BSidesNoVA 2021 | Panel: Diversity & Inclusion - Building High Performing Teams

good morning hello folks well welcome welcome we have a wonderful panel for you guys today we are talking about building powerful teams with a core component to that being diverse minds diverse backgrounds diverse people and so i'm anne marie selmoyer i'm the vice president of security engineering at mastercard and a fellow at the national security institute joining me today is juliet who is the ceo and president of revolutionary cyber jitendra chandra did i say that right now

i'm having camera issues who is um i'm gonna have everybody introduce themselves in a moment and have devon rollins uh rolas from [Music] capital one jitendra if you would start with a quick introduction of yourself what you do what you love why this is important to you that would be great and we'll follow up with jules and devon yes i'm the ceo at department of human services in the state of maryland and uh the going on interesting cloud transformation that will transform human services first of all implementation in the entire country very excited about that and i enjoyed spending time two grown kids now teenagers so i have a lot of discussions about various topics

and diversity and inclusion being one of them we discuss a lot actually so interesting awesome well welcome and thanks for being here jules hi i am jules o'confor i am an attorney but also the ceo and founder of revolution cyber uh the company's been around for about two years we focus on delivering security culture as a service and one of the core components of that is the diversity of teams and ensuring high performance by building out productivity gains across people and people skills um one of the elements you're hearing me talk about quite a bit is cyber diplomacy and that's one of the terms we've coined and that'll be critical to what we discussed today so

happy to learn more and share more about you know my background fantastic devon tell us about yourself [Music] maybe he'll come back in yes so we you know i am convinced and i've said this a few times this week actually i am convinced that there is a skype zoom name your platform poltergeist that just loves to torment whenever i'm doing speaking events or any type of meeting yeah so i apologize because you guys are bearing the fruit of that good tide rate wow it's interesting that i hit the mute button so yeah um but by way of very quick introductions my name is devon rollins i am a senior director at capital one in our cyber engineering organization

i lead the development and deployment of our platforms related to security monitoring i'm very excited and moved by all things automation machine learning cyber intelligence i have been doing this body of work for well over a decade um you know my foray into this discussion particularly around diversity and inclusion and belonging has much to do with how i've spent my time both building teams but also in crafting and creating culture and ensuring that their psychological safety thinking a lot inextensively about how a variety of perspectives and experiences can help inform how we think about protecting our customers ultimately so this is a great segue because we all know from statistics now if you if you know

me that you know i'm a big data nerd and i love everything data and so we know that it has been proven that more diverse teams more minds more thoughts that can round out the solution will understand a problem and then round out a solution to fix the problem hasn't has a indelible impact on the bottom line and the profits for business but yet we're still struggling to break through to this concept and the companies that get it are bearing the fruit of that they are finding you know ways to improve their business they're enjoying greater profitability they're enjoying more revenue more sales more innovation right and then there are folks that are still lagging behind and so what i'd love to

start the discussion with today is one what what environments have you seen in your careers the three of you where you have felt you've been a really part of a powerful team and it just clicked and it just got it you just saw those things happen i'd love to hear those experiences and then i'd love to to dedicate some time on why we think you know we're not helping ourselves why we think we're not going after that golden nugget that obvious answer right to doing things better and doing things smarter i'm going to start off with um jules and then i'm going to go to devon and then to tindra but if organically we start to just

i would love to just jump into the conversation but i'm going to have jules go ahead and start it off um i i am going to struggle to talk about um the work we're doing now and the team that we're building at my company and the reason why is i i don't want it to seem self-congratulatory or that i'm bragging however it is important that we all know that having been part of a toxic team i decided to build my company i'm very much about this idea that it is often insecurity more important the characteristics of the people than their experience prior mostly because cyber security is not a defined field yet it actually is still developing

