Leadership Laboratory

Leadership Lab: STI Degree Candidates' Leadership Essays

SANS Technology Institute's mission is to develop the leaders of the future for the information security industry. One of our admission requirements is that an applicant complete an essay describing leadership qualities they have demonstrated in the past.

SANS Technology Institute's Leadership Essay - June 5th, 2007
Leadership Essay SANS Technology Institute - May 13th, 2008
Leadership Essay SANS Technology Institute - April 16th, 2008
Leadership Essay SANS Technology Institute - February 22nd, 2008
Leadership Essay SANS Technology Institute - February 8th, 2008
Leadership Essay SANS Technology Institute - December 7th, 2007
Leadership Essay SANS Technology Institute - September 14th, 2007
Leading to Patch Management - June 27th, 2007
Leadership in Consulting - June 8th, 2007
Leading from the Front - May 4th, 2007
Leading Through Mentoring and Coaching - January 10th, 2007
SANS Technology Institute Leadership Essay - December 26th, 2006

Leading Through Mentoring and Coaching

January 10th, 2007
By Kevin Bong


My most fulfilling achievements as a leader center around coaching, mentoring, providing feedback, and being an advocate. In one example, my company was beginning a key business project. When we began the project, my peer managers and I identified the need for a technical lead from IS to be involved in the project. This was a new role that required a great deal of technical, leadership, and interpersonal skills. Initially no candidate from within IS stood out as a good fit for this role. After some consideration, I proposed one of my direct reports for the position.

This individual had been a member of my team for quite some time. She was very strong technically, and had been working on developing her soft skills. I had been working with this individual in these areas (mentoring and coaching her, providing frequent, thorough, and sometimes difficult feedback) and she was showing progress. While this person didn always like or agree with my feedback, she trusted me, respected what I had to say and took it to heart. When I proposed that she would be a good fit for the new role, other IS managers were initially unsure. They felt her leadership and communication skills may not be far enough developed for the position. I positioned myself as her advocate. I felt that given the opportunity she would live up to it. I shared the progress she had made, and why I felt she would be successful in the role. I also committed to continue to mentor and assist her if she took the role. The associate took the role and exceeded our expectations both in her contributions to the projects success and in her personal development.

Some of my greatest successes as a leader have resulted from my ability to drive change and get people to work together. Before I began leading my organizations network team, we were complacent in our technology standards and had a hard time bringing about significant changes to architecture and strategy. As a result we were at times behind in technology and not as efficient or adaptable as we could be.

One example was our data storage strategy for servers. We were purchasing internal hard disks for each of our servers, while many of our peers were moving to Storage Area Networks (SANs). I worked with my storage technician to learn about SAN technology. I fostered communication within and outside the team to better understand the value and impact of this technology. I lead the development of a strategy to specify how, where, and why we would use SAN disk technology. Working with many members of my team, we built a proposal detailing the costs, benefits, architecture, and implementation plan for our SAN environment. I presented and discussed the proposal with IS managers and many of the IS staff to gain understanding and buy in. Upon approval, I worked with the storage technicians to manage the implementation, roll out, and communication of the new technology.

In another example, when I became the leader of the IS Network team, there was no long term directory services architecture strategy. One of the key decisions to be made for this strategy was whether wed keep Novell or switch to Microsoft Active Directory - a decision we struggled to make because it had a profound impact on many peoples jobs within the department. This lack of a strategy lead to outdated processes and software, delays in projects, challenges supporting my companys aggressive growth, and a poorer end user experience. To get over this hurdle, I built a team of people throughout IS to focus on making the key decisions. I guided the team on approaches to making the decisions - we adopted a systematic approach that started with researching, soliciting input, testing, and receiving training. A heavy focus was placed on the business needs and the end user experience, this helped to make the decisions less personal for those in IS who were most affected. I then brought everyone together and gave each an opportunity to share their findings and recommendations with the group. The group then made the decisions and developed the strategy together. As a result, we had buy-in and support from everyone, even from people who may initially have liked a different result.

I used similar tactics to drive the adoption and roll out of other key infrastructure technologies, including a large VMWare implementation and the conversion of the entire corporation to IP Telephony.