Leadership Blind Spots in Cybersecurity
“I Thought IT Had That Covered”
There’s a phrase I hear far too often when speaking with executive teams after a security incident:
“I thought IT was handling that.”
Sometimes it’s said with frustration.
Sometimes with surprise.
Almost always with regret.
This assumption—that cybersecurity risk is owned, understood, and controlled somewhere deep inside the IT department—is one of the most dangerous leadership blind spots organizations carry today.
And it’s not because leaders are negligent.
It’s because cybersecurity doesn’t look like other enterprise risks… until it’s too late.
The Comfort of Delegation
In most organizations, risk is visible:
- Financial risk shows up in forecasts and audits
- Legal risk shows up in contracts and litigation
- Operational risk shows up in downtime and missed SLAs
Cyber risk, by contrast, is quiet when it’s managed just enough to avoid daily pain.
No alarms.
No flashing dashboards in the boardroom.
No broken windows—until suddenly, there are.
So leadership does what leadership is incentivized to do:
delegate technical complexity to technical teams.
That works—right up until it doesn’t.
Where the Blind Spot Actually Lives
The blind spot isn’t “leaders don’t care about cybersecurity.”
The blind spot is leaders assume cyber risk behaves like an IT problem, when in reality it behaves like:
- Enterprise risk
- Business continuity risk
- Reputational risk
- Patient safety risk (in healthcare)
- Regulatory and personal liability risk
IT can implement controls.
IT cannot own the consequences.
That distinction matters more than most organizations realize.
“We’re Compliant” Is Not the Same as “We’re Resilient”
Another leadership trap: equating compliance with safety.
Passing an audit, checking a framework box, or producing a policy document creates a powerful—but often false—sense of security.
Compliance answers questions like:
- Do we have a policy?
- Did we perform a risk assessment?
- Are controls documented?
Resilience answers different questions:
- Can we operate during an incident?
- Do leaders know who decides what under pressure?
- Can we recover without improvisation?
- Have we practiced failure?
Most breaches don’t happen because policies were missing.
They happen because
decision-making collapsed when reality diverged from the plan.
The “Gray Zone” IT Can’t Fix Alone
Here’s where leadership engagement is irreplaceable:
- Risk acceptance: What risks are we consciously taking—and why?
- Prioritization: Which systems matter most to the business, not just IT?
- Tradeoffs: What are we willing to slow down, restrict, or fund differently?
- Crisis authority: Who can shut systems down, notify regulators, or communicate externally?
When these decisions are unspoken or assumed, IT is forced to guess.
And guessing is not governance.
Why This Blind Spot Persists
Even experienced executives fall into this trap because:
- Cyber incidents feel hypothetical—until they’re personal
- Metrics are often technical, not business-aligned
- Success looks like “nothing happened”
- Responsibility is diffuse, but blame is concentrated
Ironically, the better IT performs day-to-day, the more invisible the risk becomes.
Closing the Gap: What Leaders Must Own
Closing this blind spot doesn’t require becoming technical.
It requires intentional ownership:
- Acknowledge cybersecurity as a leadership function, not an IT task
- Demand business-level risk conversations, not tool updates
- Tie cyber scenarios to operational and reputational impact
- Rehearse incidents the same way you rehearse other crises
- Empower security leaders with authority—not just responsibility
When leadership owns cyber risk, IT becomes exponentially more effective.
Final Thought
The most damaging cybersecurity failures rarely start with hackers.
They start with assumptions.
Assumptions that “someone else has it handled.”
Assumptions that compliance equals safety.
Assumptions that silence means security.
In today’s threat landscape, the greatest risk isn’t what IT missed—it’s what leadership never asked.