and therefore we're meeting new um new problems every day so if you're trying to build a diverse team you want different kinds of thought processes different kinds of people who come to the table with different ways of looking at the same problem so on on the teams i build i focus on um the person who's highly analytical someone who can take uh you know multiple areas of a problem break it down and actually provide and digest that information for reporting purposes you also want someone who's an empath or empathetic someone who can listen to the customer problem who can interpret what they're saying and then communicate that forth you want a writer right so it is my opinion that when i joined

cyber security it was all about how technical are you and if you weren't technical the the thought was you did not have the amount of skill set or the needs or you needed certificates in order to properly contribute i now believe that the dedication of my company is to find people who ordinarily would be turned down by other companies find a place for them here so we can work together to solve the problems as they develop and that's really what my key my mission has been you know that's that's so important and i i think you should pat yourself on the back of that rules because you know when there isn't a seat at the table

we make a seat at the table we make our own table right and then that's when we build something really great and show others the example of what can happen when we take away that barrier of i just want to be with other people that look like me exactly i'll tell you an example and i'd love to hear from devon and jatendra if you've had a similar experience but i remember being the only person in the room of course this happens a lot that you know looked a certain way and had you know i tend to have i have a background in business analytics and then security of course i run security engineering at a global company that processes

trillions of dollars of transactions and even though that's true and i run security engineering i still get that are you technical um yes question which is irritating but anyway so we were in a room and we were trying to discuss this problem with a customer not not at mastercard but another client that i had or a company that i was with and what was interesting is that everybody else in the room had a similar background and they failed to understand where that customer was coming from because they could not relate to that they couldn't relate to them culturally they couldn't understand you know they just assumed that their security posture is what they've always seen but they didn't have a

background in financial services this was a financial services client they didn't have a background in this particular area of the world and they couldn't understand why this cut this client had so much irritation with what was happening and it wasn't until someone thought enough to grab another mind which was me and brought me into the room that we started to to be able to problem solve and ask that what if and it was a a very tangible um moment in time where people said you know what we need someone else in here to figure this out and so that's when they brought me in and it would have been so much easier if i had already been there at the

beginning and the result of that was not only were we able to help that customer through the current crisis but they also you know then signed a three-year contract afterwards which was which was a great thing but there was you know and then you know i became that that person in front to handle that relationship afterwards because they i was able to build that trust with the customer so davon and jatendra have you ever had experiences in your career where you wish you would have been brought in first or you wish you would have been part of the team first or maybe you you know you were part of the team that could have used more skill

sets that could have used more um backgrounds so i i'll go ahead and do one if you don't mind how far so i've had a different lot of experience right i am from india and it seems uh it is assumed like if you're from india your your i.t technical capabilities are pretty good right and but i don't seem to i don't feel that i'm i'm more of a business person i'm more of a people person i'm more of the type of person like you will understand trying to understand what a customer's problem is right and um i was working in a big four consulting firm and uh they actually they always started in my review i actually happened to talk

to my superior and in the review they they told me that you lack confidence i said why do you think so he said you are tight and you're technically very sound but i said but do you know what a technical arctic architect actually is so the perception that if you're indian you're technically very good yeah i do understand like i understand how to bridge the gap between technology and business like you do and and but but the fact that i feel that there are technically more capable people out there who do give it a better thinking around the technical issues where i can come come from a customer perspective and talk about those things so so this is the type of uh

like biases that we have about people right so it was never a lack of confidence i was i actually laughed there i said do you even know what a technical argument is right yeah i would not have thanked you for someone that lacks confidence so that's uh that's like and uh but again this is how we feel about people and i am very happy that we are talking about when we are talking about diversity here we are talking about the technical diversities right julie julia talked about uh like what of the different skill set and that is what we should be looking for in people right what are what are the different skills that they are bringing to the table for

everybody to succeed together and that's the important thing rather than how you look how you appear what your gender is those are the things we should not even be talking about oh that's right i can't tell you how many times i get asked where the coffee is oh my goodness i have a great story about that too i'll tell you but i'll tell you it in a minute javon go ahead let me bring your conversation i want to hear yeah i mean i think you know the the points have been hammered home and uh you know i think we've all seen a number of companies have these sort of gaps where uh particularly in the retail industry we've seen

