The Leadership Edge: Why Coaching Matters for Privacy Pros

Intro 0:01

Welcome to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security Podcast. Like any good marriage, we will debate, evaluate, and sometimes quarrel about how privacy and security impact business in the 21st century.

Jodi Daniels 0:22

Hi, Jodi Daniels, here. I’m the Founder and CEO of Red Clover Advisors, a certified women’s privacy consultancy. I’m a privacy consultant and certified informational privacy professional providing practical privacy advice to overwhelmed companies.

Justin Daniels 0:35

Hello. I am Justin Daniels, I am a shareholder and corporate M&A and tech transaction lawyer at the law firm Baker Donelson, advising companies in the deployment and scaling of technology. Since data is critical to every transaction, I help clients make informed business decisions while managing data privacy and cybersecurity risk. And when needed, I lead the legal cyber data breach response brigade.

Jodi Daniels 0:58

And this episode is brought to you by Red Clover Advisors, we help companies to comply with data privacy laws and establish customer trust so that they can grow and nurture integrity. We work with companies in a variety of fields, including technology e commerce, professional services and digital media. In short, we use data privacy to transform the way companies do business together. We’re creating a future where there’s greater trust between companies and consumers to learn more and to check out our best-selling book, Data Reimagined: Building Trust One Byte at a Time, visit redcloveradvisors.com. Hello, hello, what’s up?

Justin Daniels 1:35

I don’t know what’s up.

Jodi Daniels 1:37

We’re going like, cool and deep here.

Justin Daniels 1:40

Really, yeah, I’m trying to figure out how I can get on my co-host’s nerves that I seem to do from time to time.

Jodi Daniels 1:49

Now, I don’t think you should do that, and since you don’t seem to be very fun today, we’re just gonna get into it. Oh yeah, I gave you your fun option. And yeah, it didn’t work. Okay, all right, so instead, we’re gonna focus on Doug Miller, who is our guest today. And Doug is an executive coach at Doug Miller Strategies for privacy and compliance executives, professionals and teams. Having been global privacy leader at AOL and Yahoo, he’s faced the challenges of overburdened privacy teams first hand, and there’s no shortage of that today. So Doug, welcome to the show.

Doug Miller 2:23

Thank you very much for having me — happy to be here.

Justin Daniels 2:26

You know, Doug, when she said the word AOL, it reminded me of when I first knew Jody and I had AOL and I’d have to hit dial up. You know, you wasn’t on all the time. You had to log in. And here we are, what 23 —

Jodi Daniels 2:42

I’m gonna let you do the math.

Justin Daniels 2:44

Yeah, like three years later. So that was a blast from the past.

Jodi Daniels 2:50

They had to get up and yes, you did not turn it on very often. It was the oldest computer on the planet with the loudest dial up sound. It’s really true.

Justin Daniels 3:00

And I annoyed her, and look where I am now.

Jodi Daniels 3:04

Anyway, all right, we’re gonna focus back on Doug.

Justin Daniels 3:08

Can you tell us a little bit about your career journey today?

