When Pressure Hits, We All Lead – Building a Crisis-Ready Culture

Excellent. When they said bring your own laptop, I was a bit worried. Normally with these things you have to put your presentation in a couple of weeks before. So there's pros and cons. Well, listen, I am so delighted to be here, guys. Honestly, it's great to see such a room full of like-minded people in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, I have to be honest. And my talk is all about when pressure hits, we can all lead and trying to build that crisis ready culture. Now, before I get into it, I just want to give you a little bit of background about me because I fully appreciate the vast, vast majority of you. will not know anything

about me. So very briefly, you can hear by the accent, I am local, right? I'm from Portadown. There's no Lurgan pin there, just to be really clear. Okay, it's Portadown. I married Mark with three girls, so I have three daughters who are 15, 13 and 10 now. A dog, Poppy. I coach girls football, so I'm a big sort of sports fanatic and love coaching under 12s for Loch Goll football team. I'm ex-military, so I used to be in the British Army. I was a captain and served in Iraq in 2005. I love Tech That, right? Any other tech? Come on, this is a room of Tech That fans. I can tell. Or Strictly. No, no

Strictly fans either. Yeah, so that's me. And I also run a youth club on a Friday night for about 50 teenagers as well. So I am your classic person who, if someone needs something help or someone needs something done, I will be there. It's like they all say, give a job to a busy woman and it'll get done. And that is probably me in a nutshell. In terms of my professional career, I have maybe very boringly, some of you might think, worked in VT my whole career for 24 years. For me, that means it is an excellent company and it's somewhere where I want to work. And if I wasn't happy there, believe me, I

wouldn't stay here. So that's probably what I would say about VT. I'm also sit on the board of directors for ITSMF UK and I would really be quite big up on ITIL in terms of process management that really gives the wrap around really good incident management whether it be cyber or incident management across any technology there is. So in terms of my job today, I'm the service operations director for BT. So effectively I run all the frontline teams across the UK for BT business and also the major incident management function as well. The types of customers we work with are we've about 5,000 different customers. They are the biggest, most important customers in the UK

and the globe. So we really are dealing with things like your blue light services, your government bodies, all your banks, your financials, anything that's in the air, National Air Traffic Control, any nuclear authorities, anything like that really goes through my frontline team, which typically keeps me up at night and I'm a little bit grayer than I should be for the age that I am today. So on that, I wouldn't want to say I've got all the credentials to do this talk, but I definitely have had enough experience, hopefully, to be able to talk through how I feel we can try and lead through a crisis. In terms of this quote, I just want you to

read that for a second. So when pressure hits, we don't wait for leaders, we all become them. Now I get in this room, there's probably over half of you going, I am not a leader. That's why I do cybersecurity and I'm a techie and I want to stay like that and be the introvert throughout everything. However, throughout this presentation, I'm hopefully going to try and build your confidence a bit that we all can be leaders in the time of crisis. And believe me, we all do need to step up when that happens. I'm going to just tell you a little story before we get into it. So it was about a year ago now and

it was just after nine o'clock and my boss Gary, he phoned me at the time and he said, Valerie, are you watching the nine o'clock news? I don't know about you, but I don't watch the nine o'clock news, right? Like my dad watches the nine o'clock news, not me. So I was like, look, no, I haven't seen the news. what's happened. Now I'm not going to go into the details because I can't for obvious security reasons. However, if you probably think back a year, you probably not go too far wrong of what happened. But in essence, it was a crisis that was really starting to trend online and our teams were all involved with fixing

it. Now it's never a good sign when I jump on a technical bridge, right? If anyone knows me will know that. However, in this instance I did get onto the bridge. And at one stage I had to take another call on my mobile phone and it was from the external head of BT Communications. and he said to me he said val if this isn't fixed soon we're going to have to phone the prime minister and wake him up out of his bed because it was about one o'clock in the morning so you can imagine the panic the thoughts that came into the head you know having to go back on to the technical bridge call

and relay a bit of what's happening from an external point of view as well now i'm going to come back to that story at the end and i'm going to finish it off for you but just for now i'll leave you hanging in suspense of what happened So in terms of a little bit about history of leadership, and I've been doing a little bit of work on this just for my own benefit, and you'll be surprised to know that there's been a big shift in leadership skills that really the top employers require in the last 20 years. And I'm going to briefly touch on six of the top ten, and then we're going to talk

