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14 SMT Magazine • October 2016 are the factors going on? That's where leaders have to do both jobs. It's not just one or the other. Las Marias: How do you know you're an effective leader? Forsythe: The reality is that everyone's always trying to be an effective leader. The only way it happens is how your team works. How does your company succeed over the long haul? Are you headed the right way? It's that whole idea of if you sit down in a car trip and you don't know where you're going, you're not going to get anywhere. You need that idea of where you're going and continue to evaluate that. Leadership isn't always about achieving the goal. That's part of it, but it's also evaluating it along the way and seeing what's changing. Maybe none of us knew what it was going to look like 10 years ago, but what about five years ago? Maybe we had a better idea of what was going on, and we should make changes to ad- just for that even though we didn't make those changes 10 years ago. It's not playing a sporting event where you have 60 minutes or so and you're done. It's a much longer term thing. It's that reevalua- tion and that openness to adapt to changing circumstances and making sure your team can speak up, because you never know who's going to have the next good idea. You can all look at the same things and somebody goes, "Wow, you know, what if we did this?" We all look at the same thing, but that one woman or man, do we hear that person? Do we give them cred- it? Do we encourage them to do that? Las Marias: That's an important point: Do people feel empowered to speak their minds? Forsythe: Absolutely. Part of that's the environ- ment. These days, a lot of that environment stuff tends to be talked about negatively, like "oh you can't do this," or "you can't do that," but that environment stuff is also positive. You can speak your mind. You can come up with a crazy idea. Maybe, it's a good crazy idea. Who knows? That's always a challenge. People are constantly changing and are in different parts and places of their lives. Sometimes they're more open to it. Sometimes they're not. It's a very moving and fluid thing. Las Marias: Do you think leadership has evolved over the past decade? Forsythe: Really good leaders haven't changed all that much. They're generally open to ideas. They're trying to question those assumptions and presumptions. What's changed is that there was a time where, and there still is in some or- ganizations, the leader is kind of like a king. Those organizations, sometimes they suc- ceed, but a lot of times they don't. Because no matter how smart one person is, 100 smart peo- ple usually can do a better job. The idea of 'get- ting more people on the bus' is not really a new idea. It gets written about more, but it's been there for a very long time for lots of people and lots of organizations, especially the ones that do pretty well. Las Marias: Regarding millennials, how do you lead a generation that says they don't want to be managed? Do you think they're ready when the baby boomers leave the work force? Forsythe: The reality is everyone grows up and no one's ready when they're 17; or very few people are, but somebody probably is. That process of gaining experience and figuring out, there's lot of fancy words for it these days, that tribal knowledge. All that really means is group experience, right? The stuff that's not written KYZEN ON LEADERSHIP AND TEAMWORK " Leadership isn't always about achieving the goal. That's part of it, but it's also evaluating it along the way and seeing what's changing. "