Interview: Sally Collins,

Associate Chief, U.S. Forest Service

By Daina Dravnieks Apple

Women in Natural Resources:  Sally, thanks very much for making the time in your busy life to do this interview.  I think it will be very valuable, and I hope you will enjoy it, too!  As the highest-ranking woman in the Forest Service, do you think that you have a unique contribution to make to the agency because of the nature of your background?

Sally Collins:  Each Chief has a unique place in history in terms of the skills that they bring to their office and the time that they bring these skills.  I think what Dale Bosworth brings, and what I want to support in terms of my role in my own position, is providing unity in our organization.  We have a real need right now to pull the people in our agency together—it’s an issue of our internal morale.  I think my own interests and focus can contribute to this pulling together, too.  My love for and interest in Forest Service issues goes back to my childhood.  I have a strong desire to contribute to sound natural resource management in this country.  I am really honored to have been asked to take this position by Chief Bosworth.  I’ve known him for many years and worked with him for a lot of years, too.  I know we work well together, and my greatest contributions in this role will be facilitated by my ability to complement his style.

WiNR:  Do you think, then, that there has been a period of greater internal turmoil, in terms of employee morale, over the last 5-10 years?  And that you and Dale Bosworth were selected to lead the Forest Service not only to respond to the always-increasing external concerns of the agency, but to also work as much, if not more, on internal morale-building and steadying of the workforce?

Collins:  Yes, I think that’s accurate.  The last decade has brought profound changes to our agency.  Like many Forest Service employees, I’ve spent a lot of years in the past in an agency that seemed to be constantly downsizing.  Change is inevitable, but I think we need to focus, as a workforce, on stabilizing ourselves, and on striving to absorb the changes.  This is a time for re-grouping, assessing, and equipping ourselves for what’s next.

WiNR:  That is an important question: “What’s next?”  The President’s Management Initiative lays out expectations for all federal agencies to downsize considerably, and to contract out a lot of work that is currently done within the workforce. [Editor’s Note: See “A Management Column,” page 46, for more on this initiative.]  Most agencies have been busy recently analyzing how to achieve these goals set by the Administration.  How do you see this meshing with the goals of stabilizing employees, and allowing them to re-group to be more effective?

Collins:  We need to make sure we are competitive; make sure we are doing things in the most efficient and cost-effective way; make sure we’re accountable; and make sure that we get our basic management functions working really, really well.  The Forest Service will never earn external credibility until our internal management functions meet the test of external scrutiny.  This includes having financial systems that are sound, having the ability to measure productivity in a meaningful way, and being able to consistently do what we say we are going to do.  I think the President’s management issues are less about downsizing and more about efficiency.  For instance, federal agencies that have experienced competitive-sourcing, such as some in the Department of Defense, have found that once they refined their internal organization to maximum efficiency, the work was more cost effective when done internally, not externally.  So, I think we just need to find the most effective way to do our jobs, and to do them well.

            The Forest Service has gone through a period of low “organizational self-esteem.”  This is probably natural, given all the changes the agency has gone through in the last decade or so.  So, part of becoming more efficient and more effective is getting back our self-esteem as an organization, too.  We should be proud of who we are, proud to be a world-class organization.  Someone recently asked Dale Bosworth what accomplishment he’d like to make as Chief, and he said that it would be that people would say, “The Forest Service is a first-class organization.”  This means that the Forest Service hires the best people, they mentor them, they support them, they get the work done.  Basically, the Forest Service should be an organization that you can count on.  That’s what this time is about. 

WiNR:  For many decades, the Forest Service was indeed considered one of the best-managed organizations in the world.  Then it seemed that we started reading in the press about 10 or 15 years ago  that the Forest Service used to be the best, but that now it’s quality is declining.  Some of that criticism may be justified, though no doubt some is just political low blows.  Either way, as employees, the criticism hurts.  So, it’s great to hear that the Forest Service leadership is focused on bringing us back to our greatness.

Collins:  The Forest Service is an organization full of dedicated employees.  There’s a sense in our agency, more than in most government agencies, that we do have a higher calling.  The Forest Service has a hundred-year tradition of having a sense of doing something that is more important than ourselves—protecting and conserving the natural resources of this country.  That’s the source of our espirit de corps. 

We’ve been challenged internally by an enormous accumulation of “process” that has made our work more and more frustrating to employees and the public.  Chief Bosworth has referred to this as “analysis paralysis.”  An internal survey in the Forest Service, the Continuous Improvement Plan (CIP), shows that employees’ largest concern with their jobs is process—everything from hiring people to completing projects on the ground.  We’re working hard to get on top of this issue, because not only does it affect employee morale, but agency credibility, as well.

