A reverend. An FBI Director. A Fortune 1000 CEO. A British Prime Minister. Four individuals representing widely different aspects of life: spirituality, law and order, business, politics. The above represents the role models of leadership identified by some of today’s most skilled security professionals — the men and women identified last month by this magazine as the Most Influential People in Security 2020.
Who better to opine on leadership than this cohort of security professionals? I asked some of this year’s Most Influential People in Security to identify a role model or mentor, essential element of leadership, or a personal example of leadership in which they take pride. The results speak volumes about the qualities that the best leaders strive for. Yet, at the same time, the answers all punctuate how elusive a concept leadership is and illustrate how difficult it is to get to the core of leadership. They enumerated a total of 18 complementary and often-overlapping qualities, but in only a few cases did any two of them use the same word.