Arkaro Insights

From Technical Expert to Effective Leader: Navigating the Transition with Garrett Forsythe

• Mark Blackwell • Episode 30

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Emotional intelligence emerges as the critical foundation for effective leadership in this candid conversation with executive coach Garrett Forsythe. Drawing from decades of corporate experience, Garrett articulates why technically brilliant professionals often struggle when transitioning to leadership roles - they've been rewarded for knowing answers, not for drawing solutions from others.

The discussion explores fundamental differences between managing (focusing on efficiency and predetermined outcomes) and leading (establishing vision, culture, and acceptable behaviors). Garrett introduces powerful concepts like the "amygdala hijack" - our tendency to react emotionally before thinking rationally - and provides practical strategies for leaders to recognize and manage these responses.

Most compelling is Garrett's insight into how leaders directly shape organizational culture through their behaviors. "The way a leader behaves often is the way an organization behaves," he observes. Leaders who interrupt, bark orders, or focus exclusively on mistakes create toxic environments, while those who celebrate successes and process failures constructively foster psychological safety and innovation.

Building trust requires vulnerability - a challenging concept for many emerging leaders who fear appearing weak. Garrett offers tactical approaches for leaders uncomfortable with vulnerability, including asking "What could two or three possible solutions be?" rather than demanding single answers. This approach engages team members while preserving the leader's ability to guide decision-making.

For listeners navigating today's volatile, uncertain business landscape, Garrett emphasizes adaptability over rigid command-and-control approaches. He concludes with a powerful framework for personal development: focus intensively on developing strengths from good to excellent, work around weaknesses, and identify and fix critical "derailers" before they undermine your leadership effectiveness.

Subscribe for more insights on developing emotional intelligence and building cultures where teams thrive through psychological safety and trust.

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Mark Blackwell:

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Arkaro Insights podcast. So we have a new guest today. We're going to welcome a good old friend of mine, Garrett Forsythe, so it's really a great pleasure to have you on, garrett. How are you doing today, you?

Garrett Forsythe:

doing very good Thanks. Thanks for having me, mark.

Mark Blackwell:

So, if it's okay with you, I just wanted to have a chat and on what you think about, uh, the role of coaching leaders in organizations, particularly in the areas of culture and trust, uh, and and behaviors that they should exhibit, because I think there's often a great need for this, perhaps a neglected need for it, in organizations. Tell me more. Yeah, absolutely, I. I think it is a great need for this, perhaps a neglected need for it in organizations.

Garrett Forsythe:

Tell me more. Yeah, absolutely. I think it is a neglected need and you know, with my many, many years in the corporate world, I had excellent supervisors, bosses that had pretty terrible ones at that, you know, and a lot of it. When I look back on it, I tried to figure what the common thread was. And the common thread with the good ones was things like emotional intelligence, communication, the ability to know strengths and weaknesses and not to beat up somebody for their weaknesses, but to work around them and how to play to their strengths. You know, there's just so many basic skills that technical people typically don't get in an education and you learn on the job. Some people have that kind of DNA where they pick up those kinds of things easy and some do not. You know that's so. Through my career I just realized that and then that sort of ended up at the tail end of my corporate career. I started to develop a real passion for coaching and I became an executive coach and that's what I'm still doing today.

Mark Blackwell:

So typically, what sort of issues do you see with? People are technically really strong as they transition into leadership roles?

Garrett Forsythe:

Boy, that's a tough one. Again, I think it depends. You know, there's kind of a DNA part of it and there's kind of a learning part of it. I think there's things that people can learn that sometimes you say, hey, that's just the way I'm built, that's just who I am and that's an excuse.

Garrett Forsythe:

I think emotional intelligence is probably the key thing, that if people spend some time and think about and just some basic things, like there's a thing called the amygdala hijack, when something happens to us, you know that sense goes through the part of the brain called the limbic system and we get emotional before we get rational. And most people have trouble sometimes controlling that part of their brain. And it's just a basic skill. Can you learn it? Sure you can.