specifically about crisis management. So the first one in terms of leadership skills you can see in the last 20 years it has moved from being a much more command and control type of leadership style so very much that authoritative to much more servant leadership. As a leader you should be there to try and ensure that your team's job is easier. That is your job as a leader. The second skill, and these aren't in any particular order by the way, is decision making. The types of decision making that we would be doing used to again be top down to thought if you're told what to do. Now it's very much collaborative and data driven. That's what

employers want to see is that collaboration and also using good data, using all of our knowledge and our AI to be able to try and get the right results. The third thing in terms of communication style, it used to again be one-way directive, now it's very much two-way, right? It's how are you feeling? Tell me about that, let's collaborate. How can we create that psychological safety to really get that right environment? So that's the type of communication style that top employers are saying they want at the minute. Emotional intelligence. 20 years ago, it wasn't even on the planet, right? It wasn't even there, okay? Now, it's all about being empathetic, being authentic. That's the sort

of skills as a leader that people are wanting. That's the sort of leader and manager that people want, and that's the environment that they will thrive in. Technical proficiency, you'll all be glad to hear this one. This one has made it into the top 10. So this one, it used to have been very much if you're in the IT department, that was your job and nobody else had to know anything about it. Whereas nowadays, fast forward 20 years, it's all about those digital skills. How can we have digital transformation? How can we change our business? And that goes right across the broad spectrum of everyone, no matter what department you're in. You guys are clearly at an advantage. And the final one, even more of an advantage for

people in the room, is crisis management. This is now in the top 10 of skills for employers, according to the Harvard Business Study Review in 2025. It used to be a reactive, very much reactive, something's gone wrong, let's fix it. However, probably two big changes have happened in the industry. Number one was COVID that happened obviously a few years ago from now, where everyone really had to change how they've worked and work in that crisis environment. And then secondly, We've had the rise of cyber, as you guys are all sitting here and testament to that. The fact that there has been so many cyber incidents, major incidents across the globe has really driven this need

for crisis management to be part of every business's everyday life and understanding how they're going to react in that crisis. Okay, so as a start I'd say nearly everyone in this room has got at least two of those, right, and if you're that sort of person who is a little bit more introvert you're probably thinking actually the skills that are now demanded by employers are more in demand, are more likely to be on the right. So by an effect you guys are halfway there to being leaders in my personal opinion.

So we're going to have a look now specifically at crisis management and I'm going to talk, anyone who knows me, I love a wee acronym or like something that people can try and remember and take away. So we're going to go through the four C's of crisis management. And as we go through this, you may or may not like this. It's a bit of a gamble. But as you saw from my profile, I do like football, right? I used to play a lot of football. I coach a lot of football. I don't know how many people have ever watched Ted Lasso, which is on Apple. So it's a comedy series. I can see a few

smiles. That's good. I'm glad. So this is a comedy series on Apple TV. It's won many awards, but just if you've never seen it, to give you a very quick overview, because we're going to go through Ted Lasso style on this. And what we're going to look at is Ted is an American. He has come over to London to run a Premier League football team with little or no knowledge of football. And the whole series is about how he leads the team, Richmond FC, to hopeful success in their role. So as part of a TED Lasso, I suppose, a testament to TED Lasso, we're going to go through this and have a few wee clips

to show you as well. So the first C of crisis management, in my opinion, and this for me is a fundamental. So if you get this wrong, actually, the second, third and fourth C are no good to you, right? Because this is probably the most important one. And it's culture, right? And it's creating the right culture in the team that you work in and the environment that you're in. And it's not just created by leaders, right? Culture is created by everybody in the team. Now I'm going to show you a wee clip and then I'm going to come back to this. So each of these clips are less than a minute. And in this clip

we've got Ted, who is the manager, and we've got Nate, who is at this stage, he's a bit of a water boy, right? So he's a water boy, he's the kit boy, and he's run the boat. And I'm just going to let you watch this for a minute. Hopefully you'll be able to hear it okay. Oh, not that one. You know what? It's not even very good. It's probably really bad. You know what? It's embarrassing even. Sorry, Nate. I have a real tricky time hearing folks that don't believe in themselves, so I'm gonna ask you real quick again. Do you think this idea will work? Yeah, I do. Whoa! Why are you screaming at us, Nate? We're