WiNR:  Tell us about your professional history, and how the positions you’ve held in the past have lead to where you are today. 

Collins:  I went straight into graduate school after I received my B.S. in Recreation from the University of Colorado.  I got a Master’s in Public Administration, emphasizing planning and natural resource management, from the University of Wyoming.  In the last year of studies during my graduate program, I spent time comparing different agencies to see who was hiring and for what reasons, to help find what interested me the most.  Having spent my lifetime recreating on public lands, it seemed logical that I focus on outdoor recreation, and the Bureau of Land Management was in the middle of doing a wilderness inventory that really interested me.  I was an avid wilderness backpacker at the time and loved the notion of working in this program.

            I had worked for the Forest Service as a temporary employee during the summer when I was in college.  But I thought the BLM would offer me new opportunities, and I got a job with that agency as a Wilderness Specialist and conducted a wilderness survey for a couple of years in the state of Colorado.  I moved from there into a NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] coordination position in the same office.  That lead to a familiarity with oil and gas leases because I was in charge of a large leasing project for the state.  I then became the mineral leasing specialist for the state of Colorado for the BLM. 

            So, in my first five years with the federal government, I had three different jobs.  I enjoyed the variety of projects and work, and I had great support from leadership.  Then, my husband got accepted in graduate school in Oceanography at Oregon State University and I needed a job near there!  I found one with the Forest Service, on the Siuslaw National Forest.  My job was split with the Regional Office. I did mineral leasing work for the Pacific Northwest Region in Portland, Oregon and I was a planner for the Siuslaw.  I did those jobs for 3 ½ years.  I took a downgrade when I moved to Oregon, but that’s what worked best for my family and me at that time.  Even so, I found it hard to come in as a new employee and establish credibility at the relatively high grade level that I was hired at.  With a longer perspective, that downgrade gave me the experience I needed to promote more quickly in the Forest Service.

            From there I went to a staff officer position on the Deschutes National Forest in eastern Oregon, working in Lands and Minerals.  I became the Deputy Forest Supervisor, and then the Forest Supervisor on the Deschutes.  I was there for thirteen years.  My daughter enrolled in first grade and graduated from high school there, and that was a really nice plus to being there for that length of time.

            I was Deputy Forest Supervisor for three years, and Forest Supervisor for seven.  That’s enough time to really give a person a sense of what works, and what doesn’t work, in a leadership position on a single unit.  While there is value in moving around, there is also value in seeing continuity, and having to live with your mistakes—you have to admit them, and move on.  So, staying on the Deschutes really worked for me, both personally and professionally.  That was the longest I’d lived in one place in my whole life!  It’s not a plan that will work for everyone, and it’s not possible for everyone, but I am grateful that it worked for me.

            During my last year as Forest Supervisor on the Deschutes, I entered the Senior Executive Development program.  Within a month of finishing that program and being certified for Senior Executive service, I was moved into the Associate Deputy Chief position for National Forest Systems in the Washington Office of the Forest Service.  I held that position for about 14 months.  I was made Associate Chief in August 2001.

WiNR:  That sounds like true “fast-tracking”!  Would you agree?

Collins:  Sometimes it does feel that way to me, but other times, quite the opposite.  I think that the job of Forest Supervisor is the very best preparation for any other job in the upper management of the Forest Service.  You have to deal with everything in that job, from A to Z.  At the same time, you are still connected to the land, and so you have a real sense of the impact of your management and supervision.  Also, Forest Supervisors manage large units with large budgets.  The Deschutes National Forest had 350 permanent employees and a number of temporary employees, an annual budget of over $30 million, a state and private program, and was well integrated with research.  You learn it all, you experience it all, in that position.  I have found myself drawing on that experience constantly, extrapolating to the larger venue of the national program.

WiNR:  It is commonly said that field experience grounds you in a way that nothing else can, for a career in the Forest Service.  Are there things that you have encountered, though, in your Forest Service jobs in Washington D.C. that you didn’t anticipate?

Collins:  The politics at the national level is very different from anything I’d experienced before.  There are many more polarizing agents in the mix here than at the local level.  Also, things seem much more abstract at this level—so removed from “kicking the dirt.”  I think my biggest challenge has been to understand what motivates people working at this level.

WiNR:  How have you dealt with this challenge?

Collins:  I’m an observer—I watch, listen, and ask a lot of questions.  One thing that we tend to do in the Forest Service is “talk to ourselves” too much.  I think it’s important, even in Washington D.C., to spend time “out in the world,” listening to different interest groups and what they have to say.

