CISOs Face Double Standard in Recruitment and Performance Evaluation
Industry surveys have consistently shown that CISO tenure is shorter than that of other C-suite roles, partly due to a double standard in recruitment and performance evaluation. During the hiring process, the focus is on technical depth, security experience, and leadership, but when it comes to budget season and board evaluations, the emphasis shifts to cost, growth, customer trust, and brand protection.
Many CISOs struggle with this disconnect, as they have risen through the ranks of security or risk and compliance, and may not be fluent in the language of business growth and customer commitments. Their board, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with cost, growth, and customer trust, and a security leader who cannot connect their work to these business outcomes may be seen as important but not strategic.
The Problem of Measuring Success by Proving a Negative
Part of the issue lies in how CISO success has traditionally been measured. For a long time, a CISO's success has been evaluated by proving a negative - showing that nothing went wrong. This is an impossible task, as it frames the entire security function as insurance rather than a business driver. However, the business is not wrong to expect this, as security plays a significant role in buying decisions. According to a McKinsey survey of over 3,000 enterprise technology buyers, data privacy and compliance ranked as the single most important customer concern, with over half of respondents naming it as a key factor.
The same survey found that among buyers who switched providers in the past year, cybersecurity was the number one reason they left, ahead of price, coverage, and reliability. Trust is a critical factor in making or breaking a deal, and yet at most companies, security is still treated as the team that slows things down, rather than a strategic partner that enables business growth.
Why the Gap Between Security and Business Outcomes Persists
So why does the daily reality still feel like overhead? Because the work underneath has not changed. Compliance keeps getting heavier, with 72% of executives in PwC's 2025 global compliance survey saying that the rising complexity of compliance had hurt their company's profitability. Every new framework and every longer questionnaire piles on effort without obvious payoff, so teams do the only thing the calendar allows - they collect evidence once a year, answer the same questions in slightly different formats for every buyer, and move on.
This is where being secure on paper becomes a real problem. A passed audit or a clean dashboard tells you a control worked on the day someone checked it, and nothing about the rest of the year. So when a customer's security team asks whether that control is working right now, most vendors can only say they think so. That hesitation is where the deal stalls while everyone waits for confirmation, and it can repeat across the pipeline.
Strategic Security Leaders are Already Positioning Themselves for Success
Strategic security leaders are already positioning themselves for success by connecting their work to business outcomes. Dave Brown, CISO of Andesite and author of 'The Lean CISO', described running security as something that should move deals rather than gate them. He sits in on sales calls, keeps 'speed dial' access to the CRO, and built an evidence library that turns security reviews that once took weeks into same-day answers.
Any CISO can translate this into concrete commitments. For example, if the board wants 50% growth next year, a security leader contributing to that goal might sign up for three specific things: earning the compliance certifications needed to sell into Europe within four months, turning customer security questionnaires around in a day instead of twelve, and being ready to meet new contractual security terms fast enough that they never hold up a negotiation. Written that way, each one reads like a growth commitment a CFO can track alongside the sales forecast.
By tying their program to the outcomes the business already cares about, security leaders can show that they are improving quarter over quarter and contributing to business growth. This requires a shift in mindset, from focusing on the absence of bad news to showcasing the positive impact of security on the business. By doing so, CISOs can finally be seen as strategic partners, rather than just important players, and can earn a seat at the table where business decisions are made.
Source: SecurityWeek