Doug Miller 3:12

Sure. I got the gig at AOL back when you still had to use the modems or whatever. I remember when I first heard about it. I hadn’t even been on AOL. I had been working at what was then called the Software Publishers Association. It’s the Software and Industry Information Association now, and I was doing government affairs work, and I was happy as a clam, but there were six people at that organization that ultimately went over to AOL, and it was a pipeline. At one point, I got a call about this gig. There it was for a new role called General Manager of Community. And so I thought, “Okay, where’s the harm?” And logged on AOL for the first time with the modem noises and all of that that you were just describing. And like, well, this is fascinating. And the role was essentially, they were, they were dealing with public policy issues for the first time, and they had created internally, this cross company group that was dealing with public policy issues and figuring out, how do we come up with the appropriate response? So there are people from government affairs and corporate communications and the legal department, of course, and the security and things like that. And then there was this new team that was going to be me that was figuring out what the internal policies were for content and conduct on the service. And that was fascinating. And it put me right at the nexus of what’s going on externally and interpreting it for what’s going on internally in the company, which is where I lived for many years professionally. So the AOL ride was terrific. Eventually I became the full-time privacy person, because they didn’t have a full time privacy person. And then the team got bigger, and Jules Polynetski was there for a while. They brought him in, and he had already been the Chief Privacy Officer at Double Click. So he’s a superstar, and I learned a lot working with him. And then after he left, I became the chief privacy officer. We called it global privacy leader, and it was a fun time. The company was fighting its way back, and we were building the mature program. I had some great bosses. I had a terrific team of people that it was great to go in and work with and see every day. And eventually we acquired Yahoo, and that was utterly fascinating, because, you know, they were, they had been around for a long time. And the fascinating part for me was how different the culture was there. And so we acquired Yahoo in 2017 and so we had the challenge of integrating these two companies, the privacy teams reported to me, and figuring out, then also how to get ready for GDPR. And so it was a wild ride, and very much enjoyed it. And then what happened is, over time, I started getting what I realized now in retrospect, was that itch for change which people get, I think. And so at one point, I changed my duties, and I became much more external focused. I joined the public policy team, and then we got acquired by private equity, and I felt like the Sisyphean boulder had rolled back down to the bottom of the hill, and I was going to have to get to know a new CEO and a new team of executives and just start rebuilding all over again. It was in that moment that a recruiter called about a gig at Amazon, and so I went over to Amazon on the Amazon ads privacy team for a couple of years. And that was fascinating too, just because it was, it’s this fascinating culture and their leadership principles and very, very smart people and a very engineering driven culture, and the scale was very different. So I got a lot out of that. But at one point, I had started working with an executive coach from the perspective of just becoming a better leader in dealing with this rapid change. And then over time, it was very helpful. And over time, it started to become a conversation about, well, what can we do that’s a little bit different? I’m still some years of career ahead of me. Where can we go next? I think a lot of people go through that kind of transition too. And at the beginning of the pandemic, I’d been talking to my coach, Sandy Hughes, who was terrific about how you become a coach. And it turned out that during the pandemic, the extensive training that could take a year to do was condensed and now possible virtually. And so I did it, and I figured this is bound to make me a more effective leader, and I love corporate training kind of stuff. It turned out to be a revolution. It was unbelievably cool. I loved that. It’s very forward looking. I love coaching, there’s such a commitment to finding what’s true for the client, a real commitment to truth. And then I realized I was helping people, and then I was hooked, so I started thinking, well, I should do this on the side. I would like to become certified as a coach. And I did, and I started coaching people on the side, and I created Doug Miller strategies, but the itch to make a transition overwhelmed me, and so last September, I left Amazon, and I’m doing the executive coaching thing full time, which is great, because now I can work with teams, and I can go into a company and help with workshops and things like that. And I’m very fortunate as well to be able to work as a Senior Fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum, driving their ad practices working group. So I’m still firmly grounded in reality as well. So it’s been a terrific transition.

Jodi Daniels 8:45

Very fascinating background from, hey, we’ll dial up to the really fast paced privacy universe that we have today. And I’d like to dive in and kind of break down this coaching piece for privacy professionals. How would you define coaching for privacy pros? And what is it about privacy pros? What are the unique challenges that they’re going to face? Because so many of them are trying to figure out the “how” of actually getting this privacy thing done?