Garrett Forsythe:

Some people have a natural ability. They're calmer, they're more patient, they take a pause, they take a deep breath. They don't just react, others react. I remember having one boss who just was a react type of guy and I saw him chew people out and people would just walk away with the tail between the legs and I'm thinking, why would you do that? You're killing your own organization. You're basically committing sabotage to yourself. So I think some of it is that Some of it is you know again, learn Some of it's personality related understanding yours and understanding those around you. And how do you perceive information, how do you process that information and then how do you react to that information?

Mark Blackwell:

and then how do you react to that information? The amygdala hijack did serve us well two million years ago when we were on the Savannah Plains and saw a flash of something yellow moving at speed. Absolutely A bit of fast thinking was required then to move, but it's beginning to understand some of the basics of how our brains work and that can make us better people in the workplace, and to know to recognize that hijack coming and name it. Take a pause and move on.

Garrett Forsythe:

No, absolutely. I think there's people that need to learn at a young age what some of those concepts basic concepts are. I didn't learn about it until I was probably in my fees, so you know just the fact that counting to three, taking a pause, thinking before you speak, you know those are basic things that some people have. Naturally. Others never learn it in their 60s, so why?

Mark Blackwell:

do you think these type of issues are often so neglected in the workplace?

Garrett Forsythe:

Yeah, I think again, some of the basic training for everybody should be on emotional intelligence. For example, do you have competency personally to both be self-aware and understand where you're at what's around you and then can you manage that, or do you have the self-management skills to manage yourself? Most people struggle with that through their whole life. Most people struggle with that through their whole life. That's something that's just a basic that unfortunately, I don't think people are made aware of what that really is.

Mark Blackwell:

Classically, in the industries that you and I have known, which are populated by technically brilliant people, and they typically rise to the top because they know more answers than others, they're defined as being the person to go to, who has the expertise. Their claim to fame, their expertise, is all about knowing the answers themselves. Correct, but when you get to a leader, just being the know-it-all isn't going to make you a leader. You've got to develop the skill of getting the answer from the team, because the best answer is in the room and it may not be with you. It probably isn't with you as a leader. So what techniques do you use to try to get people to behave like that?

Garrett Forsythe:

Wow, and my typical coaching client has been that person making the transition from a technical expert to their first managerial job. And one of the things we go through is understanding what's the difference between leadership and management. Even when you're leading a team, you may know the answer, but you're not the one really that should come right out with that answer. You want to draw that out from your team and understanding what's the difference between managing something and leading something. And there's very discrete differences in leading and managing that are very important. So typically someone who's strong technically, who gets promoted. They just jump in the job. They don't really think through.

Garrett Forsythe:

What investment should I do on self-development? What podcast should I listen to? What books should I read? What mentors should I try to find? Fortunately for me, when I transitioned from an engineer to a lab supervisor job where I had 10 people reporting to me that I hadn't had direct reports before, I had someone pull me aside and start that mentoring process Very, very valuable part of my crew development. If I had not had that, I would have made many more mistakes than I already made. I made mistakes, but typically none of them were fatal mistakes or critical ones, but it was a learning period. Most technical leaders have to learn through that first transition and it's critical that they have some coaching, some mentoring, some people working alongside of them.

Mark Blackwell:

So you mentioned a couple of times the difference between managing and leading. For the listener of this podcast, what can you? You know three or four key takeaways to help them have a mental model of what's different between a manager and a leader.

Garrett Forsythe:

Yeah, typically when you get into a low-level managing job, you have both leadership and managing responsibilities. The managing responsibilities are making sure things are efficient and effective with what you have responsibility for, managing cost, managing production, managing specifics of the job to meet a kind of a predetermined outcome. Leading is a whole different thing. Where you're setting vision, you're setting culture, you're setting behaviors that are acceptable and not acceptable. It's a little harder to wrap your fingers around some of those skills. They call them soft skills.

