Jennifer Zador: Staying Cool Under Pressure is a Game-Changer

Generally I include meditation to be honest into my daily and that helps me maintain a semblance of just peace throughout just my daily. And I think during those incidents, especially when you're doing Those really long 19, 20 hour days, you still need to build in self care. I understand. Sure, let's pull an all nighter, sure, like but build in a 15 minute, 20 minute nap, right. Or you know, do you have to do those items of self care so that you can show up as best as you possibly can in that scenario. So and I think too you don't know this about me yet, but my husband is a former Air Force special ops guy and so he also is a big advocate of self care during times of crisis. Like his crisis is completely different than a cyber incident and I'll take my cyber incidents any, any day versus what he's experienced. But I think he also is has built in to like those I like any kind of mission or anything that he has been on. He has built in self care, meditation, journaling, things like that to keep him in a good headspace during the middle of a crisis.

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Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Yes, likewise, my friend. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Yeah. So my name is Jenny Zader and I am the general counsel of Plan Source. I am a mom of three, former military spouse and I negotiate pretty much every day in my career, whether it be in the exec room, the boardroom, or just negotiating contracts. So I'm really excited here to talk about potentially negotiating during a crisis. I was at SolarWinds when the incident happened and I have kind of been through a number of cybersecurity incidents in my career and I think it's a really interesting topic and I think a lot of people just kind of need help navigating through it all because really I think the biggest piece coming out of it is of confidence and maintaining your cool, calm, collected.

Oh, this is good, this is great. And I love the takeaway and we're going to go deeper into the specifics in a minute, but I think what would be a good way for us to start is just setting the stage when we're talking about the Solar Winds crisis and using that as a case study. What was it that happened and what were the biggest challenges that you had to experience?

Yeah, so I think, well, let's set the stage. So I was actually out for dinner for my birthday dinner in December 12th of 2020 and I received a call from my boss, the general counsel at SolarWinds, and he let me know that we were alerted of the Sunburst vulnerability in our software being penetrated by nation state actors. So basically we worked around the clock for the next two to three weeks to manage and control the situation as much as we possibly could. And we partnered with a number of people in the industry because they had already done some deeper diving into kind of the incident overall. And it was just, it was fascinating because what was really great about all of it is that you come together and you have to collaborate effectively in order to manage situation like that. And I think too what you're seeing with CrowdStrike is there are companies that are impacted by the CrowdStrike vulnerability and they are able to kind of get back up online faster than others. Right. And so I think everybody is impacted. It's just how well are you able to work together with your team so that you minimize and mitigate the impact as much as you possibly can?

Oh, there's so much here. So in this situation, it's a cybersecurity attack, and that causes a significant disruption in business functionality. We always want to be prepared for that. But, you know, it's not on anybody's schedule, it's not on anybody's calendar that this is going to happen. And I love the simplicity of the takeaways. Needing to collaborate effectively, work with your team. And then really, the key skills were maintaining your confidence and staying cool under pressure. And I think what would be a great place to go now is exploring the specific types of conversations that were happening from the beginning to the middle to the end throughout this challenge.

Well, I think keeping it at a higher level. Right. Is that there's a high stakes from. At SolarWinds, there was definitely. It was high stakes. Right. A lot of our customers were governmental customers, and we also had 500 of the Fortune 500 within our customer portfolio. And we had 63 products. And so we needed to narrow down and identify of the products which ones were vulnerable. And so you need to work with your customers. We also were working with the government in terms of helping to manage and maintain control of the situation. And then you're also working internally to figure out how extensive the impact actually is. I think when you take a step back and you look at what a crisis situation actually is, it's high stakes, there are high emotions. And then you have multiple parties and teams that come to the table to have these discussions.

This is great. And what's fascinating for me, I know it was painful for you, but now looking back, it is now fascinating to me is the complexity of this. Even though it is such a challenging situation, it's incredibly complex. Again, the takeaways in terms of the skills that were required, we're very simple. I want to keep on getting back to that, but we have the high stakes. There's a lot on the line. Emotions are running high. Everybody's stressed out, and we have multiple layers of conversations because we have to have the conversations internally to get clarity on as to what's happening and get internal alignment as to what we're going to do and say. And then we have the conversations with our clients and then the conversations with the government. And when you were having those internal conversations without getting into the specifics because I know there's a lot of legality involved there too. What would you say would be the biggest challenge that you experienced when you were having those high stakes internal conversations?

What was really interesting is that at the time we had filed, we were planning to divest an MSP business. So we had two kind of major divisions of the company and one was the MSP divisions. And so we had confidentially filed the S1. And so internally we were setting up different systems, different infrastructure, entirely from the SolarWinds typical operating entity. And in doing that, politically, you have this company that is going to eventually be its own entity, but it is still, as of that date, part of the SolarWinds larger entity. And so you're trying to preserve truly the shareholder value for both companies, but ultimately the SolarWinds entity is the only one that is trading and exists on the market. And so what I saw is that yes, there's a shareholder issue and a valuation issue, but also the personalities associated with, with that scenario was very dynamic and interesting to navigate.

