a volunteer organization. You no longer have the motivation of paying employees. Your ability to manage and motivate the volunteers depends far more upon your knowledge of the volunteers, and their trusting you as a manager (which was important in a commercial enterprise) now becomes much, *much* more important, and, indeed, absolutely vital.
As a manager of a volunteer organization, or a volunteer office within a larger enterprise, you are going to require all of the skills of management for a commercial enterprise, and then some. There are additional skills which are not called upon in a commercial enterprise. Your ability to make a personal connection, with the people that you are managing, becomes much more crucial in a volunteer situation. Tasks which you would normally assign to other offices within a commercial enterprise, you are now required to handle yourself. You need to know the cause and you need to know your volunteers, very deeply. You probably will need to know other volunteer organizations, some working for either the same, or a similar cause, and some which may not be working towards the same cause, but may be pursuing causes that are congruent with your own objective. So you are dealing with people that you are not paying, and you are also dealing with external organizations, upon which you have no contractual or commercial leverage. If you are used to managing within a commercial enterprise, this will require a whole new raft of skills, while still being part of management.
Introduction and table of contents
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