mistakes uh made where they've even tried to market to or service certain communities of people without necessarily having representation of those people in the room and so there's this tone deafness there's this this misfire that happens and i think that it can show itself not just in the retail space where you're directly engaging and marketing the com customers but obviously in the ways in which we formalize and build our teams i luckily have been a part of really great organizations who've been very thoughtful about this body of work um and i think it is in part because of uh just the nature of what we're trying to accomplish in cyber security and particularly as it

relates to um trying to protect ourselves from a rock a wide swath of adversaries who come from all different backgrounds and regions of this world um we've naturally had the tendency to build our teams with that in mind so you know we're having to comb through say forums that are fully in russian yeah of course there's translation services right but it's so much better to hire someone with that know-how and skill set in part because they'll understand the nuance in those conversations um we've thought long and hard about you know some of the kind of the the technical attack paths that uh a hacker adversary i hate calling in a hacker excuse me for that

uh some of the criminal actors would take um you know understanding that there's various components there and then there's people with um skill sets obviously in the cloud people who've had a ton of experience with on-prem architectures people who thought long and hard about data security about detection um we we need all of like the political components the geopolitical landscape i i think you know just naturally there's a tendency to want to grab all this different skill set and know-how to help us come up with the most robust comprehensive defensive posture possible and so i've i've been very lucky in that regard both to be a part of and to be at the helm of teams

who've had that in mind you know um one of the things that i i have heard before and i repeat it because i believe it so so much is that you know talent aptitude passion grit that is evenly distributed in humanity but opportunity is not and if it takes all minds to solve this why would we limit ourselves to just the people we feel comfortable with or that we're used to when there are brilliant minds out there that we need right and we have to learn to seek and and bring in in a real and powerful way so devon you know when we were talking before you had some great insights into why we might not be doing the things

that we need to do and you know so so tell me a little bit about that and some of the the research that you've seen and tell me what tell me what you think and i want to hear from you jules and jatendra yeah i mean i think that this kind of boils down to just how our brains work um look i'm not a neuroscientist but i've i've read a couple papers on this and i think you know people have made it plain for folks like myself who are not necessarily immersed in that subject but it's clear to me that number one we all have biases and how those biases show up in our work

split our workspaces and ways in which we um craft our teams uh is interesting so naturally like there's this familiarity bias i tend to gravitate or um align myself with people who are familiar to me who are who i see myself in um it's actually quite interesting because there's a number of folks who um are only helping people who remind them of their young and so they're not intending to discount and disenfranchise folks but inevitably they're doing so think about how we recruit we tend to recruit from schools that have prestige and we believe you know are affiliated with certain cognitive abilities and what we end up doing is discounting and disenfranchising folks who don't happen to go to those schools

um but all of this kind of boils down to the human brain's uh natural resistance to change um you know if i were to kind of simplify this as best that i can you know there's different parts of our brain that serve different purposes and there's the prefrontal cortex which is uh i say our conscious mind this is the you know kind of more data driven more information gathering and processing components of our brain and then there's the kind of limbic system this is our fight flight freeze responses this is the stuff that we do that feels in many ways completely uncontrollable and what happens in situations and particularly when we're thinking about teams and

particularly like change in this diversity and inclusion and belonging discussion um far too often we're reacting and what that means i think in the macro sense is that you know sometimes there are hard conversations associated with this this particular body of work and uh it's it's almost natural for people to get defensive um but what we have to do is find ways to interrupt the limbic system from taking over and so sometimes there's you know a shared vocabulary that your organization can have that i believe can be very helpful in helping interrupt us from going into those kind of natural like because if your change it assumes it to be a threat and so these this part of your brain

