AUSTRALIAN businesses face a growing number of cyberthreats as the digital landscape evolves.

Malicious threat actors have become increasingly sophisticated, particularly with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Their attacks are also more targeted and include info stealer malware, AI powered impersonations, and ransomware.

The Logicalis CIO Report 2024 revealed that 91 percent of Australian CIOs reported experiencing a cyberattack in the past year, emphasising the urgent need for organisations to enhance cybersecurity measures, practices, and protocols across their operations¹.

The report points out how attackers now use advanced technologies like AI to inflict damage on businesses across varied industries. These technologies let them scale their threats easily to launch more precise, automated attacks across regions. 

The promise of AI in enhancing defensive operations is already being realised, with analysts benefiting from AI's capabilities in mass data parsing and logical reasoning.

However, there needs to be more emphasis on the importance for defenders to simultaneously prioritise the development of intrinsic skills in their teams and to ensure the robustness and suitability of their current security operations processes.

Logicalis report reveals better ways

Logicalis Australia chief technology officer (CTO) John Griffin said, “Organisations often fall into the trap of thinking that purchasing the latest cybersecurity tools will solve all their problems. While this is important, it’s not the only piece of the puzzle.

“Sophisticated tools can be ineffective without the proper understanding and application; the saying, “a fool with a tool is still a fool” rings true in this context. It is essential to train employees adequately and establish clear processes for managing and responding to security threats in tandem with technology investments to fortify defences.”

There are two critical aspects of a cybersecurity program in which people and processes must converge with technology to deliver success.

A robust vulnerability management program. This involves regular penetration testing and third-party verification to identify and address potential weaknesses. Regular testing keeps organisations ahead of potential threats and ensures that their security measures are up to date.

A thorough understanding of security controls. Organisations must check controls regularly to ensure they remain effective and update them as needed.

“The third piece of this puzzle is homework,” Mr Griffin said. “It’s true that compliance with frameworks such as ISO27001 will create a higher baseline for security controls within an organisation. However, compliance alone does not guarantee security.

“Businesses need to go beyond mere compliance and focus on the effectiveness of their security measures. It is essential to understand that, while compliance is a good starting point, it is not a solution for all cybersecurity challenges.

People, process, technology, diligence

This is where the convergence of people and process, together with technology and due diligence, will prevail. Businesses should consider investing in ongoing security control testing and validation, including the automated testing of key controls, rather than reacting after the breach has occurred.”

Working with a trusted partner can help businesses address the vulnerabilities within their IT infrastructure proactively. IT vulnerability management services provide the expertise and resources needed to identify and mitigate risks.

“Organisations can address the most critical areas of their cybersecurity strategy by partnering with a knowledgeable service provider that will empower their people and processes.

“Having a cybersecurity incident response agreement with a service provider can be invaluable in the event of a cyberattack,” Mr Griffin said. “It gives businesses access to the necessary resources and expertise to respond to a breach effectively.  

“Preparation is key to handling a security breach; organisations must have their cybersecurity incident plans and communication strategies ready.

“Training employees on these plans and conducting regular drills can help ensure that everyone knows their role in the event of an attack. This preparation can reduce the impact of a breach significantly and help businesses recover more quickly,” he said.

“It is also important that the technology in the organisation is reviewed to ensure that the appropriate data can support any breaches that may occur. For example, the forensic fitness of current logging configurations is essential to investigating a breach.” 

www.au.logicalis.com

www.leongettler.com

Reference: 1. https://www.au.logicalis.com/cio-report

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MASTER BUILDERS Australia has released its first annual report on the progress toward its Building and Construction Industry Sustainability Goals 2050.

Master Builders CEO Denita Wawn said the report marked an important milestone in the industry’s progress toward building a sustainable and resilient future.

She said these goals “seek to identify measures that are likely to affect business performance and develop actions to minimise the risks and/or maximise the opportunities of those material issues through an ESG governance framework”. 

Each of the eight 2050 goals have a 2030 ambition and a first three-year plan.

“While there is huge demand for building and construction work, including the commitment of governments to build 1.2 million homes over the next five years, the industry has been battling significant headwinds,” Ms Wawn said.

“Over the last year the industry has grappled with high inflation, chronic labour shortages, higher than anticipated interest rates, compounding changes to industrial relations laws, and new building regulations.

“These challenges have seen a reduction in private investment, an ongoing decline in productivity and higher than average insolvencies,” she said.

“Mindful of the practicalities of what is happening in the industry, Master Builders is moving at a realistic pace, leading transformation for the long-term benefit of the industry and Australia’s built environment.”