And I see the smile. This is that you knew. For me, as somebody who loves to read body language, there is so much there that I will choose not to explore. And yes, the reality is under pressure, people respond in very different ways that can create challenges. And when we think about what's required in these conversations, a lot of times what I've found is that people feel as though the standards, standard negotiation techniques that they would use and the standard conflict resolution techniques that they would use are not sufficient. They need to do more. That's what they think. But really what I've found, and I'd love to get your perspective on this too, is that the more difficult the scenario, the more you closely, you need to stick to the fundamentals and stay within yourself during these conversations. But that is also very difficult to do because you too are emotional. So how did you manage that dynamic in those situations?

Well, to be clear, I was part of the team. I wasn't managing anything. We had a wonderful team of lawyers, incident response folks involved, and they really, truly led the charge. D.L. piper was our lead counsel at that scenario and they were phenomenal. But I do want to say, like you need to in my former boss, Jason Bliss is phenomenal at removing all emotion from any kind of situation. And so he was a wonderful leader to learn from and be groomed by during that incident because he is cool, calm and collected at all times. And so you need someone that is able to put the emotion aside. And generally that is going to be your General counsel, or hopefully it's your CEO, but counsel is a great person to rely on to remove emotion and be objective in any kind of incident or crisis situation.

Agreed, agreed. And as a lawyer, I doubly agree we really should be the adults in the room. And it's one of those situations where if everybody is kind of freaking out about something and then you look at the lawyer and the lawyer is freaking out as well, you're like, well we're doomed if this, if this person can't keep it together. And even though as leaders in, we do have that responsibility to be calm, cool and collected under pressure, to instill confidence through the way that we are carrying ourselves in these situations, that still doesn't make it easy to do that. And so when you and your team, when you were under so much duress, what was it that you were able to do to manage to stay calm, cool and collected during the tough conversations?

Generally I include meditation, to be honest, into my daily and that helps me maintain a semblance of just peace throughout just my daily. And I think during those incidents, especially when you're doing Those really long 19, 20 hour days, you still need to build in self care. I understand, sure, let's pull an all nighter, sure, like, but build in a 15 minute, 20 minute nap, right. Or you know, do you have to do those items of self care so that you can show up as best as you possibly can in that scenario. So and I think too you don't know this about me yet, but my husband is a former Air Force special ops guy and so he also is a big advocate of self care during times of crisis. Like his crisis is completely different than a cyber incident. And I'll take my cyber incidents any, any day versus what he has experienced. But I think he also is, has built in to like those. I like any kind of mission or anything that he has been on. He has built in self care, meditation, journaling, things like that to keep him in a good headspace during the middle of a crisis.

I love this because again it's kind of like that earlier point where we say all right, this is a tough situations, the fundamentals won't work. When we think about just self care, mental health, all of those types of things, we often leave that behind. We're saying okay, that is a. For the privile folks who are not in the midst of a crisis, I don't have time to take care of myself. I need to focus on these things. And one of the things that I really want to hammer Home. Here is the fact that you said you build meditation into your daily practice. It's a routine. And when it comes to our performance under pressure, we need to have done the work for mental health and self care just throughout our lives in order to lower our baseline level of reactivity. Because if you haven't done that work, you're already more stressed out, which makes you vulnerable to being emotionally triggered under difficult circumstances. So the time to start preparing mentally and emotionally for a crisis situation is today, when there is not a crisis.

Yes. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah, yeah. And I think establishing some ground rules too with your teams. I mean, a lot of people say run tabletops. Yes. Do it as much as you possibly can. Yes, it's disruptive. Yes. It requires collaboration.

But hey, quick, quick note. Sorry to interrupt. I'm not familiar with tabletops. Can you, can you? Yeah, so, so start the answer again and, but describe tabletops. Cause I think that might, people might miss that.

Yeah, no, so I think preparation is definitely key to any kind of incident. So yeah, establish your policies and procedures. Run a tabletop, which is basically you can either run it yourself, an engineering product, et cetera, and build in, hey, this is an emergency. Or kind of run those systematic issues in the background so that people have practice coming to the table, running security, incident response, doing those things. You can also hire a third party to run it for you if you have budget. And that actually tends to work out a little bit better because they observe, they pull together and they pull together a good summary of what you can improve on, what you did really well and things like that. So I think practice and preparation and running through real life scenarios as much as you possibly can is helpful because it becomes more muscle memory as opposed to hey, let's, let's go and let's do this 200 pound deadlift without doing the a hundred, 120, 150 reps like beforehand because that is a great way to pull out your back.

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Find out more, elevate, negotiate and succeed. Yes, this is great because I don't think a lot of times we take the time to practice and prepare for these situations. We use what I call hope based strategies where we see a potential challenge and our strategy is to say, well, gee, I sure do hope that does not occur. Well, hope is not a strategy. It's not effective in this situation. And so we have to actually run these plays, have these practices so that when this time does come, you and your team are ready for it.