takes over so it just reminds me to be very conscientious of the fact that this is happening in other people and to be thoughtful about ways in which i can help them interrupt that process and to look at the data to be cognizant of what we know to be a fact-based research-oriented uh view of how these changes can result in real outcomes for our organization you know that i mean point what what do you think detendra or jewel you talk about neuroscience that's pretty interesting actually and um i was part of an exercise a few years back when i was working with the latch for company and they had worked with the dealer scientist to come up okay what are the

different styles of leaderships within the organization right and when they did the experiment like they were looking at more on leader style first still type based on like are you a collaborator are your guardian are you our innovator or are you a pioneer right so that is the type of there was no ethnicity here there was no thinking around like which backgrounds do you come from it was more related to what is going on in your brain from a chemical perspective which is very interesting and uh and i know people are trying to do work in that area like i i happen to know a person who has started a small business around uh around uh like during the inter

recruiting processes people have inherent biases like you talked about a familiarity thing right and these even people realizing it right those biases come forth right and uh they don't know that they don't intend to but they don't know that themselves right but this is how we have like people up from different cultures themselves this is how they're brought up so companies are trying to understand like what is what is causing that and uh how do you go past it so there are so i see a lot of things coming out out in the future which are going to address the uh issue i would say it's more of an evolution right it's going going on in the industry and again it's

just that we are bored of brought up in a certain culture brought up in a certain way that is to be able to identify what that might uh and empathize with this is going to help us move along right and and and i i completely agree so i've been listening to each of you i think you guys you are all correct um one of the challenges i see is we don't promote the people who think like this into the executive top top leadership positions in fact we continue to promote people who have type a uh you know they're very focused on the end result only it's about the bottom line and those people then are charged with setting the vision

uh downwards and what happens is they don't reward for people who can't see the need for change can mobilize and influence or who have the ability to be conscious of other people in fact in organizations that's seen as either a female trait a soft skill or it's seen as a man who isn't prepared for leadership every time it i come across that in an organization very aware person especially he is not in a leadership position he's typically a very long-standing individual contributor well respected but he is not at the top of the chain so there has to be this honesty about what we're truly rewarding because those are the things that get measured monitored and those are the changes you

see if we don't reward people for um and we talked about this before for being a parent because naturally managing men multiple lives at the same time as you do your job shows resilience just in being able to do the thing but if we don't women because they may not be able to dedicate themselves fully to the job then we're not taking advantage of the resilience we see over and over again as i work with organizations to build out security culture programs there's a lot of talk of what they hope the culture will be we want healthy culture we want work-life balance we want our people to to be more productive and to be happy

great so here's what it will take it takes you giving people more time off it takes you rewarding people um for things that are not in their control despite that for instance um if you have someone who is uh you know uh um who has ability challenges and they can't make it to as many meetings physically don't hold that against them we need to find other ways to reward them or to measure them against everyone else every time we talk about the work people back off and go wait that sounds like hard work i can't do this right now and so i become very frustrated with the conversation about diversity because it is an idea and a theory i leave the

office i go home mostly segregated neighborhoods mostly people who are not um friendly with people outside their back um their background geopolitical um interests in whatever it is so if the outside world is not reflected inside and the inside of companies is not reflected outside george floyd dying doesn't matter because in the end we're all going to revert back to what we know consciously we we are we'll revert back to what our neuroscience tells us it's fight or flight and in the end you get these very incremental changes everyone pass themselves on the back and we continue to have the same problems over and over again that is what we're facing we've got to admit that even the way corporations are

built they're built on supremacy there are some people that are believed to be more important more valuable to organizations than we're willing to put down on paper when we can start to admit that then we can address it but until then we're this is all just a discussion so you know that's um this reminds me of a time where i was up for um a new role uh at a certain company i won't name but uh and they were you know they were nominating me for a you know a promotion and in the and i happened to someone sent me uh the write up i saw the writer okay and the and in the strengths column was