right here! All right, come on now. Walk us through it. Okay. So I thought if we start the attack on the wing, Jamie could run through near side, then when the defense follows, Sam could fill his spot. So you use Jamie as a decoy? No. No. Yeah. Yeah. In this case, yes. Let's give it a shot. Okay. So you can see there from that clip how Nate, who is a water boy, right? He is not important. He is not anybody at all, really, at that stage in the show. And he has this idea. And Ted is so open to his idea, right? And I don't know if you put yourself in your position at work and where you are today, and if you think... if the most senior person

in your business comes to you or doesn't even ask, you're not even in the conversation there. You're literally changing the bin, right? That's what Nate was doing. And he went forward and he gave him an idea. And Ted was so excited. opening of that idea welcome give it a try you know I'm to try and do that and that culture that created that ability to speak up okay that ability the people feel safe to have that psychological safety is fundamentally important particularly when you're in a crisis yeah because quite well I was going to say quite often, but all the time the leaders do not know the answer, right? Leaders do never know the answer.

All the time it will come from somebody else and to be able to create that environment of culture is so, so important. Again, as you guys know, in a cyber environment, the insight that saves the day, you know, will come from probably the quietest person, the most technical person there who will be able to see something that they're doing in the back end system quietly in the background and they'll probably not even have that much of a voice, but creating that culture is so important. the second c we're going to look at um is collaboration now this next clip um shows jamie tart so jamie is the the main striker he's like ronaldo right he's like ronaldo um enrichment fc and um this is

after a game this is how ted talks to him and this is really about collaboration jamie real quick regarding jamie tart it was an insignificant goal by the match i haven't known you that long but Okay. So a great line there from Ted, "Turn that me into us." Like that for me is amazing, right? And I think true collaboration and someone who is really good at that is how they can really create that team just from being there, right? And having really that culture, underlying fundamentals of the culture and then being able to do that. In BT at the minute we have a number of a lot of a lot of new really senior leaders right new CEO new different people they all

bring their mates right everyone comes in to know whatever and they're there and what I have seen it's consistent over the last six months right is about this real push to break down silos right to try and work cross-departmental. Now I appreciate BT is a huge company, right, and I'm sure, but in each organisation within your teams, okay, there always tends to be like an invisible wall between teams, right, no matter how hard you try to do that. But I don't think I've ever seen the push strong at the minute to cross-collaborate, to hold people to account, right, to be open and honest about maybe what's not working well, what needs fixed, But that real

push to collaborate as a leader, right, you will not make it in this world. And even as an individual or anybody, you will not make it if you aren't able to really push in terms of that collaboration. And if you remember back to the Harvard list of leadership skills that we showed at the start, the type of decision making that people and employers want to see is a collaborative one. Typically, a shared idea will get the best result. When you can talk through the pros, the cons, you can work out the answers for that. and very much everyone has a responsibility, particularly in a crisis. In terms of troubleshooting, when you're doing any type of

crisis management on a specific incident, that talking it through on the technical bridge is where you get results, rather than individuals on their own in silos. And I suppose just like in football, right, in a crisis situation, it's not just the solo star who wins, it's all the team that works together the best. The team that creates that culture, fundamentally, and it's the same in cyber response. The collaboration beats individual heroes every single time. So the third C we're going to look at here is consistent practice. And we're going to again have another look at a clip and this is the same Ronaldo figure in Richmond FC who doesn't feel like training this day. Okay, let's see how Ted handles this one. I heard you're not

going to be able to run with us today, is that true? Yep. Why is that? Because I'm out. Really sorry to hear that. Relax Ted, it's just practice.

If you can't practice, you can't practice. You're hurt, you're hurt. It's as simple as that. But it ain't about that. At all. You're sitting in here, you're supposed to be the franchise player. And yet here we are, talking about you missing practice. We're talking about practice. You understand me? Practice. Not a game. Not a game. Not the game you go out there and die for, right? Play every weekend like it's your last, right? No, we talking about practice, man. Practice! You know you're supposed to be out there. You know you're supposed to lead by example. You're just shoving that all aside. And so here we are, Jamie. We're talking about practice. Not a game. Not the game. We're talking about practice with your team, with your teammates. The only

place that we get to play together, we got control over. Rest of the time, it's us 11 against those 11. We're talking about practice, man. I'm talking about practice. And you can't do it because you're hurt, right? It's fine by me.

