All this is but one way of saying that the Forester should be his own severest taskmaster. The Forester must keep himself up to his own work. In no other profession, to my knowledge, is a man thrown so completely on his own responsibility. The Forester often leads an isolated life for weeks or months at a time, seeing the men under whom he works only at distant intervals. Because he is so much his own master, the responsibility which rests upon him is peculiarly his own, and must be met out of the resources within himself.
The training of a Forester should lead him to be practical in the right sense of that word, which emphatically is not the sense of abandoning standards of work or conduct in order to get immediate results. The "practical" men with whom the Forester must do his work—lumbermen, cattlemen, sheepmen, settlers, forest users of all kinds—are often by very much his superiors in usable knowledge of the details of their work. Their opinions are entitled to the most complete hearing and respect. There is no other class of men from whose advice the Forester can so greatly profit if he chooses to do so. He is superior to them, if at all, only in his technical knowledge, and in the broader point of view he has derived from his professional training. It is of the first importance that the young Forester should know these men, should learn to like and respect them, and that he should get all the help he can from their knowledge and practical experience. The willingness to use the information and assistance which such men were ready to give has more than once meant the difference between failure and success.
The young Forester, like other young men, is likely to be impatient. I do not blame him for it. Rightly directed, his impatience may become one of his best assets. But it will do no harm to remember, also, that the human race has reached its present degree of civilization and advancement only step by step, and that it seems likely to proceed in very much the same way hereafter. As a general rule, results slowly and painfully accomplished are lasting. The results to be achieved in forestry must be lasting if they are to be valuable.
In general, the men with whom the Forester deals can adopt, and in many cases, ought to adopt, a new point of view but slowly. To fall in love at first sight with theories or policies is as rare as the same experience is between persons. As a rule, an intellectual conviction, however well founded, must be followed by a period of incubation and growth before it can blossom into a definite principle of action, before the man who holds it is ready to work or fight in order to carry it out. There is a rate in the adoption of new ideas beyond which only the most unusual circumstances will induce men's minds to move. Forestry has gone ahead in the United States faster than it ever did in any other land. If it proceeds a little less rapidly, now that so much of the field has been won, there will be no reason for discouragement in that.
AS A SUBORDINATE OFFICER
Necessarily the young Forester will begin as a subordinate. How soon he will come to give orders of his own will depend on how well he executes the orders of his superior. In particular, it will depend on whether he requires to be coddled in doing his work, or whether he is willing and able to stand on his own feet. The man for whom every employer of men is searching, everywhere and always, is the man who will accept the responsibility for the work he has to do—who will not lean at every point upon his superior for additional instructions, advice, or encouragement.
There is no more valuable subordinate than the man to whom you can give a piece of work and then forget about it, in the confident expectation that the next time it is brought to your attention it will come in the form of a report that the thing has been done. When this master quality is joined to executive power, loyalty, and common sense, the result is a man whom you can trust. On the other hand, there is no greater nuisance to a man heavily burdened with the direction of affairs than the weak-backed assistant who is continually trying to get his chief to do his work for him, on the feeble plea that he thought the chief would like to decide this or that himself. The man to whom an executive is most grateful, the man whom he will work hardest and value most, is the man who accepts responsibility willingly, and is not continually under his feet.
AS A SUPERIOR OFFICER
The principles of effective administrative work have never, so far as I know, been adequately classified and defined. When they come to be stated one of the most important will be found to be the exact assignment of responsibility, so that whatever goes wrong the administrative head will know clearly and at once upon whom the responsibility falls. This is one of the reasons why, as a rule, boards and commissions are far less effective in getting things done than single men with clear-cut authority and equally clear-cut responsibility. Another principle, so well known that it has almost become a proverb, is to delegate everything you can, to do nothing that you can get someone else to do for you. But the wisdom of letting a good man alone is less commonly understood. It is sometimes as important for the superior officer not to worry his subordinate with useless orders as it is for the subordinate not to harass his superior with useless questions.
Let a good man alone. Give him his head. Nothing will hold him so rigidly to his work as the feeling that he is trusted. Lead your men in their work, and above all make of your organization not a monarchy, limited or unlimited, but a democracy, in which the responsibility of each man for a particular piece of work shall not only be defined but recognized, in which the credit for each man's work, so far as possible, shall be attached to his own name, in which the opinions and advice of your subordinates are often sought before decisions are made; in a word, a democracy in which each man feels a personal responsibility for the success of the whole enterprise.