Garrett Forsythe:

I think that's probably a bad term. I use that term myself but they're skills that you know communication, the behavioral thing, the listening skills, those kinds of things that typically as a manager you're reacting from one thing. The listening skills those kinds of things that typically as a manager you're reacting from one thing to the next and you're not really thinking through necessarily the effects of your behavior, whereas a good leader is always thinking ahead, always thinking that they see things before others see them. They process things that others haven't thought about yet. So there are different skill sets and there's ways to learn that. There's actually some good literature that go through the very specifics of what managing is, what leadership is and what are the subtle differences between the two.

Mark Blackwell:

Maybe we can just pick up on some of those that you mentioned. You talked about setting the culture. My understanding of culture is culture is an emergent property. It comes as a result of people interacting with each other. So what are the skills or the techniques that a leader can use to influence how that culture emerges in an organization?

Garrett Forsythe:

Yeah, that's a really big question and I think leaders that are good at this that I've seen they recognize that everything they do is under a little bit of a microscope but not a little bit a real microscope that their behaviors are being modeled.

Garrett Forsythe:

The way a leader behaves often is the way an organization behaves. So if a leader is there interrupting all the time or barking orders out, the rest of the organization will take on that kind of DNA. If a leader is a little more introspective, a leader catches people doing things right, for example, instead of just finding mistakes. A good leader takes every mistake that's being made and processes it in a way. Some mistakes are good mistakes, some mistakes are bad mistakes. If someone knows better and does something because they're just being obstinate or being not thinking through what they're doing, sometimes there's going to be a need for some corrective action. On the other hand, who takes a stake, that's okay, that could be built on, that could be I wouldn't say necessarily forgiven, but it can be, you know, processed in a good way as a learning experience for that person.

Mark Blackwell:

Interesting. We used to talk in DuPont when we were together about felt leadership in this context. Yes, and I think one of the specific areas of culture development and change where we saw leaders having an impact clearly in our DNA in DuPont was safety culture. Yes, clearly in our DNA in DuPont was safety culture yes, can you give me maybe thinking about that, to give some more specific examples to the listener about how a leader can influence an organization to generate a culture change, perhaps more so with the focus on safety?

Garrett Forsythe:

Yeah, that one's actually pretty straightforward and fairly easy. A good leader and I've had a few like this you know they're going to be out early in the morning, walking through the process, meeting people, greeting people. If they see something that they know is probably not the way it should be, they ask questions. They don't just sit there and say, hey, you need to fix this. They'll come in and have a discussion. You know what do you think about this. You know what could be done differently. You know they're looking for root cause. They're looking for improvement that would be sustainable, not just a quick fix. So good leaders have a way of engaging an organization to think bigger, think better and, to you know, lead making those corrections without being told or without being drug into it. So I've seen that. You know firsthand and I've tried to be that leader when I used to run a process. Um it, it takes work. It's not something that's straightforward and natural always to do interesting.

Mark Blackwell:

I want to move a little bit to another topic, which is the idea is amy edmonton's idea of psychological safety and parallel trust. How do you manage it? There's all the data shows that if you want a team to be innovative, they need to have psychological safety, to be open with each other to share ideas. But the reality is we live in VUCA times, we live in economic turbulent times, where changes in the workplace and redundancies are sadly all too common. What are any ideas you have about how leaders can, in this context, generate psychological safety.

Garrett Forsythe:

Wow, again, that's a tough one because I don't think I've ever seen a 10 out of 10 on psychological safety. I've seen organizations that are maybe seven and't think I've ever seen a 10 out of 10 on psychological safety. I've seen organizations that are maybe seven and eight. I've seen some that are two and threes. I worked in one mining operation one time in another country I won't mention which country it was, but I'd say it was about a one.

Garrett Forsythe:

Everybody operated out of fear. There was no trust in that organization whatsoever. We found that they were hiding safety incidents. I mean literally the managers were, you know, opening the gate door and sneaking people off the site that had been injured so that they wouldn't be recordable injuries, unbelievable things. So you know, from a psychological safety, there are things leaders can do to make it at the higher end of that. It's almost.

