“CISOs and SOC analysts are fighting the same war, but too often, one’s answering to the board while the other’s drowning in alerts.” Security teams rarely fail because of a lack of skill or commitment. They fail when the coordination layer between the boardroom and the SOC starts to unravel.
Today’s CISO operates in triage mode: managing up to the executive team, translating risk into action for their analysts, and working across the business to engage peers like finance and legal. That’s already a complex job. But when strategy doesn’t translate into operational clarity, the result is friction, not impact.
Here are five common leadership disconnects that contribute to that breakdown, and how CISOs can lead more effectively in every direction.
1. Clarify Strategic Goals for Every Team, Not Just the Board
The disconnect
CISOs spend a significant chunk of time crafting board-level narratives, translating complex risk into clean metrics and strategic talking points. While those updates may satisfy executives, they often leave SOC teams unsure how to act, and finance teams struggling to connect budgets to value.
That pressure is real. 66% of CISOs say they’ve felt compelled to downplay or distort cybersecurity risk when reporting to the board.
What to do instead
Managing up is essential, but not at the expense of clarity downstream or across the aisle. If the board asks if you’re ready for ransomware, your SOC needs more than a coverage percentage. They need threat models, prioritized detection targets, and the space to tune. And your CFO? Provide them with language that frames security spend in terms of risk reduction and operational resilience, not just tooling costs.
2. Turn Security Policies into Operational Enablers
The disconnect
Security policies can look airtight on paper. But once they reach the SOC, they often slow detection, confuse workflows, or become just another source of noise.
In fact, 39% of SOC professionals cite policy complexity as a key contributor to alert fatigue, ranking just behind false positives and lack of context.
What to do instead
Write policies with the people who have to live with them. Let analysts call out what’s enforceable, what slows them down, and where automation could help. The best policies reinforce detection instead of interrupting it. When controls clarify decisions instead of creating drag, they reduce fatigue rather than add to it.
3. Design Metrics That Reflect Real Security Work
The disconnect
Executive dashboards often prioritize metrics like mean time to detect (MTTD), false positive rates, and incident closure counts. But from the SOC’s perspective, these numbers can feel disconnected from the reality on the ground—where signals are ambiguous, data is noisy, and case ownership can shift mid-stream.
According to 2024 research from SC Media and Fortra, 60% of security professionals say their performance metrics don’t accurately reflect the value or complexity of their work.
What to do instead
Metrics are not the issue; interpretation is. Don’t build KPIs in a vacuum. Ask your SOC what “good” actually looks like from their side. Then, in conversations with your CFO, tie those metrics to outcomes that resonate across the business: faster incident resolution, measurable risk reduction, and better containment. That’s how metrics build alignment, not frustration.
4. Integrate Compliance into Daily Detection Workflows
The disconnect
CISOs see compliance as foundational. It unlocks funding, reduces liability, and signals maturity. But for analysts, it often feels like busywork—time lost to log pulls, evidence trails, and audit prep with minimal return for real threat detection.
And that time adds up. In 2024, IT and security teams reported spending more than 4,300 hours annually on compliance, often at the cost of more proactive work.
Even more telling: while 90% of SOC analysts say their detection tools are effective, those same tools are often poorly integrated into compliance workflows. When compliance lives in a silo, the result is duplication, drag, and burnout.
What to do instead
Fold compliance into the workflows analysts already use. Automate evidence capture and log retention directly within their existing tools. And if a significant portion of your security budget supports compliance, make sure that spend also improves investigation depth and team velocity.
Need buy-in from your CFO? Don’t position compliance as a regulatory checkbox; frame it as an investment in operational efficiency. Better execution reduces incident costs, shortens audit timelines, and frees up analysts to focus on meaningful security work.
5. Coordinate Incident Response Around Shared Visibility
The disconnect
When a breach hits, the clock starts ticking. But most teams are not starting from the same page. CISOs want clarity. Analysts need time to investigate. Finance wants hard numbers. Legal needs a message.
Yet most incident response (IR) plans assume perfect handoffs and ideal coordination. In reality, 68% of organizations report that process or communication breakdowns contributed to incident escalation, according to the 2025 Verizon DBIR.
What to do instead
Treat IR planning like a live-fire drill. Define who needs what information, when they need it, and how it will be shared. Involve the CFO early; they’re the one who translates technical impact into business risk for executives, insurers, and regulators. Give them access to real-time exposure metrics, recovery milestones, and cost projections.
The goal isn’t just to move quickly. It’s to move together. That happens when the entire team operates from a shared playbook, not a collection of assumptions.
Real Leadership Moves in Every Direction
CISOs can’t afford to lead in just one direction. The role demands multidirectional leadership: up to the board, down to the SOC, and across to partners in finance, legal, and beyond.
Effective security leadership means more than reporting metrics or enforcing policies. It requires acting as the bridge between strategy and execution, between risk and response.
To lead across the organization, CISOs must:
- Translate technical risk into shared understanding—for boards, analysts, and CFOs
- Build operational clarity. so that policies, metrics, and compliance drive action, not confusion
- Empower teams with workflows and tools that reduce friction and improve coordination, especially under pressure
That’s exactly what Graylog is designed to support. We won’t fix your org chart, but we will ensure your detection stack is aligned, communicable, and built for trust at every level.
Trying to lead across, not just up? See how Graylog helps CISOs connect strategy to action