Doug Miller 9:19

Yeah, coaching is usually for somebody who’s looking for a change of some sort. It could be a behavior change, it could be a life change or an edge, just getting a little bit better at something. The kinds of people who get the most out of coaching are not people who need an awful lot of remediation, but people who are doing pretty well, and then need to just shore up a particular skill, right? A lot of executive coaches get called because there’s an up and comer who just needs that one thing, of being able to delegate better, make decisions faster, or something, and a coach can help with that in the privacy setting. One. And because I’ve walked the walk, I born the burden. I understand privacy professionals’ concerns, and I know that so much of what makes you a successful privacy professional is behavioral. It’s people skills, it’s there are lots of law firms and firms like yours that can tell you how to comply with the particular law. I’m not going to do that. I can tell you how to take that knowledge and deploy it in the context of other people to help you be more effective in the workplace. Help you be more effective as a teammate, as a leader, as somebody who is working and leading across teams. These are the skills that coaching comes in very, very handy for and you know, privacy is not an easy gig, and almost anybody who’s watching this right now knows that, that it’s it’s a tough way to make a living, because in most organizations, you’re not aligned with why the organization is there. If you’re on a sales team or a product team, you have a great idea, we should do this, and somebody’s going to say, Well, that sounds great. Maybe we’ll make more money. And the privacy team comes along and says, Well, we should do this, and people usually don’t want to hear it, so you’re not aligned, and you don’t always fit in, but you have things that other people don’t have. You usually have a more panoramic view of the organization than most people in the organization. So you see things that other people don’t see. You are working with a wider variety of teams than a lot of people do. And so you can build networks that other people can’t build. The act of doing data inventories and data mapping can actually take something that is a poorly understood asset of an organization, and make it a very valuable asset for the organization. And these are all things that privacy professionals do that is unusual, and the coaching can absolutely help with.

Jodi Daniels 11:53

It is definitely a hard job. I like how you commented on that, and how and reframed, which is what we often say about how it can, it is kind of climbing uphill, but how it’s all about explaining it in a way that the organization can understand.

Justin Daniels 12:12

So what skills or approaches do you think privacy professionals often struggle with the most, and how can coaching bridge the gap?

Doug Miller 12:22

Well, there are two big ones. One is you can call it growth. You can call it maturation. You can call it developing leadership skills. You can call it vertical development. But it’s it’s that long journey from being the kind of person who is told what to do and has a lot of oversight over what they do, to somebody who can work independently, somebody who knows what to do and and who then can can provide insight and and input to the operations of the organization, and then take on broader responsibility in teams and lead across teams, etc. The full range of growth that vertical development is so important for privacy professionals, and if done right and under good leadership, that nurtures that kind of talent, the privacy teams end up being this, this group of super talented people in organizations. And that’s when it’s just that’s why working in privacy is so interesting, because the people are so interesting. The other thing that comes up a lot is confidence, and working in comfort zones. And when I say confidence, it comes up for men and women. I’m fascinated by this that a lot of times somebody approached me for the first conversation to explore what’s going on, and they tell me what their challenges are, or whatever. And you can get 45 to 50 minutes into the conversation, and at some point, then there’ll be a pause, and then they will admit that sometimes they struggle with confidence. Since everybody, men women, happens a lot, and a lot of how we improve is to be able to manage our comfort zones, to be able to to how’s the comfort zone you work, you expand it a little bit. You’re a little bit uncomfortable, you go back, and then it gets better and better. And that is a thing that coaching can really help with, because the last thing it can help with is being an accountability partner of facilitating change. And even if you’re just trying to get an edge over other people, is is hard to maintain that discipline. The coach can, can be your partner in helping make that happen. And then all of that vertical development is a range of skills that I think are familiar to you and your audience. It’s the capacity to persuade effective communication, developing good value propositions, figuring out how to convey risk, dealing with difficult people, coping with burnout or feeling overwhelmed and and then a lot of the things that come up in my coaching practice anyway is people who are thinking about reinventing their career in some way, either people who. Have drifted away from privacy and want to get back, or people who have been in privacy for a while and are thinking of doing something privacy adjacent, or maybe even something very, very different. So there’s a lot of ways that I can help, and a lot of reasons why I get calls.

Jodi Daniels 15:16

I’m curious, because you were sharing before about how privacy pros might have to extend vertically and across the organization, and sometimes it’s a single person and sometimes it’s a team. Do you see differences whether it’s a privacy person, and that is the privacy team, versus really having a whole team?