Garrett Forsythe:

You know, with the VUCA world it's very difficult to have pure psychological safety. But I think that's something good leaders work at and when they make a mistake they'll own up to it, and I think that helps a lot when it comes to trust. Leaders that show some vulnerability show that hey, I don't have all the answers, I'm going to make a mistake, I'll fess up, and you know, I understand that we're all going to make mistakes. The question is how serious and how premeditated was that mistake? Trust, though, is a tough one, because trust can be broken so easily, and to rebuild trust is very difficult. So people that say, oh, you can rebuild trust, you know, fairly easily, I don't buy that. I think once trust is broken, the damage is done. It takes a long time. Maybe it takes 10 situations of building trust to maybe counteract one situation of broken trust, or maybe it's 20 to one. So I think trust is obviously one that's very difficult to rebuild. If it's an accident, that's one thing thing. If it's a premeditated breaking of trust, then forget it.

Mark Blackwell:

It's going to be tough I wanted to go back to the, to the concept of building trust and showing vulnerability as a technique. Sure, perhaps it happened in your coaching experience, but what do you say would say to a coach he just said look, I can't be seen to be vulnerable. That would damage my position in the organization. You know, I'm the strong person in this organization. I can't show weakness. How would you respond?

Garrett Forsythe:

Yeah, and a lot of it depends on what do you mean by weakness? And also, how do you open up the situation to you know, to have that discussion? If it's with your supervisor, that should be a safe place. That's a place where there should be some psychological safety. And you might say, hey, you know, this area I feel a little inexperienced at, or I feel like I really don't have the knowledge base here. Who should I be talking to? You know, one of the best questions that someone gave me early in my career is when you meet a new person or you're with a new person, you say who else should I talk to this about? Or who else do you know that you would introduce me to? You know, when you're in an organization, you constantly want to be building that network at all different places of the organization, not just your direct organization but outside of it and that's one way where you can kind of build skills that help you in that vulnerability area.

Mark Blackwell:

I was thinking more in terms of managing a team or leading a team more precisely is, as you say, you mentioned that, building trust. A key technique is to show vulnerability, show you're not perfect. How would you help a young leader who's nervous of showing that vulnerability move forward so that he can use that as an approach to build trust with his team or her team?

Garrett Forsythe:

Yeah, if you're a young supervisor, I know my first job, everybody was older than me.

Garrett Forsythe:

I was the youngest, I was younger than every single person on my team and you know we would joke about it a little bit, say, hey, look, you know, I know I'm younger than you and you have a lot more experience than me.

Garrett Forsythe:

So let me hear what your thoughts are, let me understand what you think are the best options here. The other thing to do that I found is a really good tool is when you ask somebody for an opinion or you're not really necessarily showing vulnerability, but you're really wanting their input is say, hey, what could two or three possible solutions to this be? Because if you ask them for what their answer is, they might give it to you, but again, you don't have anything to compare that to and you don't know how much they've really thought about it. So you'd say, hey, you know there's probably two or three ways we could go about this. What do you think some of them could be? And I found that to be a very good tool to help, you know, get a conversation started and not locking in to necessarily, if they say something and you don't like it as a possible suggestion, you have to reject it. You know, having a conversation between two or three options is way better than having to reject the one suggestion that you get from a person.

Mark Blackwell:

And it's naturally very human. I mean that's interesting Engaging in conversation. I mean I suppose a very related question about psychological safety is you get from a person and it's naturally very human. I mean that's interesting engaging in conversation. I mean I suppose very related question about psychological safety is organizations are realizing increasingly that we are in a vuca world, not a lame-o world. Not the old we used to believe that you could be linear, anthropocentric, mechanistic order and you would use rigid sort of Tayloristic-type management systems of plan command and control. Organizations are waking up to the need that they need to be more adaptive in their approach. What advice would you give to an organization or a leader in how to make that transition from a sort of more terroristic barking order type leadership style to a more adaptive style?

Garrett Forsythe:

Yeah, I think it goes back a little bit to what we were just talking about. I think if you have an organization and you're looking through possible scenarios that might happen in a in a vocal world, having options is usually a good thing. So you don't want to necessarily lock into option A, you want to have okay, we have three different options here that we might want to consider. We'll probably start down the path of A, but you know whenever we see some, some data or some indications that that may not be the right path, hey, let's talk it through. We might switch to B.

