Followership, CyberSecurity Leadership, and Judgement as a Defining Skill - Kenyada Meadows - BSW #465
Show notes
The overwhelming majority of people, across the full span of their professional lives, operate without formal authority over the domains in which they work (i.e., leadership). Yet followership has almost no sustained literature, no targeted development, and no rigorous framework of its own. If you're not a leader, what does a follower look like?
Kenyada Meadows, CEO & Founder at The Executive Parent Company, joins Business Security Weekly to discuss his book, The PASSENGER Seat, which outlines a framework for followership. Kenyada will outline the nine disciplines of the framework across three dimensions, including:
- (P) Principled Anchoring — Holds values explicitly and specifically enough to guide behavior under pressure; knows the limit line before reaching it.
- (A) Accountability — Communicates upward honestly, documents concerns before decisions are made, and owns errors without deflection.
- (S) Self-Mastery — Invests deliberately in work, home, and inner domains, so identity — and ethical agency — isn't hostage to institutional threat.
- (S) Systems Thinking — Reads the institution analytically — what produces the patterns observed, and where honest information is being filtered.
- (E) Emerging Risk Management — Functions as an early-warning system for risks that formal frameworks haven't yet named.
- (N) Negotiation — Translates insight and values into institutional impact through credibility, framing, coalition, and timing. -(G) Guardianship — Protects what the institution stands for over time, especially when no one is watching.
- (E) Enablement — Ensures influence strengthens collective capacity rather than merely advancing individual position.
- (R) Results-Driven Influence — Binds the other eight disciplines toward outcomes that are genuinely better — not merely visible.
In the leadership and communications segment, Stop playing with the CISO role. Fix cybersecurity leadership, What CIO-CISO alignment looks like when it's working, Why judgment is emerging as cybersecurity's defining skill, and more!
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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/bsw-465