Doug Miller 15:41

I think the challenges that you have are the same, because you’re still trying to persuade an organization to do something that it doesn’t want to do. And obviously a team, I suppose, creates all the challenges of leadership, and is in a different pool of time that you need to devote to nurturing your team and helping them be effective. As opposed to being a solo contributor. There’s this weird luxury, I suppose, in being a solo contributor, in that you cannot possibly do everything, and so it forces you to ruthlessly prioritize. But in the end, the techniques that you’re going to use, the people skills that you’re going to bring to bear, are largely the same. It’s going to be presentation skills and being able to persuade. It’s going to be empathy, to understand what’s going on with the people you’re trying to persuade so that you can be effective, and you’re not just yelling at them, it’s persistence. And years ago, I came across this quote from President Eisenhower that was a revelation for me. It was late in life, and somebody asked him, you’re interviewing the former president. Well, what do you think leadership is? And he you know, here’s a guy had been Supreme Allied Commander. He’s been President of the United States, and he said, Well, leadership is its persuasion, it’s conciliation, it’s education, and it’s patience. And I just thought the idea that that guy who’s held such awesome power still has to persuade and conciliate and educate and be patient. That is an important thing to keep in mind that these things take a while, and you got to not get too far ahead and bring people with you, as I indicated earlier. I think the capacity to manage burnout or feeling overwhelmed is important, and that’s going to speak to prioritization and how you’re bringing order from chaos. And somewhere in there, you gotta essentially learn stoic philosophy, know what you can control what you can’t control, and there’s a wisdom in that. So these are the skills that are elements of perspective and small changes of behavior that can help privacy professionals thrive. What we often forget is that we’re calibrating here. You know these, these aren’t binary. Things. Success is fragile. Teams are fragile. One’s motivation is fragile. And so you can, you can turn the dial one notch to the right and continue forward progress, and you have a couple bad weeks, and the dial turns to the left a little bit, and you can spiral in the other direction. Having a coach there to help you can keep you on this straight and narrow and moving forward

Jodi Daniels 18:32

like that. That makes a lot of sense, I think, a lot of times just just a little bit of a setback, just a little bit of a challenge. And sometimes you really do need that extra person to help. Diall, you back the other direction

Doug Miller 18:43

years ago. It was actually when I first got to AOL, I remember there was some corporate training that they sent us to for managers. And I just love corporate training stuff. And it was about taking the idea of the buzz word would be task relevant maturity, the extent to which a person understands their role. So new people don’t have task relevant maturity yet. But ultimately, you want people who you just point them in the right direction, and they completely know their job, but pairing that with sort of morale or enthusiasm, and the exercise was for the manager to have insight into where on this spectrum the employee was so somebody who’s brand new, high enthusiasm, don’t know what the heck they’re doing yet. So a certain amount of manager, real oversight is called for. There. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the perfect employee, highly enthusiastic, highly motivated, great at their job, and you don’t have to spend much time with them. That person, they have a few bad days or a few bad weeks, they can start to backslide a bit, and that is where a lot of managers we were taught in this training completely miss this opportunity to jump. And of course correct. And I noticed this during the pandemic, where, you know, people were working from home, they’re coping with are they getting sick? Their relatives getting sick? What do you do with the children they’re not learning, etc? And a lot of people, I think, slid back a little bit, and that was where there was additional leadership calibration. Called for fascinating problems. And so when privacy teams are coping with burnout the way they are, I think it asks a lot more of leaders. Makes a lot of sense.

Justin Daniels 20:32

So I was curious, Doug, could you give us any like, specific experiences you’ve had with someone that you’re coaching about a particular issue and how you were able to get them.