Garrett Forsythe:

And this again gets to the emotional intelligence question, where there's a competency in social situations that people need to have. You know they need to understand how to be a relational manager. You know understanding if someone suggests a crazy idea, not to dismiss it right away, not insult it, which I've seen bosses do. That that's stupid, that's a dumb idea. You know that's the worst thing you could do to shut a person down in an environment where things are volatile and things are uncertain. You know having social awareness and know how to manage relations in a group without shutting down people unnecessarily. Manage relations in a group without shutting down people unnecessarily. You know, if someone's being disruptive, sometimes you have to be straight and you have to be a little more direct, but there's a way even to do that. So I think having a place where you can have a safe discussion on alternatives, understand, scenario planning, better understand again, root cause analysis some of these basic skills that you can, you know, can lean back on from your technical training can be a really good tool in situations like this.

Mark Blackwell:

Well, I suppose, classically in a LAMO plan and command type organization, people expect to receive orders, so their default behavior is wait for the next order before I do anything, right, right, so their default behavior is wait for the next order before I do anything, right, right. One of the techniques for the leader can operate is simply give the team a challenge and walk away. Just give a high level vision mission this is what we're operating and then shush, do not say a word. And that's a very, very challenging for the leader in the transitioning role to leave the team on their own to figure it out and what they do. But I think it's one of the critical behaviors that you have to do because, as the organization realizes, there is not another order coming, there is not another set of instructions on how to do the task. Ownership of solving the task now rests within the team. That is a critical part of that transition in towards adaptive leadership.

Garrett Forsythe:

No for sure, and I think, good leaders who do that and at the right time and the right place. Again, the team has to be capable and have the skill sets to do that. What you'll see is a peer leaders, you know, kind of standing up in that situation. It's a good way to find out who your future leaders are and see who will stand up and help that group to facilitate, to help coalesce ideas. I've seen that work and I think in today's world and again, the generational differences make a difference. Here too. We haven't really talked about that at all, but the millennials will act differently than a Gen Z or a Gen X, and there really is a whole study there as well.

Garrett Forsythe:

I think the other thing is the cultural situation that you're in. You know there's the Gerd Hofstede cultural assessment tool. That is really interesting. You know that'd be a whole discussion for another day of how culture has aspects that they can be kind of defined with, where people will either naturally have these conversations or everybody will clam up and everybody will be afraid to kind of be the one to speak out because, one, it's not culturally the way things are done and two, they might be concerned about getting squashed in that situation. So there's a lot of frameworks and a lot of factors that can come into play, but the concept you mentioned is a good one for sure, and in certain situations it could be an ideal kind of framework to try to get a group to think through and to process some different alternatives.

Mark Blackwell:

And so you're now engaged with one of your clients. How do they know they're making progress? A lot of these things are quite intangible Soft skills, culture, trust, behaviors. True. What sort of indicators would you use midway through a session or a program with one of your clients to know whether it's working, or maybe signs that it's not working?

Garrett Forsythe:

Yeah, I mean ultimately it shows up in KPIs and outputs. There's probably leading indicators and there's probably lagging indicators. Here Some of the leading indicators would be turnover within a group. You know there's a lot of talk today about, you know, quiet quitting and things like that. You can measure that and it's a little harder to see. It typically takes a third party to come in because the group themselves might not all see it.

Garrett Forsythe:

But you know some of the leading indicators could be things like new ideas, concepts of if you're running a production unit, for example, are you on time? Are you adhering to a schedule? Are you, is your schedule set, where you're not changing it all the time because people are communicating? You know you can sense a little bit of a cohesiveness factor there in an organization especially. You know when I go into organizations when I was doing external consulting, I could feel it because I know what good looked like, just kind of through experience.

