Al Sample, President Emeritus, Pinchot Institute for Conservation1
When the U.S. Forest Service came into being in 1905, it immediately became the steward of more than 300,000 square miles of federal forest land—the National Forests—scattered across the rugged mountain ranges and remote valleys of 11 western states. Throughout its first half-century, the leaders of the USFS focused on how to prepare the line officers in its geographically far-flung and highly decentralized organization to make real-time decisions that would reliably reflect the agency’s mission, goals, and core values, even in the absence of timely communication with headquarters. Political scientist Herbert Kaufman’s classic book The Forest Ranger was a landmark study of the “socialization” process by which employees’ values and behavior were carefully shaped and molded before turning them loose as a line officer in charge of a distant, million-acre National Forest. As Kaufman demonstrated, this was an enormously successful model of efficiency, control, and organizational effectiveness that made the USFS an exemplar widely emulated elsewhere in federal and state government.
But by the time Kaufman’s book was published in 1960, the Forest Service’s world was already changing. American society was becoming more diverse, more socially aware, and more politically active in matters of federal policy. This brought a new level of scrutiny to the management of public resources on the extensive network of National Forests, which now included badly cutover and gradually recovering forest lands in the East as well. Citizens were becoming increasingly assertive in expressing competing and often conflicting views about the values for which these lands were being managed. Many were distressed when these entreaties were seemingly rebuffed by an agency stubbornly unwilling to consider outside views. A three decade-long series of legal challenges and legislative reforms eventually forced the Forest Service to be more open and responsive to public opinion and to rapidly evolving social values and priorities. Over time, these evolving values and perspectives were increasingly reflected within the ranks of the Forest Service itself, particularly as the agency welcomed a broader diversity at all levels of the organization, in terms of race and gender, but also in terms of different cultural, socioeconomic, regional, and professional backgrounds.
With the conformity that characterized the Forest Service in Kaufman’s era now ancient history, how does a sprawling and still largely decentralized agency cultivate and sustain effective leaders? How does the organization prepare its future leaders to make thoughtful and durable decisions on issues for which there are no easy answers? No one is more intensely interested in these questions than the agency’s front-line, public-facing leaders—the Forest Supervisors charged with managing individual National Forests. Yet they themselves may be better positioned than anyone to illuminate a pathway through this complex and dynamic environment.
Ed Brannon came to a full appreciation of this mainly in hindsight, having been faced with a daunting array of unexpected leadership challenges as a brand-new Forest Supervisor on a large western National Forest, and feeling less than prepared for many of those challenges despite all his prior experience and training. One the key insights drawn from this crucible is that, in fact, something can be done to prepare in advance to confront most of what arises in today’s unpredictable environment. As Brannon points out, truly effective leadership is less about directing and more about listening, learning, and understanding, and then adjusting one’s own perspectives, biases, and predilections. A third is that, at its best, this learning process is less of an individual and more of a shared experience that becomes deeper and richer over time, and that is career-long if not life-long. And finally, basic virtues like honesty, openness, fairness, and respect often play a far larger role than might be expected.
This blog series is largely about Brannon’s personal journey as a searching and deeply committed leader in the Forest Service. He recounts what he has learned about the true nature of leadership from Harvard professors and from respected Forest Service senior leaders under whom he served—but especially from other searching, sometimes struggling, Forest Supervisors, and from the innumerable individuals he has come to know along the way whose lives and livelihoods revolve in some way around the conservation and thoughtful management of America’s treasured National Forests.
Al Sample