Doug Miller 20:40

As a coach in a better place. Yeah, one of my favorite little cases was a couple of years ago, a friend of mine who’s a partner in a mid sized law firm contacted me and said he had an associate who wrote beautifully, but couldn’t hit a deadline, and it was really becoming a problem, and could I help? And so I set up a coaching engagement with the associate, and we started talking about time management and things like that. And there are plenty of time management techniques. You’re probably familiar with a lot of them, and some of them work for some people, and some of them work for other people, and we experimented with some things. But what I love about coaching is we never really coached the problem. We coach the person, and so if somebody’s procrastinating and missing deadlines, underneath that procrastination, there’s some anxiety, there’s some avoidance. We needed to get to the bottom of what that was, and as we spent some time getting to that. We were able to neutralize that and come up with strategies for coping with that. And week after week, we would create these little rules that the associate could use and check in with little precepts to guide and over time, they actually wrote them down and developed them as a thing that they pasted over their desk. And so by the time we were done, they had developed their own rules for changing their behavior and staying focused. And it was a complete success story. And I just love the way that one worked out.

Jodi Daniels 22:22

Well, now you have me super curious. Do you remember what any of those precepts were that that person wrote down?

Doug Miller 22:31

Well, a lot of them had to do with the identifying the things that were triggering their anxiety, so that they could acknowledge them and then acknowledged that that was not going to be something that was going to unravel their day. So it had to do with the perhaps identifying specific behaviors from their boss that they could let bother them or not, and we could get in the way of that. It turns out, in the end, that, you know, little time management techniques like creating time blocks or whatever, that helps somewhat, but mostly it was finding a way of alleviating the anxiety so there’s no avoidance going on, and then creating the conditions where some sort of flow was possible so that they could really focus and do their best work, which was good When they could do it. So I’m curious. Doug, in that example,

Justin Daniels 23:25

What did you uncover as what the anxiety was, and how did the person then start to deal with it? Was it the anxiety over these new laws. I don’t quite understand them, because I know some people embrace when things are different, and other people, particularly lawyers, because —

Doug Miller 23:42

Like, well, we need to get a handle on, yeah, I think it was much more in the nature of performance anxiety and trying to meet a high standard, and procrastinating feeling like they weren’t going to, and all the the anxiety that keeps people from doing stuff that they need to do, plus a certain amount of fear, perhaps inadequate nurturing from their boss. What you find is people come to you and there’s there’s an employee they need you to help with a particular behavior or whatever, or a team needs to work through some issues, there’s almost always going to be things that the individuals can do, but there’s these things happen in interaction with leaders, and so leaders can also meet their teams or their employees where they are as well. I honestly think that in modern workplaces now the traditional pyramid, of course, is passe, but the style of leadership that is more collaborative, I think, ultimately turns out to be more effective, especially when you consider generational differences among employees, Gen Z is very different from Gen X. Or or whatever. And, but it, I think a lot has to do with the leaders being willing to to waste Brown, would say, Rumble with them. And, you know, get in there and figure out what’s going on and collaborate, as opposed to just saying, Well, we’re having our weekly meeting. And then if you got to go up and do this.

Jodi Daniels 25:24

I was going to ask, and maybe you can expand a little bit, but we have a lot of leaders listening. And so what might be something that they could tactically look for in their week, of how they’re working with their teams, and maybe just a small little tweak that you might offer.

