People & Culture

Every year, organizations spend more on cybersecurity tools. Firewalls, endpoint detection, identity management, AI-powered threat monitoring. The technology stack grows. The budget grows. And in many organizations, the breaches keep coming anyway.

The reason is usually not a technical failure. It is a cultural one.

Security culture, the norms, behaviors, and shared expectations that shape how an organization handles risk, does not come from software. It comes from leadership. And until more organizations treat it that way, no amount of technology investment is going to close the gap.

What We Mean by Security Culture

Security culture is not a training program. It is not a phishing simulation or a compliance checkbox or an annual password reset reminder. Those things can support a strong security culture, but they are not the culture itself.

Security culture is what happens when the audit is not running. It is whether employees feel safe reporting a mistake they made, or whether they quietly hope no one notices. It is whether leaders visibly model secure behavior or quietly treat security protocols as things for other people. It is whether security is treated as a shared organizational responsibility or as something that lives in a single department.

The culture defines what people do by default, especially in the moments that are not covered in any policy.

Technology Cannot Build Culture

Organizations are understandably drawn to technical solutions. Tools are measurable, deployable, and give the appearance of progress. A new endpoint detection platform means something changed. A security culture initiative requires more ambiguous investments in people, in leadership behavior, in organizational norms, and the results take longer to show up in a dashboard.

But the data is consistent. The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that the human element was a factor in 68 percent of breaches. Technology is part of the picture, but it is not the root cause, and it cannot be the primary solution.

Culture is a human system. It has to be built by humans, and it has to be led from the top. This is something we have seen play out across the conversations in this space, including in our look at who is accountable when AI gets cybersecurity wrong: the governance gap is almost always a leadership and culture gap before it is a technology gap.

How Leadership Behavior Shapes Security Culture

Culture follows what leadership models, not what leadership mandates.

A CISO who talks about security culture in all-hands meetings but skips MFA because it is inconvenient sends a message that everyone in the organization receives and interprets. An executive who publicly blames employees after a phishing incident teaches the team not to report mistakes. A leader who treats a security near-miss as a learning opportunity creates a very different environment than one who treats it as an HR event.

Security culture is built through thousands of small signals over time. Here are the behaviors that actually move the needle:

• Treat security incidents as learning moments, not blame events. Psychological safety around mistakes is foundational. People who are afraid to report errors will not report them, and that is how small problems become large ones.
• Make security part of business strategy conversations. When security only shows up in IT meetings, the organization learns that it is an IT problem. When it appears in leadership discussions, board briefings, and budget conversations, the signal changes.
• Visibly model secure behavior. When senior leaders use multi-factor authentication, follow access control protocols, and participate in security awareness training alongside their teams, the culture shifts.
• Recognize secure behavior, not just compliance. Most organizations only discuss security when something goes wrong. Building in recognition for people who surface risks early or raise concerns reinforces the behavior you actually want.
• Invest in security awareness as professional development, not just compliance. The difference in how people respond to training framed as a requirement versus training framed as a career investment is significant.

As we explored in 6 Human Skills That Will Define Cybersecurity Leaders in the Age of AI, the capabilities that matter most at the leadership level are not primarily technical. Judgment, communication, and the ability to build trust are the skills that shape whether a security culture actually holds under pressure.

Security Theater Versus Security Culture

There is a version of “security culture” that looks like culture but functions like theater.

An organization runs quarterly phishing simulations. It tracks click rates, celebrates when the number goes down, and uses that metric to demonstrate progress to the board. Meanwhile, employees have never been asked whether they feel comfortable reporting a real suspicious email, or whether they understand what to do if they think something has been compromised, or whether they believe the organization will take them seriously if they raise a concern.

Compliance activities are not the same as culture. They can be useful inputs, but the output that matters is whether human behavior inside the organization actually makes it more secure. The CISA Cybersecurity Awareness Program offers useful framing here: effective awareness campaigns change behavior, not just knowledge scores.

What a Strong Security Culture Looks Like in Practice

Organizations with genuinely strong security cultures tend to share a few characteristics:

• Security conversations happen at the team level, not just the IT level. Managers raise security topics in team meetings and make them part of how work gets done.
• People know what to do when something looks wrong, and they trust that reporting it will lead to support rather than consequences.
• Security is woven into how new employees are onboarded, not introduced later as a compliance activity.
• Security investments are communicated in terms of organizational values and mission, not just regulatory requirements.
• Leaders at all levels are visible participants in security culture, not just sponsors.

These are not technical outcomes. They are organizational ones, and they are built over time through consistent leadership behavior. The organizations that have done this work tend to be more resilient across the board, which is a pattern we have seen reflected in our look at why traditional cyber talent models are broken as well: culture and workforce strategy are deeply connected.

Where Leaders Should Start

Building a stronger security culture does not require an entirely new strategy. It requires honest assessment and consistent follow-through on a handful of foundational questions:

• Do employees in your organization feel psychologically safe reporting security mistakes?
• When a security incident occurs, is the first instinct to learn, or to find someone to blame?
• Is security framed as a shared responsibility, or as something that belongs to one team?
• Are your leaders modeling the behaviors they are asking others to follow?
• Are security investments communicated in terms of values and mission, or primarily as compliance costs?

If the honest answers to these questions reveal gaps, that is not a technology problem. It is a leadership opportunity.

The cybersecurity field has spent decades building better tools and stronger systems. The next frontier is building the organizational cultures that make those tools work. That requires leaders who are willing to own the problem rather than delegate it to a platform, and who understand that the most powerful security system in any organization is a workforce that is genuinely invested in getting this right. When you look at what the cybersecurity jobs boom actually requires, the ability to communicate risk, build trust, and shape organizational behavior sits near the top of the list.

Security culture is not a deliverable you can purchase. It is a practice you have to lead.

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