ASIS Aug14__ASIS_RiskUK_may14 05/08/2014 08:16 Page 1
INTERNATIONAL
TM
Newsletter AUTUMN 2014
UNITED KINGDOM CHAPTER 208
ASIS NEWSLETTER OF THE YEAR – WINNER 2013, 2012, 2008 & 2003 – HONOURABLE MENTION 2011, 2006.
ASIS UK, WIS SUMMER MEETING Dawn Holmes CPP
On the 10th July at Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Canary Wharf office, the first ASIS Women in Security event in a long time was held. It was the first event that I had ever organised and couldn’t have done it without the help of Amanda McCloskey (CIS Security), Graham Bassett and Steve Emmins; these things seem to just ‘happen’ when you are a participant and I soon learnt that it is not that straight forward when you are actually organising things yourself! As I’ve said, this was the first event in a long time, which gave me the opportunity to try something a bit different. Whilst wanting it to be aimed at women in the industry, I didn’t want it to be exclusive: a theme we will be developing throughout our meetings will be “Creating a Community”, where like-minded people can go for support, advice, or to just talk through things and that men would benefit from attending just as much as women. I also had feedback about what people wanted/what they thought about other events, and lots of people came back saying that security can be a bit of an ‘Old Boys Club’ and if you don’t fit in/have the right background etc, networking at these events is sometimes an uphill struggle. We therefore decided that we wanted
to do this first session on networking and I wanted people to come away from this meeting feeling a little bit more confident about the next networking event that they attended. I also liked that this isn’t something that only women would benefit from, but anyone new to the industry, or those who have joined security through untraditional routes. We found Vanessa King (The Fire Inside) who coaches people for public speaking and asked her to help us with the event. It was a small group (23 people) and Vanessa organised an interactive event, lots of group activity under the theme of networking. We all sat down in very respectablelooking theatre style seating, politely leaving the usual gaps inbetween us and others we didn’t know, people avoiding the front rows etc. After a brief introduction, the chairs were chucked around the room and we got on to our first networking exercise. It was fun, broke the ice, but got us all thinking about the value of networking. We then looked at how to approach a group, using body language as a guide to work out who is the best person/group to approach, so we aren’t just hovering and trying to squeeze into conversations and looking like social lepers when we can’t get
into a group. We also, very importantly, learnt how to ditch someone who is boring - the secret of this, we will not tell!! Our final group activity was working on a 60 second elevator pitch; the trick of this is to leave a person wanting to learn more and that if you come across as if you are trying to sell something, people will switch off, but if you can get them interested in a solution you can offer without going on too much about your product, people will be interested in understanding more about what you do. We learnt that no one (no matter how well connected and confident) really likes being put on the spot and doing these pitches and that it is something that we can all learn to improve upon. One of the things I really liked about the event is that I think most people spoke to everyone around the room: we didn’t just stick to the couple of people who we knew, but actually spent a lot of time learning more about the other people with us. One of the things the WSS encourages for their networking (an unwritten rule that they have) is that after the event, you must speak to someone who you have never met before and I think this is a philosophy that we should adopt too. The last part of the meeting was a group discussion as to how we want to progress the group, the best way to communicate; how we can create a community that supports the group (without being too salesy). Again, it was really refreshing to see group participation, people genuinely interested in how we can develop continued on page 4