all of these wonderful things there was one weakness listed the weakness was has small children wow wow well yes so i tell that story because it happens right it happens and you know the and i i didn't i didn't get the position oh wow oh yes um so you know and thinking back to it you know as happy i i didn't i got other things in other companies that were much much better um but that happens and it still happens and so what i would love to to talk about now um is examples of things that are working right and things that have good intention but maybe aren't working and that things that just aren't working um

as a as a data point it's a lot of data you know devon you mentioned psychological safety and sometimes when i when i see things that are are good intentions they're like oh well let's bring one person of color in let's bring oh i've got the token female oh i've got the token whatever right and but it doesn't solve the problem because one it'll stop there and two if you know there is um a study and i i i'm blanking on the source but i will follow up with it if you all are interested um there's a whole book on this that if you are one of uh if you are part of 25 or less of a group

that individual or those individuals are less likely to speak up in meetings because of psychological safety because they feel self-conscious about that even subconsciously they will be less likely to stand up and speak and so i thought that was really powerful because i thought back to a lot of the situations that i've been in and and i can see that happen not just with with me but with other folks that might not be of the majority including neurodiverse folks right jules you mentioned type a a lot and you know i see a lot of people get promoted that are type a what about the folks that are highly empathetic that can solve people challenges even more so

over than technical challenges why are the technical challenges never get fixed because there's always people behind it yes and if we don't have the insight to figure out how to bring people along we don't have that skill set in the room we're always going to be at the same same problem right same situation so i'll open up to the floor of who might want to talk about things that they've they've seen have worked or maybe tried to work and failed because they forgot something or what have you let's talk about how we might be able to solve the problem what company and organizations are doing and what we could do better and what we should stop doing

i'll say um i think google um and netflix um are doing a lot of great things with regard to hiring um talented minorities um you know neurodiverse um and and other types of people now what i will admit to is not being familiar with the culture inside but from what i'm seeing in terms of the recruitment and the hiring processes they're they're they're attempting to focus on that area and i see them doing a good job in that area um when it comes to other companies big tech i think what i like is that big tech is at a point where they have to recognize it they're kind of being confronted with it um and so they're speaking much more

louder and bro and boldly about their need to to fix the problem have i seen beyond that the fix i haven't but i don't think the first step is to admit you have a problem so i've seen more of that lately yeah i i mean my my commentary here really is that uh in the wake of george floyd's murder um i do believe we're in an inflection point in our society um and i think for a lot of i certainly say for a lot of black folks there's this sense that this is long overdue and this is an experience that we've um we've known for quite some time but it you know i think the the pandemic plus

you know the forcing of people to be home and pay attention i think has really made people a lot more aware um because even if you look at just the spectrum of folks that are a part of these coalitions that are um asking and demanding change um it's just a course of folks that look very different than we've seen from times in the past and so i i'm very appreciative of that where i um i think the some of the given that outcry a lot of companies have taken the position of making sizable commitments to invest in areas and in organizations that are advancing racial equity work um addressing kind of diversity inclusion belonging issues both in the community and then i

see them obviously bringing in folks externally to at least engender more conversations about you know and engender both more conversations but then to also facilitate trainings on these topics you know the data will have to prove to me that the training is actually meriting some meaningful outcomes um you know i think that awareness of your biases can be helpful but i think jules point around incentives is probably more pressing than anything else what do you incentivize what do you allow that ultimately is the largest determinant of what your culture is exactly um and so you know i've seen some companies approach their lack of representation at certain ranks of the organization as a legit business

problem and so what they've said is we're going to collect a ton of data and we're going to even do our data collection like in a very quantitative manner but we're also going to look at like heuristic type models we're going to do like focus groups we're going to really understand and try to unpack how people feel not just kind of what we can denote or identify on paper because there's always ways to splice and data or craft statistics to do what the confirmation advice like i believe a certain thing to be true and you can manipulate the numbers to help you feel better about what you already believed to be the case and so i've seen companies uh