Yeah. And I think too hope in this day and age, you will be impacted by some kind of cyber incident, privacy incident. And it's just when. And so kind of building those in to your at least like biannually or you know, if you want to do kind of quarterly things like that, like build it in to your practice, it doesn't need to be an every day because you do get caught up, but you need to build it in. And I think establishing the consistency with your team and making it important item like a to do with your team is you need buy in across the company to do it. So kind of building that in is super helpful.

Yeah, I agree. And when you go back and you think about the conversations that you had and you think about the core skills that you relied on with consistency during those conversations, what are the top negotiation skills that come to mind for you?

So I think during that specific moment, negotiation one, I think internally, externally, with the government, communication is number one. Like number one. And I think too being clear and concise is really very important. But I also think especially during internal discussions where there are action items from your team members, ensuring that there's a comprehension of what they need to do is super helpful. Even having them read back what they think that they need to do. Yes, it takes additional time during a meeting, but there needs to be collective precision that actually occurs during those moments. Because if people on your team aren't understanding what they need to do and how they need to action something, then how are you going to fix it for your customers? How are you going to communicate it clearly to your customers? So I think communication in general is really important and I think swiftness without rushing. Right. It's okay to say you don't know, but communicating transparently that you've received the information that you're looking into the situation is super helpful because people know where you are and they can then establish their expectations as to what comes next. And if you're saying, okay, 1, 2, 3, products were not impacted, okay, well we use 1, 2 and 3, but we also use 4. It may still be impacted. So let's come back, let's visit the website, let's see if there is an impact to us. But I think being clear as to and transparent as to where you are in exploration, in investigation, all of that stuff is really very important.

I agree 100% and there is a similarity between this point and the point we made about mental health and self care. Because you are in the habit of meditating on the daily, it's easy for you to inject that into the crisis situation. And if you as an individual and as a, you are in the habit of communicating clearly, it is easier for you to inject that into a crisis situation. And we have to think about the way that these crises can affect us psychologically because it will make it harder for us to think clearly because of the cortisol that is, that is coursing through our veins. It's going to be harder for us to retain memories as well. Not only because of the stress but also because of the lack of sleep. You are going like 20 hour days. That's wild. So your brain is not functioning at tip top shape but you have to be really precise. And so in those situations we're not going to assume that everybody's got it. We are going to check and double check to make sure we're on the same page and communicate clearly, transparently and with humility too. Because like you said, if you don't know something, it's important for you to say that. So everybody can be on the same page and then we can collectively work to address that situation. And also that humility gives the other side the confidence in the relationship to be willing to say the same thing. Hey Jenny, I don't know the answer to that question, but let me come back and get you. So there are so many important things that you just outlined there that can help people through these tough situations.

And I think too another thing about the humility piece is that when people say that they don't understand showing up with a little bit of grace on the back end, right? Because one, they're being vulnerable with you telling you that they don't understand. And yes, everybody's tired, yes, everybody's grumpy, yes, everybody, like everybody is pushed to the max. And so as much as you possibly can, you're showing up at 100% but generally you're going to be at 70. So showing up and giving grace during those moments of humility is super important as well because again you're looking to establish a deep collaboration so that you can operate with precision. And if you don't, if you aren't giving each other that grace, it's going to be make the entire issue harder, 100%.

And when we think about the flip side of it, I think it becomes really clear, because if somebody is vulnerable and we respond with grace, it encourages future vulnerability. They feel comfortable sharing more information. Now, if you go and bite their head off after they share that, they're like, you know what? Next time I make a mistake, last person I'm going to tell is Jenny. And now we cannot solve the problem collectively. And so this isn't saying that we are not holding people accountable. We are. But it's just the tone and approach that we take that has a massive impact.

Yeah, there was one incident that I had worked in my career, and there was. There was an issue, and it was out of Belarus. And culturally, how they approached each other during a time of crisis was completely different than what we needed as a company and from the U.S. and so the people that were involved with the incident in Belarus were very afraid to be honest and to be vulnerable because they were scared of the repercussions, because culturally it would have. It was preservation of their position and because they thought that they were going to get reprimanded so badly that they would be out of a position. And so we needed to come to the call and say, hey, look, we understand that this is how you feel, but we need honesty and transparency as what happened so that we can help you fix it. And so I think, too, especially when you're a global company kind of coming to the table with an appreciation of those cultural differences is also really important.

Vitally important, because it's almost like swimming and not recognizing you're in a current. The same strokes that work in one area don't work here, and you can't fully understand why. And then we start pointing fingers and blaming other people, not fully understanding what's working against us in this situation. Getting a really strong understanding of the culture before we run into these situations or it's going to be very, very important. I think that's an important point to make, too.

Yeah.

Jenny, this has been exceptional. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Before you go, can you let the listeners know about the new gig and how they can get in touch?

Yeah. No. So I am working at Plan Source as a general counsel, and feel free to reach out to me on my LinkedIn. I'm always happy to chat about negotiation and helping you set up any kind of negotiation strategy, especially around incident.

Love it. Jenny, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Yeah.

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