From Compliance Theater to Human Leadership: Why Sidelining CISOs Normalizes Breaches
Boards that weaken security leadership reduce cybersecurity to performance art. CIOs and CISOs must reclaim their role as human-centered leaders—guardians of trust, privacy, and dignity.
Picture the scene: the boardroom applauds itself after another clean audit. The dashboards glow green. The compliance reports are filed neatly away. And yet, outside those walls, the breaches continue. Privacy is violated. Dignity is eroded. Trust vanishes.
This is the paradox of modern cybersecurity. Organizations are checking all the boxes but failing to protect the very thing that matters most: the humans behind the data. When security is reduced to compliance theater, breaches stop being treated as existential failures. They become routine. And in that routine, leadership normalizes the erosion of privacy and dignity.
Sidelining CISOs Normalizes Breaches
The sidelined or weakened CISO is the hallmark of this dysfunction. Instead of acting as strategic multipliers, CISOs are too often cast as compliance managers. Their remit is narrowed to passing audits rather than preserving trust.
The result? A culture that tolerates breaches as the “cost of doing business.” This isn’t just bad governance. It’s organizational surrender. When boards minimize the CISO’s voice, they signal to the enterprise that protecting dignity is optional.
Recent research underscores this gap. In a 2025 Harvard Business Review study, 71% of executives believed their cybersecurity funding was adequate or strong. Yet only 39% rated their board’s understanding of cyber risk as proactive, and just 31% considered their organization an innovator or early adopter in cyber readiness[^1]. The illusion of readiness masks the normalization of failure.
The People/Process/Technology Prison
Why does this dynamic persist? Because CIOs and CISOs are often trapped in what I call the people/process/technology prison.
Legacy frameworks treat people as risks to be managed, processes as boxes to check, and technology as the silver bullet. Humans are reduced to “actors,” “insiders,” or “threat vectors.” Leadership is forced to view the enterprise through a compliance lens, not a human lens.
This prison strips cybersecurity of its real purpose: enabling people to thrive with dignity in a digital-first world.
The Stakes: Privacy and Dignity
Breaches aren’t just technical failures. They are human failures. They rob customers, employees, and citizens of their dignity. They leave people feeling exposed, powerless, and undervalued.
HBR research shows that dignity violations are common in organizations, and that treating people with dignity significantly improves motivation, satisfaction, and overall flourishing[^2]. Cybersecurity is no different. Each time leadership accepts compliance theater, it chooses to normalize dignity violations at scale.
The Golden Rule has long reminded us: treat others as you would like to be treated. Today, leadership demands an even sharper ethic: treat others as they want to be treated[^3]. That requires designing systems of trust, not systems of control.
The Escape Route: SPIRE as Human-Centered Leadership OS
How do CIOs and CISOs escape the prison? By reframing security leadership through SPIRE: a human-centered operating system for leadership .
Signal – Upgrade the signal. Replace noisy dashboards and vanity metrics with board-relevant telemetry: drag, control effectiveness, velocity friction, trust signals.
Performance Intelligence – See the real system. Surface blind spots, entropy, and misaligned incentives that undermine execution.
Insight – Understand what system you’re truly running. The CISO is not a translator but a Strategic Multiplier, co-designing systems of trust, speed, and resilience.
Reframe – Stop reporting problems. Start commanding the system. Position security not as liability management but as enterprise execution.
Execution – Close the loop. Translate insight into prioritized action with financial discipline, governance, and feedback.
SPIRE is not abstract philosophy. It is a leadership design system. It restores agency to CIOs and CISOs. It elevates the role from compliance enforcer to guardian of dignity.
Why Symbolic Leadership Matters
MIT Sloan Management Review warns that simply adding more senior cybersecurity roles can actually increase collective overconfidence, leading leaders to overestimate capabilities compared to peers[^4]. In other words, title inflation doesn’t fix the problem—it makes it worse.
The solution isn’t more hierarchy. It’s more symbolism. An empowered CISO isn’t just a functional leader; they are a signal to the enterprise that dignity, trust, and momentum matter. Weakening that signal weakens the system.
Actionable Moves for CIOs and CISOs
Reframe Board Discussions
Don’t settle for “Are we compliant?” Ask: “How does this strategy preserve dignity and trust?”
Elevate the Symbolic Role of Security
Communicate not only risk reduction but also human empowerment.
Challenge the Prison Mindset
Reject frameworks that treat people as liabilities. Treat them as voices with potential.
Measure What Matters
Replace red-yellow-green dashboards with metrics tied to performance, friction, and trust.
These aren’t theoretical exercises. They’re boardroom moves CIOs and CISOs can make today.
Closing Call-to-Action
Compliance theater might pass audits. But it fails people. And in failing people, it fails the enterprise. Normalized breaches don’t just erode data—they erode dignity.
CIOs and CISOs who want to break free from the people/process/technology prison need a new operating system for leadership. That system is SPIRE.
Learn how to apply SPIRE as a leader, and inside your organization: identient.ai/spire
Footnotes
[^1]: “Boards Need a More Active Approach to Cybersecurity.” Harvard Business Review, May 20, 2025.
[^2]: “The Dignity Mindset: How to Build Organizations Where People Flourish.” Harvard Business Review, Oct 30, 2024.
[^3]: “The New Golden Rule of Leadership.” Harvard Business Review, Aug 2022.
[^4]: “The Case for Lean Cybersecurity Leadership.” MIT Sloan Management Review, Feb 10, 2025.