start to take this approach um where there's just much more intentionality and the language that we're using is no longer soft it is about edicts and declarations about our vision both for the organization and for the ways in which we can serve our our customers and the mandate then to being able to accomplish and get to that vision requires that we take these actions now the question is like do we have enough urgency around this work um and that i believe is to be seen um obviously with the commitments people are tracking and watching closely to ensure that folks make good on those commitments but uh i think we're kind of in a to be

determined state but i'm excited to see that this is part of the national dialogue and believe that you know there's a springboard for us to really become change agents um and and see to it that our organizations better reflect uh the talent across the spectrum of people yeah i i i also want to add like apart from companies doing like individual individualistically what are we doing ourselves too it's very important to realize that and you try to get my name right whether it is channa or chandra right you're making that effort and i appreciate that personally right like in in my name here my name is because i think jam is a very common chinese surname and she just assumed

that china is my last name but that's not true and i did not have that change because i wanted that to be an example right are we also making an individual effort to pronounce people they are from a different culture it's slightly difficult for us to do it but are we doing it are we trying to empathize with them on how they feel like people come from the planet people come from different backgrounds different cultures they are brought up in a certain way they they behave in a certain way right and then because of that they have a certain like confidence issues or lack of content or basically they don't come out because culturally it is do you as leaders try to

understand that right do you try to empathize with that and if you do understand that do you try to give opportunities those people to give have a voice that is also an important aspect so juliet you are talking about cyber security as a culture that is the service you're trying it's a service right similarly diversity as a culture should also be type of service that some companies will try to bring it right and which is which is important because that is when people will understand these are different types of scenarios that we are faced with on a daily basis which we don't realize are what we need to become i think that will take time will take some practice

and uh but it is important like i think john f kennedy said like think about what the country does for you but what so on an individualistic basis too we should we should think what do we do on a daily basis how do we educate our children how do we so that when they come into the workforce they realize those differ and understand those differences and try to empathize with them and go beyond those right look beyond those differences that is an important aspect too so so this has been a great discussion you know what i've heard in the in the last bit that not only corporately but individually we have to act we have to

get teeth um and incentives and actual action on the business aspect there are companies that um management con you know uh compensation and i mean management committee board of directors compensation uh on whether or not they have a diverse executive team and so i think that there is hope and direction in in those types of stories right and those types of examples but your true point it it's not just the big corporations that have to act it's how we act individually do we say something when someone makes a joke do we say something when someone excludes or makes fun of another person do we actively try to bring people into the conversation and i think just like security is

everybody's job bringing these minds in is everybody's job and so i thank each of you for taking time on a saturday afternoon in the summer to chat with me to lend your voice to add your voice to each other and amplify it for everybody else to hear for the audience i encourage each of you to have these discussions and your teams to beat your own internal biases up you know to make sure that there's space with a conversation because that's when goodness and change can start to happen um we have we're at time but i'm going to give a round round robin 30 seconds any final thoughts jules you start um what i i completely

believe which tendril i believe that it is incumbent on us to be honest about where we are how we contribute and then to hold our corporations and the people around us accountable for making other few people feel like they belong fantastic devon yeah i'll i'd like to just raise the theory uh it's called the emotional wake but it's all about the residue that all of us leave on people given that our experiences our interaction with folks can be very temporary i always like to say a few things and fewer people are meant to be in your life forever the reality is for every person that we encounter we leave some type of residue on them

is it aftermath is it after taste or is it after glow and so my question then is you know how do you think about uh your interactions with people no matter how short they are and what you leave behind in that experience and i think if we all are thoughtful about that um we'll see to it that these issues get resolved awesome tender any final thoughts strive to do the right thing right and if you try to it will always try to understand where you are where you are what the what the optimum solution for everybody is going to be around that and try to do that and that will help everybody hello awesome thanks again everybody i'll

leave with the final thought that jules actually brought up yesterday and we give you credit for it is that would you know talking is important but action is more important so be part of that conduit for action thanks for joining us today have a great saturday everybody