Garrett Forsythe:

But if you're looking for true metrics it can be a little harder. I think you have to decide what is important for your organization. Two, you have to have buy-in from the organization that those really are your KPIs. They're really the ones that you together are agreeing to that. This is the way we'll measure our own performance, and then the other way is through surveys. Sometimes you can do physical surveys, paper surveys or online surveys. A lot of organizations don't like to do that because they feel, one, it's still too touchy-feely and, two, they may not even want to know the real results of that survey. But surveys they can be informal or they can be formal can be helpful to know what the organization's really feeling and thinking.

Mark Blackwell:

Interesting. So, looking ahead, what do you think are going to be the most important skills for leaders of the future? You mentioned a bit about the generational changes. Ai is on the way. It's becoming more and more impactful in our lives. So, in that context, what would you be giving more emphasis now than you have done in the past in coaching leaders?

Garrett Forsythe:

Well, one of the things I've noticed with the younger generation is they don't live to work, they work to live. So there is a difference. People will bounce jobs more. You know, when I started off, we kind of expected to work for one company or two companies our whole career. Nowadays, you know, even the Gen Xs, I see, and some of the millennials will be popping jobs. If they don't like a situation, they don't like the culture, they'll leave. You know, and it's often been said, people don't quit companies and people don't quit jobs. People quit bosses. So when there is turnover in a company, you have to look at the group and see is the supervisor, the boss, the leader part of that problem? So I think some of the skills we talked about emotional intelligence skills, communication skills, basic leadership skills they're almost going to become more crucial because in my generation, when I got out of college and started working, the first 10, 20 years you pretty much had to deal with bosses that were command and control and ordering things around, and that was just part of the culture back then. That's not part of the culture now. So there's a difference in the way to manage and in the way to engage your team.

Garrett Forsythe:

Now you mentioned AI. Ai is obviously going to be a way to get answers and strategies and options in a quicker way. You know I'd be going to use AI a lot, even in my coaching. Here's the client, here's the person that I'm working with, here's their background, here's their skill sets, here's their gaps, and you could put that into you know, one of the AI tools and it can come back with a self-development program where you can invest two hours per week so the savvy person now can develop a lot of their own self-development and then augment that with coaches, with mentors, with other people, so people that want to develop. I think now it's going to be even I wouldn't say easier, but it's going to be more targeted and even better if they enhance and embrace some of these new tools that are available. So they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I disagree. I think some of the people that learn to use some of these tools, they're going to have an advantage in the marketplace for sure.

Mark Blackwell:

Be curious, consistently be curious, and then it's easy to adopt some of these things. Yes, rapping, have there been any questions that I've missed that you would have wanted me to ask?

Garrett Forsythe:

Not necessarily. I think there's some key concepts of you know, for someone who is a leader and someone who's in that first job where they're really responsible. Now for people. One you have to be resilient. I think that's key. You have to learn flexibility. Some people just their DNA and their personality. They aren't flexible. And if they aren't, they need to learn how to develop some of that skill set and in some cases they might be too flexible in sending mixed signals to an organization. You know we talked about being adaptive. I think that's key. You know you mentioned that multiple times and I think that's good.

Garrett Forsythe:

And then it all gets down again to the self-awareness, the emotional intelligence aspect of knowing who you are, knowing where your strengths are, knowing your weaknesses. When I do coaching, I talk about strengths, weaknesses and derailers. Derailers are the things that you better fix. Weaknesses are things you might not really spend a lot of time fixing because other people can kind of cover those areas. So if you're weak at something and you're maybe a two out of 10 and you can work hard and be a five out of 10, that may not make a difference. But if you're seven out of 10 at something that you're strong at and can be a nine out of 10, boy. That's where you should focus your attention, and if you have a derailer, which means you may not even be aware what that derailer is, you might need a third party to help bring that out or make you aware you better work on that, because that really will impact your career and impact your relationships as well.

Mark Blackwell:

Brilliant, thank you for that. Garrett Really enjoyed that.

Garrett Forsythe:

Thank you, Mark I appreciate it.

Mark Blackwell:

Talk to you soon.

Garrett Forsythe:

Bye-bye,

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