Key measures in the report include:

• Working with government and the building supply chain on changes to support the goal for a net zero built environment.
• Participating in reforms to building regulation on priority building resilience issues such as waterproofing and bushfires.
• Increasing female participation with ongoing work of the Women Building Australia program and advocacy to government for greater support.
• Partnering with a tech platform to provide much needed digital contract management and payment tools.
• Working with the Office of the Federal Safety Commission to promote better safety outcomes on building sites.

www.masterbuilders.com.au

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By Linda Scott, Thinking Leaders >>

AFTER 30 YEARS working with businesses of all shapes and sizes, I can’t tell you the number of times I have heard from business owners and CEOs “I just can’t get out of the weeds”.

Or, “I can’t delegate to my team as I don’t trust them to do it right.”  

Or, “I just don’t have enough time.”

Or, finally, “My team just don’t do as I ask. If only I had better people …”

It’s these issues that seem to be the ‘cause’ of growth and expansion issues, exit strategy challenges and generally building a great business.

So, I thought I’d share a few secrets about business success – and a new way of thinking that is proven to work, that you can implement straight away, and that will directly impact the success of you, your teams and your business.

Ready to go?

Okay.

Starting with … you

It starts with you. What you say? Me? This isn’t about me – it’s about my teams …

I hate to burst your bubble here – because it is rarely the people within an organisation that stop businesses succeeding – it’s the leadership, which starts all the way at the top!

I’ll say it again – it starts with you. As the person at the top, you are responsible for the standards, attitudes, benchmarks of success, culture, communication and so much more.

It’s about who you are, how you turn up, how you respond in crisis or when things don’t go to plan. It’s about your behaviour under stress and uncertainty.

It’s your self-leadership mastery that is at the centre of your success.

Because the reality is, if you are not personally accountable and responsible for your actions and results, view failure as a negative, and blame others, your people will see that as the benchmark of excellence.

That’s it. Like parenting, you are modelling best practice.

So, your high performers will leave because they no longer align with the culture of the organisation – they will no longer respect or trust you, and those remaining will behave at this level only at their best.

And this has the ripple effect down through your executive team, senior leaders and all the way to the office junior.

Case study in leadership change

Recently, I completed a project with an incredible business, Outsource Institute Australia. They are a top engineering training provider in Australia.

They were facing challenges because the owner wanted to transition to an advisory role rather than being in the day-to-day weeds, shifting the responsibilities to the Executive Leadership team.

They found themselves experiencing challenges with communication, leadership dynamics, accountability and responsibility, decision making and general cohesiveness and culture throughout the organisation. This is such a normal and common occurrence in business.

And, as always, we discovered the challenges started at the top – with the owner Carl.

It wasn’t until he underwent a process of self discovery that things began to change. In Carl’s words, it was the process of getting to know himself first that gave him the confidence when dealing with adversity and the challenges of running a business.

He’s the first one to admit that, until he became more self-aware, he was creating a culture where people weren’t thriving. This directly impacted performance, retention and results throughout his business.

He stepped up as a true leader, took responsibility and made the change. And he’s never looked back.

Now his team members have also transformed, the organisation is growing, and teams are happy and engaged.

True leaders always look around

Onto the second secret: As a leader, we must learn to leave our ego at the door and look around – to be curious.

How is my behaviour and communication impacting my teams and results? Am I being high performing or creating an environment where people don’t have psychological safety and feel fear rather than empowerment?

Because, like you, our teams want to feel like they have success each and every day – that they achieve and have purpose. But if they have stress and anxiety because of the environment the leaders create, then they can’t flourish, which impacts productivity and the bottom line results.

So, let’s look at results another way. Instead of blame, let’s move to curiosity and personal accountability.

The fastest way for you to grow your business, get investors, de-risk and thrive is to empower your people to be their best.

And my last secret for now…

Strategise to empower people to be their ‘best’

Everything we do is a strategy – a series of steps that gets us from A to B.

So, if you are not getting the results you want, look at the strategy you ran to get there.

And ask the question: Where’s the gap in the strategy? How can we be flexible and do things differently to get the result we wanted?

It’s like running a marketing campaign – it will always fail until it doesn’t. Marketers are constantly tweaking the strategy until they consistently get the results they want.

A team member didn’t write a report to your standard? Let’s look at the guidelines and frameworks that you have provided that team member in order to set them up for success. What training and guidance have they received? How have you taken the responsibility for setting them up for success?

