You don’t need a title to lead.

Here is something worth thinking about as a leader in your organization: every person on your team is already leading every single day. The question is just whether they are leading toward good habits or away from them. When someone leaves their workstation unlocked and walks to the break room, the people around them notice. When someone wears their badge incorrectly, or not at all, the people around them notice that too. Culture is not built from the top down through policy documents. It gets built one small moment at a time, by everyone, and your job as a senior leader is to make sure your people understand that.

The small moments are genuinely small. Locking a workstation when stepping away is shortcut key Windows+L. It takes a quarter of a second. Wearing a badge correctly costs nothing. These are just habits, and habits are contagious. When your most experienced people do these things consistently, all employees pick it up naturally. That is how a security culture actually takes root, not through mandatory training reminders, but through watching the people they respect treat the standard like it matters.

From a compliance standpoint, physical access control and workstation security are daily behaviors that either exist in your environment or they do not. You can have the best written policies in the industry, but if your team is not living them out in the small moments, those policies are just words sitting in a folder. The assessment will eventually surface that gap, and it will not be a fun conversation with your contracting officer.

So encourage your team to own the standard and be the kind of coworker who helps others hold it too. A simple “hey, you might want to lock that before you head out” from a colleague lands better than any memo from the front office. When you give your people permission to hold each other accountable in a low-key, supportive way, you are building a team that takes the mission seriously at every level, and that is exactly the kind of culture that makes compliance sustainable long after the assessor leaves the building.