Boost Your Team's Influence with Corporate Anthropology

3-Steps to Get You Started

Despite possessing critical technical expertise or emerging regulations, many security and privacy teams still fight an uphill battle when implementing protocols, securing budget, or simply being included in strategic conversations.

Corporate anthropology is a powerful yet underutilized discipline that can dramatically change how security and privacy teams operate by influencing how they’re perceived within their organizations. When leaders invest in the principles of corporate anthropology to understand and connect with cross-functional stakeholders, they elevate their teams from isolated subject matter experts into trusted business partners whose guidance shapes decisions at all levels.

What is Corporate Anthropology?

Corporate anthropology applies traditional ethnographic research methods to understand a business environment’s culture, behaviors, and social dynamics. Unlike conventional business analysis, which focuses primarily on processes and metrics, corporate anthropology examines the human elements – the relationships, unwritten rules, communication patterns, and shared values that actually drive organizational behavior.

This approach provides invaluable insights for security and privacy teams that technical expertise and compliance requirements alone can’t deliver. 

Why Infosec Needs Anthropological Thinking

Infosec has traditionally been viewed through a technical lens – threats, vulnerabilities, and controls – while privacy is still predominantly seen as legal or regulatory compliance. This perception creates a weak reputation for security and privacy teams as innovation blockers, directly undermining their influence.

Signs that your team isn’t seen as a critical partner: 

• Being excluded from early product development
• Privacy is relegated to compliance checks rather than experience design
• Initiatives are deprioritized as cost centers
• Technical expertise is dismissed as irrelevant to business goals

Because everyone is busy with priorities and deadlines, the quality of your relationships determines how quickly and helpfully people respond to your everyday requests. This "trust dividend" pays returns in seemingly mundane, yet powerful ways:

• Product teams seeking security and privacy input proactively
• Leaders allocate budget based on trusted ROI calculations
• Better implementation of controls with cross-functional collaboration
• Inclusion in strategic planning
• Better M&A outcomes through early security/privacy involvement

Applying Corporate Anthropology to Security and Privacy

Most influence flows through relationships, not org charts or official titles. Corporate anthropology emphasizes the importance of creating opportunities for meaningful cross-departmental collaboration, establishing trust through consistent demonstration of business value, developing empathy for the challenges faced by various stakeholders, and participating in formal and informal organizational networks.

Below are three initial steps for using anthropological principles in your engagements beyond your reporting chain.  

1. Map the Organizational Terrain

The foundation for strategic relationship building begins with careful observation and analysis.

Anthropologists call this "participant observation” or immersing yourself in a culture to understand its unwritten rules before trying to operate inside it. Here’s what that looks like in a corporate setting:

• Identify formal and informal power structures (who really makes decisions)
• Recognize departmental subcultures and their unique priorities
• Observe how information flows throughout the organization
• Document the "tribal knowledge" that guides daily operations

This mapping process isn't just analytical – it's the first step in building your relationship network by understanding who to connect with and how. 

Now, think about the outcomes or initiatives you want to influence and create a stakeholder map that identifies key influencers, decision-makers, and potential allies who impact those goals. Then, identify existing relationships your team members have that you can leverage. (I wrote previously about a simple way to assess the state of these relationships periodically.)

Finally, and perhaps the most “bang for your buck” tactic – look for opportunities to help other departments succeed in ways unrelated to security or privacy.

2. Speak the Language of Different Business Units

Each departmental relationship requires its own communication approach. Each department operates with its own terminology, priorities, and success metrics. Learning to "code-switch" between these different cultures gives you more influence and positions your team as an integrated business function, not as an isolated specialty.

Here are a few techniques to practice: 

Ask questions about departmental goals before discussing security or privacy needs.

When approaching the product team about implementing additional authentication, start by asking, "What are your current user experience metrics and release timelines?" instead of immediately explaining security requirements. This shows you value their priorities before introducing yours. Their response also tells you where the goal line is for proving business value. 

Learn and use the specific terminology valued by each department.

When working with marketing, discuss security in terms of "brand protection" and "customer trust" rather than "vulnerability mitigation." For Engineering, translate security principles into "technical debt reduction" and "system reliability" concepts they’ve already prioritized.

Share insights that help others achieve their objectives.

Provide sales with security benchmarking data that shows how your company compares to competitors, which they can use as a competitive differentiator in client conversations. For finance, share quantitative risk analyses that help them more accurately forecast potential future costs.

3. Care For Your Team’s Reputation

Your team's perceived value and relevance are impacted by how it’s discussed within your company, particularly when you’re not in the room. Here are a few anthropological approaches that have worked for me in my career:

Replace fear-based messaging with empowerment narratives.

Fear-based security messaging positions your team as the harbinger of problems rather than solutions, creating resistance and avoidance. Empowerment narratives focusing on enabling safe innovation position security as a business accelerator, giving you a seat at strategic planning tables rather than being called only during emergencies. 

Connect your initiatives to core organizational values and mission. 

When your work is perceived as peripheral to the organization's core purpose, it's easily deprioritized during resource allocation. By explicitly connecting security and privacy work to existing organizational values, you transform from a technical specialist into a guardian of the company's mission, dramatically increasing your influence in strategic decisions.

Develop communication strategies tailored to influential audiences. 

Generic security messages get generic responses, but tailored communication demonstrates diverse acumen that earns respect from your peers and their leadership. When other teams see that you understand their specific business priorities and pressures, they're more likely to include you in early planning stages where you can exert maximum influence on outcomes.

Measuring Progress

To determine whether your approach is working, start by identifying where your team currently stands, so you can focus your efforts on advancing to the next level of organizational influence. The evolution typically progresses through these four stages:

1. Subject Matter Expert: Valued for specialized knowledge but limited in organizational influence

2. Trusted Advisor: Consulted on security matters with growing credibility across departments

3. Business Enabler: Recognized for contributing to business objectives beyond security

4. Strategic Partner: Integrated into high-level decision-making and organizational strategy

By viewing your organization through an anthropological lens, you'll discover new ways to influence outcomes that technical expertise and compliance requirements alone can’t do. In complex social environments like professional organizations, cultural fluency is just as important as technical proficiency. Corporate anthropology offers a framework and tools to navigate these dynamics.