Okay, so I think that's the only time in all the seasons that Ted gets really cross and loses his temper, right? And clearly, by the way, he's not injured, just in case people think he's being too hard on him, right? He's definitely not injured. He's probably just a bit hungover, right? So I suppose in terms of that clip, You would never, ever, ever expect a football team to win on anything if they only play matches, right? If they only play matches every single week, never practice as a team, never do drills, never do anything, they are not going to win or be successful at anything. Yeah, for sure. Like that is 100% true. And it's

very, very similar in cyber and incident management. That practice, that muscle memory of how you do things will definitely kick in whenever it's a crisis. It should take over. Now, I personally have never seen this probably as strong as when I was in the military. And I don't know if there's any other people here who are ex-military at all, but they are so good at drilling into what you have to do in a time of war or trouble. Now, hopefully you never ever have to use those skills. However, the training that you do, your life is training, right? On the odd chance that reality hits. it's not when reality hits the odd chance that happens to hit and i always think a really good very basic

basic one would be now this is a bit tricky if you've never been in the army at all but say say you're writing an exercise and let's say there's open and fire the first thing anyone will ever do will be to go to ground everyone everyone right will go to ground i want to say go to ground you'll just lie flat on your belly right that's the first thing you would do now if you brought a a hundred of you who've never been in the army and you're walking along and something like that happens, I can guarantee you every single one will be standing up going, oh my goodness, nightmare, right? What am I going

to do? Whereas anyone who is trained will automatically go straight to their belly, right, on the ground. And that's not because... that is not because just to be clear we're more intelligent or no that's what you should do it's total instinct because you have practiced it so many times right it totally takes over that that is what you would do in that specific instance Now, if you bring that back, I suppose, to a business world, another sort of story for you, about 10 years ago, our data centre in Belfast, which is, well, it is one of the most important critical national infrastructures in Belfast, there was a fire. And ten years ago, now it was

on the BBC News, it was a bit of a drama, it was a lot of a drama, but we sort of got away with it, reasonably unscathed. However, the actual management of that disaster was a disaster, right? It really was not well handled and there was so, so many lessons learnt that we got as a team from that. I would say over the next two years I actually grew to quite like business continuity management whereas traditionally I would have hated it. I would not at all have liked it. It's always to me a bit of a boring subject. However, we rewrote everything we did around business continuity management and we practiced it and we practiced

it and we practiced it within an inch of our lives to the point that if that ever happened again and touch wood it's never happened since. it would be such a slick operation. Now the outcome might not have been much different if I'm totally honest, but in terms of how you feel and how you run that as an incident, it would be so slick. Similarly, just at the weekend, we had four subsea cables broke in India, in the Indian Sea, and it meant potentially on Monday there was going to be no traffic anywhere in India, right? And obviously for a company like BT, we have a lot of people who work in India and a

lot of customers who are also in India. So Sunday afternoon, we're all on our silver targ calls or, you know, our group calls as we call them. And we're working through business continuity management. Now, for me personally, I was totally comfortable that we knew exactly what our resilient plan was, how we were going to react and how that was going to do because we practice it so, so much. And it's the same folks everywhere. and appreciate some of those are bigger examples. However, for you guys who are working on an incidence potentially a lot, right? That practice, the training that you do for whenever something does happen is so, so important and you should all be prioritising that, whether it's immersive labs, whether it's your own

professional development. I would suggest that probably 50% of your time is just practising what happens if, what happens if, what happens if. And if you're not doing that, you really should try and focus on doing more of that. I think in BT we are pretty decent at doing that and we give a lot of budget and time and energy to training, to learning, to professionalisation and it's something that's really, really important because whenever that crisis hits, if you're not fully equipped and you haven't practised it, It's like anything in life, the first time you do something, it's always very shaky. So that practice, that consistent practice can really significantly help in a crisis. There's absolutely no doubt about it. So in terms of our fourth C is clarity. Now

in this next clip, last clip, you might be glad to know, is Ted in his final match of the season. So it is the most important match for the team and he is about to give a team talk.