Doug Miller 25:41

Well, first of all, if you’re not having one on ones with your direct reports, you really should be, and that sounds like an easy one, except a lot of people don’t, because here’s what happens. Everybody gets busy and they think, well, we’re in the office. We’ve returned to office, and we see them every day, and so it’ll be fine, but that is the employee’s time, and that’s when they have the premature to raise issues with you, which they can’t always do, if it’s a hallway conversation or a short meeting about something else, so maintaining that discipline of having the space for the one on one very, very important basic fundamental. But when you’re there, also check in with them about weekly about the trade offs that they’re being forced to make, because everybody has way too many things to do, and so you got to check in with priorities constantly about what you’re working on, what you’re not working on, check in with people about how overwhelmed they’re actually feeling. It’s essentially the tiny steps that you can take to understand what creates a sort of flow state for your employees or your team. The workplaces now are terribly distracted, and there’s a growing literature about this. The Stolen Focus book is terrific, the Jonathan Haidt book about the anxiety generation, and Chris Hayes from MSNBC has a new one out where he focused on employees and how distracted we are. Meetings distract us. Administrative tasks distract us. If you can reduce the pointless things the work about work, some of that you have to do, of course, but there’s a lot where maybe you don’t, and all of that is creating time where your team can get into a flow state, as opposed to being so scattered and distracted that they don’t know if they’re going to be more effective at home or in the office or on the metro. You just don’t know. It’s little things like that, but it’s, it’s actually getting in the weeds.

Jodi Daniels 27:35

I really like that. You brought up the one on one. I know some organizations have moved to not have those as often and just use digital tools to have summaries. And I think there’s definitely a place for those digital tools and summaries, but in my mind, it doesn’t replace that one to one conversation.

Doug Miller 27:52

Yeah, look, there’s a lot of reporting that we have to do, and if you can use some digital tool, you know, fine, but that doesn’t replace the human connection, the human understanding, the capacity to to understand with some empathy, what’s going on with people. So use the AI to free up time for deeper human connection. Makes a lot of sense for me. Oh, Doug, what is your best privacy or security tip when you’re having that personal interaction at a cocktail party? For example, I think the most important thing there is just prioritize. You know, as Stephen Covey said, schedule your priorities. Just make sure you’re actually doing it doesn’t matter what the specific tip is, but just make sure that you’re checking in on privacy and security every week or whatever, to actually do it.

Jodi Daniels 28:51

I like that one. I love Stephen Covey. If anyone has not read or followed any Stephen Covey principles, highly recommend you find.

Doug Miller 29:01

Even if you’ve read it, it’s one of those things that repays a reread. And a really good book like that, and the COVID one has had some staying power, they always repay a reread, just like a good classic novel does. There are so many that are just whatever, almost not particularly useful, but the really strong ones that I think repay every visit. Well, I think it’s also important to note, as Doug, you made the point about having the one on one with your direct reports. For those of you who probably don’t have access to Jody’s calendar, that’s precisely what she does about every week with all of her direct reports. Yep, I’m, do you believe in the people side, except for me, who’s not a direct report that I’m only found. But here’s some contract crisis.

Jodi Daniels 29:51

Yep, you do not get the Calendly link, so Doug, when you are not coaching people, what do you like to do for five. In

Doug Miller 30:02

I have always loved history. I love reading about it. I like studying it, but I’ve discovered and as an adult, I love telling people about it. So for many years, I’ve been a docent at the National Museum of American History, and I great joy in life is giving my highlights tour of the museum and getting people excited about it. Some of the people watching me have been on one of my history tours at a Future of Privacy Forum event, and I love doing those too. I just get such a kick out of getting people to think about this stuff and appreciate it, even if just for a few minutes. It makes me very happy.

Jodi Daniels 30:40

Fellow history buff over here, there’s some exciting ways that you could be the walking history book. Indeed, for someone other than you, it’s so much fun. When we go somewhere, I just go, ding, can tell me about X, Y, Z. Walking history book just comes out.

Doug Miller 30:56

It’s great.

Jodi Daniels 30:58

Love that. Well, Doug, we’re so glad that you came to talk with us today. If people would like to connect and learn more, where can they go?

Doug Miller 31:07

They can find me at dougmillerstrategies.com, contact information is there, and you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I’d love to talk with — if you’re wondering and just a little bit curious. Let’s spend 30 minutes or an hour and figure it out together. Wonderful.

Jodi Daniels 31:20

Well, Doug, thank you again for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Doug Miller 31:23

Thank you very much for having me.

Outro 31:29

Thanks for listening to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security Podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes and check us out on LinkedIn. See you next time.