2026-10-31 –, Track 1 (306B) Language: English
Coaching a junior analyst. Translating between the SOC and the C-suite. Holding a team together through an incident. These are cyber skills, even if they never show up on a certification track. Yet most conversations in the field still treat them as a finishing touch on top of the "real" technical work.
This talk reboots that thinking. It positions leadership, communication, mentorship, and emotional intelligence as load-bearing infrastructure; the layer that decides how teams make decisions under pressure, how incidents actually resolve, and whether the tools and frameworks we invest in ever get used the way they're meant to. When this layer is weak, technical excellence can't compensate. When it's strong, ordinary teams produce extraordinary outcomes.
The human side of cyber isn't soft. It's structural. This session treats it that way.
Technical skills might open doors in IT & Cybersecurity, but leadership, communication, and mentorship sustain growth and impact. As the field becomes more complex and critical, we must rethink how we build and lead teams. This talk highlights the soft skills that turn strong technicians into effective collaborators, trusted advisors, and emerging leaders.
Attendees will leave with concrete ways to build psychological safety on technical teams, navigate conflict without burning trust, develop mentorship pipelines that actually grow people, communicate clearly when the stakes are high, and lead from any seat regardless of title. The session is built for everyone in the room, from interns to executives, because these are not leadership traits reserved for the org chart. They are daily behaviors any cyber professional can practice, starting the moment they walk out of the talk.
Talk Type: 50 mins, presentation, conversational, and interactive
Amanda Kollmorgan is a Security Architect Lead for Veolia North America with nearly 20 years across federal and state government service, most recently as Deputy IT Director for the WI Dept. of Military Affairs. That dual seat, building compliance programs auditors sign off on while running operations meant to survive an attacker, taught her the widest gaps in cyber rarely show up on paper. She brings the same level of passion for mentoring people as she does for the cybersecurity profession.