From Firefighting to Forward‑Looking: Building a High‑Impact Security Team

Most security teams are busy. That’s a given. There is always another project, audit or incident competing for attention. In that environment, it is dangerously easy to confuse activity with impact. Everyone is working hard, but it is not always clear whether the organisation is genuinely safer or simply more exhausted.

A high‑impact security team looks different. It still works hard, but it works hard on the right things. It understands its purpose, shapes demand instead of just reacting to it, and develops people in ways that compound over time.

Moving from firefighting to forward‑looking is less about heroic effort and more about deliberate design.

What “High-Impact” Really means

Before changing anything, it helps to define what “high‑impact” looks like for your organisation. A useful way to think about it:

• The team provides clarity. Stakeholders understand the major security risks and what is being done about them. There is fewer surprises and better understanding.
• The team influences early. Security is present when strategies, roadmaps and major purchases are being shaped, not just when somebody needs a last‑minute sign‑off.
• The team commands trust. When security says “this matters”, people listen because previous advice has been proportionate, reasoned and grounded in the business context.

A Simple, Shared Vision

Many security functions have detailed approaches but no clear, memorable message. When that clarity is missing, everything feels urgent and nothing feels important. A concise vision acts as a filter for decisions and a compass during busy periods.

Try capturing your vision on a single page by answering these three questions.

What are we here to protect?
Be specific. Customer data, service availability, financial integrity, regulatory standing, brand trust, which are most critical? Rank them. When a crisis hits, you need to know what sits at the top.

How do we protect it?
Describe the key ways your function adds value: detecting and responding to threats, designing secure platforms and patterns, enabling compliant use of technology, advising on risk and trade‑offs, shaping security culture.

What do we not do?
This is just as important. You do not own every risk. You do not approve every configuration change. You do not guarantee perfection. Being explicit about the limits of your remit prevents both overreach and unrealistic expectations.

Once you have this vision, repeat it relentlessly. Use it in onboarding, quarterly updates, and incident reviews. When new work arrives, ask, “How does this contribute to the purpose we’ve agreed?” If it doesn’t, you have a reason to challenge the request or at least to place it correctly in the queue.

From Endless Queues to Intentional Portfolio

Even with a clear vision, a team will still struggle if every task just arrives in the same pile. To escape pure firefighting, you need to treat your time as a portfolio rather than a single bucket.

A simple model is to group work into three categories:

• Run – business‑as‑usual operations: monitoring, alert handling, standard access requests, vulnerability scans, routine reviews.
• Change – project and improvement work: implementing new controls, uplifting configurations, modernising a legacy system, closing actions from tests and audits.
• Transform – strategic initiatives: re‑architecting platforms, building new capabilities, simplifying the control environment, shifting culture and behaviours.

If you are honest, the current picture might be 80% run, 20% change, 0% transform. That is not a failing, it is simply reality in many organisations.

From there, you can start to rebalance:

• Introduce a light‑touch intake process so every request does not become an immediate emergency. Some work can be scheduled, some can be handled quick email chain,; some can be politely declined.
• Use clear criteria to prioritise: alignment with the vision, potential to reduce future work (for example, by eliminating a class of recurring incidents), and impact on the most critical services or data.

The goal is not to eliminate firefighting, unexpected events will always happen. However, the goal is to create enough breathing room that you can actually change the conditions that cause the fires in the first place.

Building people, not just capabilities

Processes and tools matter, but people are what turn a security function into a high‑impact team. Two teams with similar budgets and technologies can perform very differently depending on how they are led and developed.

Clear career paths

Unknowns about progression is a quiet drain on motivation. Try sketching simple, visible paths such as:

• Analyst -> Senior Analyst -> Team Lead.
• Security Engineer -> Senior Engineer -> Architect or Principal Engineer.
• GRC / Risk Analyst -> Senior Risk Analyst -> Head of Risk or Assurance.

You don’t need complex frameworks to start. Even a short description of expectations at each level, breadth of ownership, autonomy, influence, helps people see where they are and what “next” could look like.

Rotations and skills-sharing

Security is a team sport, and isolation breeds friction. Rotations and pairing are a relatively cheap way to build empathy and broaden skills:

• Encourage short, focused placements across teams so people see security from different angles. For example, time spent with product, platform, or infrastructure groups to understand how decisions are really made.
• Involve engineers and architects in major incident reviews and forward‑looking risk discussions so they can connect design choices to real‑world consequences.
• Create deliberate mentoring and coaching relationships, where less experienced staff shadow seniors on significant work such as investigations, risk assessments or design reviews, with time set aside to discuss the thinking behind key decisions.

These exchanges break down “us vs them” thinking and create informal networks that are invaluable during incidents.

Psychological safety and blameless retros

In high‑pressure environments, it is tempting to look for someone to blame when things go wrong. That instinct is understandable and damaging. If people associate incidents with embarrassment or punishment, they will start hiding mistakes, downplaying issues or quietly avoiding risky conversations.

A healthier approach is to treat incidents and near‑misses as sources of data about how the system behaves. In retrospectives, focus on questions like:

• What made this outcome likely?
• What signs did we miss, and why did we miss them?
• How did our tools, processes or culture nudge people toward the decisions they made?

You will still hold people accountable for deliberate negligence or repeated disregard of expectations, but you start from an assumption of good intent. Over time, this builds confidence that raising problems early is safe and that is exactly what you want in a security team.

Deliberate stretch and recognition

Future leaders rarely emerge by accident. Identify people who are ready for more responsibility and give them stretch opportunities: leading a response call, owning a customer‑facing comms, designing a new standard, or fronting a steering‑group discussion.

Crucially, stay close enough that they feel supported rather than abandoned. Afterward, debrief honestly: what went well, what was hard, what they learned.

Recognise the effort publicly. That combination of challenge and support is where growth happens.

Closing Remarks

Big transformations can feel abstract. Here are some concrete questions you can take away and act on now:

Stopping: What are three recurring tasks our team performs that add little real value and could be automated, delegated or simply stopped?

Investing: Which two people will I give a meaningful development opportunity to this quarter – a project to lead, a rotation, or ownership of a new capability?

Clarifying: How would I explain the purpose of our security team, in a single sentence, at the next executive or all‑hands meeting?

These questions won’t magically turn a reactive team into a strategic one overnight. However, answering them honestly and using them as building blocks to action, is how the shift begins.

One decision. One clarified priority. One developed person at a time.