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Chris Wheeler’s route from the U.S. Navy to the C-suite ran through cybersecurity roles in both the private sector and financial services. In a 2026 SecurityWeek interview, the Resilience CISO describes the leadership lesson that connected those settings: security depends on reciprocal trust, capable teams, and risk advice that business leaders can use.
How Chris Wheeler went from Navy service to cybersecurity leadership
SecurityWeek’s Kevin Townsend interviewed Wheeler on August 27, 2026, and reported his career history. Wheeler joined the U.S. Navy in 2010 and served for six years. His work included traditional sailing aboard destroyers and cyber operations that the Navy then called “information warfare.” He also said that shortly after school he led a division of 15 sailors aboard a ship.
After leaving the Navy, Wheeler worked in cybersecurity at Efflux Systems and Arbor Networks. He later joined Resilience as a threat intelligence lead, left in 2020 for Morgan Stanley, where he became a vice president and SOAR lead, and returned to Resilience four years later. He first served as vice president of information security and subsequently became CISO. Those details are the career account given in the interview.
Wheeler says Navy service gave him an early grounding in leadership, mission, and purpose. But he treats military experience as a foundation to adapt, not a playbook to transplant unchanged. Commercial security leadership brings rapidly changing technology, complex networks, and the need to understand business priorities. A CISO cannot personally be the expert on every system, security discipline, and business process; the job also involves building a team and helping people specialize.
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Why Wheeler says trust is a CISO’s most important trait
For Wheeler, trust runs in several directions. Business leaders must be able to rely on a CISO’s strategic security advice. The CISO, in turn, must trust colleagues and the specialists they have hired. Team members need confidence that their leader will support them.
That makes trust a working condition for security decisions, not just a matter of personal rapport. A leader who has earned confidence can make the case for security priorities, rely on others’ expertise, and help teams work across organizational boundaries. Wheeler connects this to empathy: he encourages his team to be considerate partners to the people they work with and to protect personal and professional balance.
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Why a CISO needs both technical understanding and a team
Wheeler’s leadership model pairs enough understanding to oversee the work with the ability to teach others and guide them toward specialization. As he put it, “A leader must understand and be able to do the whole job, but more importantly be able to teach others how and where to specialize.”
He also argues that technical expertise alone is not enough when hiring. As automation and generative AI broaden who can contribute to security operations, he values future-mindedness, emotional intelligence, and social skills alongside technical ability. His point is not that technical competence no longer matters; it is that a CISO’s results depend on how well specialists can contribute together.
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How to make cyber risk useful to business leaders
Wheeler says CISOs should strengthen their ability to quantify risk. That does not mean pretending that uncertain risks can be measured with perfect precision. It means making a reasonable estimate of probability, explaining uncertainty, and increasingly translating potential impact into financial terms. “Do you have to be perfect at it? No, but you have to know how to reasonably estimate probability, describe uncertainty, and increasingly, map that to financial terms,” he said.
This approach also changes the goal from promising to prevent every incident to protecting business-critical assets and maintaining continuity. Wheeler warns against treating security as a pursuit of perfection: even a very large budget cannot eliminate all risk. Instead, a risk-first CISO has to make decisions using quantitative or financially informed measures and help the business understand the trade-offs.
Wheeler’s advice for developing security skills
Learn the mathematics of the field
Wheeler recalls a mentor’s philosophical advice: professional expertise requires understanding the “mathematics” of your profession. For a CISO, he connects that idea to improving risk quantification—being able to reason about probability and uncertainty rather than relying only on instinct or absolute assurances.
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Build a home lab and experiment
His practical advice is to build a home lab and experiment with the technologies and processes you are responsible for securing. He does not prescribe specific hardware or a particular configuration. The value is in hands-on exploration; that can extend beyond physical IT equipment, and generative AI tools can help explore or simulate concepts.
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- Author: Bungay Stanier, Michael.
- Publisher: Page Two
- Pages: 244
- Publication Date: 2016-02-29
- Edition: 1
Make room for balance
Wheeler also urges security professionals to take vacation, be present with family, and avoid burnout. He frames personal balance as part of working well with other teams, not as a substitute for professional responsibility.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How Wheeler approaches secure adoption of agentic AI
Wheeler says he is concerned about keeping pace with agentic AI adoption securely and resiliently. He describes pressure to adopt the technology from boards and investors as well as developers and power users. His response is to listen, experiment personally, and set risk-based guardrails so security can enable use without treating every request as either automatically safe or automatically unacceptable.
He says many relevant controls remain rooted in zero-trust architecture, and identifies three areas drawing increased investment attention: identity and access management (IAM), data inventory and categorization, and automation. These are the priorities Wheeler named in this interview, not a complete technical standard for securing AI systems.
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