It’s generally not the people that fail, it’s the systems and strategies that fail. Again we are back to personal accountability and responsibility at the top.

You may be wanting to argue with me – and that’s okay. But I ask you to take a moment to think – really think – how have you set your people up for success?

What steps have you taken to ensure they are fully trained, that you understand their motivations (and that’s another article right there)? What gives them purpose? What do they value? How do they communicate and behave? How do you meet them ‘where they are at’ when you communicate with them?

Leadership really is all about human behaviour. Yourself, your teams – people.

Yes, it’s great to have the best people – but you must build rapport with them, communicate with them in a way they resonate with, inspire and influence them. Then you are on your way to creating a high performing culture that people want to be part of.

It’s quite a process this self-awareness stuff. I know it was for me. I certainly didn’t learn it in accounting school!

And back to where we started … it starts with you. Your self-leadership – your habits, routines, how you turn up, how you lead, your language, your standards and attitudes, your benchmarks, how you respond in crisis and chaos – and how you inspire and influence.

Everyone really is doing the best they can with the resources they have.

So, what resources do you have? Who are you modelling? What type of leader do you want to be?

How are you creating the business you want, with the team you want, to achieve the success you want? What are you aiming for?

Only once you can lead and manage yourself can you lead others and organisations .

You will then be able to step out of the weeds, and build trust with your teams. You will inspire and influence them. They will connect with the purpose and be motivated to be their best.

You will create a high performing culture.

Then you have choice about how you spend your time – and that’s what business and life is all about, isn’t it?

About the author, Linda Scott and Thinking Leaders

Linda Scott’s Thinking Leaders organisation has an innovative approach to business and leadership development by empowering leaders and their teams to overcome barriers to success, take control of ‘today’ and realise their full potential. Thinking Leaders has developed a world-class online self-leadership course and, as part of the business-building process, introduces transformational coaching, dynamic workshops, keynotes and facilitation. Through these initiatives, Thinking Leaders goes beyond traditional leadership development by partnering with business owners, executives, leaders and teams to overcome their challenges and maximise performance, delving into organisational culture and high performance strategies. www.thinkingleaders.com

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

IN THE POST-COVID era, hybrid work has become much more established. The hybrid workplace is now becoming a standard.

But it has resulted in a number of challenges for businesses and employees.

As the world has returned to normal, employers now have a choice in terms of space usage and office real estate: do they force people to come back to the office and get back to work the way it was before the pandemic, or do they embrace the hybrid way of working?

This is critical because employees during the pandemic experienced freedom of choice in terms of when and where they worked. In the post-Covid era, they are now re-evaluating what they want from their work.

Gartner’s HR Advisory director, Neal Woolrich said Gartner surveys showed that one in three employers said they would not mandate people to come back on site. They said they would give employees a say on whether they wanted to work flexibly. 

Regular office time recommended

But at the same time, one in three organisations were mandating time in the office – and generally that was two to three days a week in the office.

“What we’re finding, for organisations that are mandating time in the office, employees just aren’t coming in as much as they would like them to,” Mr Woolrich told Talking Business. “That’s [causing] all sorts of frictions around this onsite-versus-hybrid model.

“Some employees are resisting it and, on the other hand, we have some mostly senior leaders who are vigorous about compelling people to come back onsite.

“So there’s this tension between employees who want flexibility and say they have been working productively and collaboratively in the hybrid model versus senior leaders generally who are saying ‘We want people back on site because this distributive workforce is affecting our productivity and it’s affecting our culture.”

Mr Woolrich said the hybrid workplace was now much more challenging for workplace management.

“Working in this hybrid manner is a bit more difficult. What we’ve started to realise much more acutely recently is that every individual’s needs in the hybrid environment are unique,” he said.

“We can’t just impose a ‘one size fits all model’ on everyone and hope that it works. There’s a big lift and most of that lift is on the shoulders of managers to really come up with customized hybrid working models that will cater to the unique needs of all the different employees that they have across their organisations.”

‘In-principle’ hybrid work works

Mr Woolrich said the best organisations approach it with a broad set of principles and then get managers and team members to customize those principles in their own context.

If the team, for example, has parents, they will come up with a team agreed charter that won’t schedule meetings before 9am and no later than 3pm

He said people were now realising what has to be done to make hybrid work happen more effectively.

“Hybrid work is here to stay,” Mr Woolrich said. “We’re not going back to the pre-Covid days and employees are telling us loud and clear that they want that flexibility – and if they don’t get it, they will vote with their feet.”

www.gartner.com.au

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-8-interview-with-neil-woolrich-from-gartner

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