All right, now, fellas, hey, let's focus up, huh? So I've been hearing this phrase y'all got over here that I ain't too crazy about. It's the hope that kills you. Y'all know that? I disagree, you know? I think it's the lack of hope that comes and gets you. See, I believe in hope. I believe in belief. Now, where I'm from, we got a saying, too, yeah? It's a question, actually. Do you believe in miracles? Now, I don't need y'all to answer that question for me. but i do want you to answer that question for yourselves right now do you believe in miracles and if you do then i want you all to circle up with me right now

I left it before they all screamed and shouted there and there were some bad words. So in terms of this clip itself and clarity, it's not so much about what Ted said there, right? It's more about the principal here. So they're all nervous, right? It's obviously a really big game for them. And he just really focused them in and really tried to get clarity in their brains about what they were going out to do and the fact that he believed in what they could do. and i think very much there's a parallel here right with crisis management and during a crisis it's amazing how things can quickly escalate the message the impact it can get

confused so quickly when there's so many people who are genuinely trying to do the right thing and to get things resolved and i have seen so many major incident bridges where everything on the other hand goes silent it's either really noisy and everyone's talking and new clarity or it's total silence and nobody wants to say anything. Really, I think being able to relay simple instructions, I'm not asking you to be a Ted Lasso and do your big fantastic speech and inspire the world. What I'm saying here is simple instructions, clear updates, clear what's happening next, clarity on those really simple things can really help lead, even if you don't have maybe the answers. A single source of truth, the impact to

customers real time, those things are what is really required on Bridge. And all of these traits bring clarity in moments of pressure when maybe some other people around you are losing their head. And when you give that clarity and you step forward and lead, even if there's crisis going all around you, it's really important. It's funny, right? I don't know how many times over my career I have heard people saying, "We need more technical leadership on this call. We need more technical leadership." I'm not technical, right? But they don't want leadership, right? They want technical leadership. And what they mean by that is exactly what I've just said. It's somebody there giving clarity. What's happening?

What has happened to date? What's the exact current situation? What's the next steps? and who do we need to get this resolved? It's not a leader, it's not a manager, it's somebody who has that technical leadership and it's somebody who's speaking with clarity on the calls. Everyone can and should be able to bring clarity to whatever role you're playing in that crisis. It doesn't matter who you are or what your job is, you can bring clarity when you're on that bridge. So just in terms of conclusion, And we're going to go back to the quote that we started with at the start. When pressure hits, we don't wait for leaders, we all become them. We've

talked about the four C's, right, of crisis-ready leadership. The culture, the collaboration, consistent practice, and the clarity. These are all simple ideas, but when you put them all together, they can really transform how we respond in a time of crisis. Because whenever the pressure hits, it's not just about the people at the top. In fact, it's not about them at all. It's about the culture that we all build, right? Not the leader, but we all build. It's the way we all work as a team in terms of that collaboration. It's the discipline of our preparation, our own incentive on our training and learning, and the clarity that we can bring in that moment. Those are

the most important things. And that's what makes an organisation crisis ready.

And I think it's why this quote resonates so much with me and particularly at this conference. When pressure hits, we don't wait for leaders, we all become them. And that's what today is about. That's what this whole conference is really about. You're all here because you want to learn more, right? You're all getting a tick in the box and you're consistent in practice, right? You're all here because you want to be better at the job that you do and you want to understand what's going on in the industry. In cybersecurity, every single one of us has the chance to lead, whether it's spotting the anomaly, sharing the ideas, making that call, or simply keeping calm

when others can't. So as you head into all the different sessions today and you're listening to the speakers that are going to be amazing and the conversations that you'll have, leadership isn't just a job title, it is a behavior. and when pressure hits you can all lead and you all need to believe that you can do that it might not be in your job title you might not put on your top list of skills that you're a leader but if you listen to everything i've talked about i could almost guarantee you you'd be able to do every single one of those things and that makes you a leader in time of crisis and finally just

to go back to my story at the start about the prime minister whenever we thought we were going to have to wake him up well you'll be glad to know he's still sleeping in his bed Thank you very much, guys. Thank you all very much. Thank you so much, Valerie. That was brilliant.