WiNR:  You are describing a much more externally oriented focus than I think previous Associate and Deputy Chiefs have had.  In the recent past, those positions operated primarily on internal operations of the agency, and the Chief handled external relations.

Collins:  I think you’re right about how we’re operating now.  If Chief Bosworth told you how he wanted his Associate Chief to operate, whether it was me or anyone, I think he would say, “as an alter ego.”  That is, if he can’t make it to give a talk, I’ll give that talk.  I’ll sign for him—that sort of thing.  Either of us can do whatever needs to be done in the Chief’s role, and we both end up doing a bit of everything.  The duties are not compartmentalized.   

            The Deputy Chiefs have both national responsibility and Washington Office responsibility.  The Chief of Staff pulls the Deputy Chiefs together as a team.  Many of the day-to-day operational responsibilities that were conducted by the Associate Chief in the past have been placed now with the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Chiefs.

WiNR:  Can you tell us about your personal history?

Collins:  I was born in Ames, Iowa.  My father was a college professor of Chemistry.  My mother is a mathematician, and has a Master’s degree in Greek and Latin.  She is a remarkable woman.  She earned so many academic honors, and yet never had a permanent job outside the home until she was 70!  She’s 83 now and lives in Washington D.C., just a few blocks from my husband and me.

            My parents raised six kids; I’m in the middle.  We were and are a very close family.  All of the kids went to college and got advanced degrees.  We moved around a lot when I was a kid because my father was a guest professor at a lot of different universities.  He worked at Purdue, Princeton, Iowa State, the University of Iowa, Texas A & M, and the University of Wyoming.

            In the early 1960s my parents bought a cabin in Colorado, and we spent every summer there.  We still go there; I’m going back this summer for my niece’s marriage.  Our property is surrounded by the Arapahoe-Roosevelt National Forest and Rocky Mountain National Park, and I think that’s where my love of the National Forests first grew.  I went to several universities, but I graduated from the University of Colorado.  I went to the University of Wyoming for graduate school.

WiNR:  Who were some of your mentors?

Collins:  I have had so many mentors, supporters, and guides in my career that to single out a handful hardly seems right.  I hope they know who they are and how they helped me.  Many of them were employees who worked for me who gently steered me in directions I needed to go.

A few people do stand out, though.  Dale Bosworth and Elaine Zielinski have been professional mentors for many years, sticking beside me during some of my most personal- and career-challenging decisions.  I can’t imagine where I’d be without them.  Personally, my mom has been my strongest and most reliable source of strength and guidance.  No matter what, she’s always been my greatest cheerleader.  Nearly everyday I draw on the lessons she has taught me.  I still call her right after I testify at a difficult hearing or have a bad day, and I always feel better after talking to her.

Finally, I couldn’t have a job like this one without the support of the spectacular husband I’ve had for 25 years.  And our daughter, Casey, brightens my life each day.

WiNR:  You’ve shared a lot about the important steps in your career.  What do you think are the important steps in general that a woman can take to insure a successful career in Natural Resources management?

Collins:  I don’t think there is one plan for everybody.  Each person has to find the path that works best for them.  My personal life and my family life are by far the most important things to me.  The richest part of my life has been raising my daughter.  My career is important, too, but none of it is as important as my family, and my path was influenced by that.  Every choice that I made, I tried to make so that it fit my personal life, and this ended up (ultimately, but not at every step), benefiting my career.

            So, my advice to others would be: think about those things that are important to you, and pursue those first.  Make sure that you don’t look back and say things like, “I wish I’d spent more time with my kids”;  or, “I wish I’d had kids”; or “I wish I’d taken that job in that particular place, and convinced my partner to do that with me.”  I think it’s vital to think through your choices and decisions so that you don’t look back with regrets.

            I think a lot about life choices now, because I’m spending time counseling my daughter as she is about to graduate from college and move on.  She’s facing a lot of the same choices that I did.  I try to tell her to find the things that she loves, that gives her energy, and that will make her feel whole.

 WiNR:  Other successful women in natural resource careers have told me that they often had to deal with constant pressure to move.  You had the very good fortune to stay on one unit for a relatively long time when your child was growing up and moving up through the schools.  A lot of women, and men, too, resist advancing their career with the “next move up and onward” because it would mean disrupting their family’s stability: when they move for a new job, their kids have to go to new schools and their spouse or partner has to find a new job.  This is a continuing problem for many people in the Forest Service, and many other organizations.

Collins:  Yes, those can be very hard decisions.  There’s no formula.  If I had had a different kind of child, I might have moved a few times during her school years.  Each person has to balance their own factors of family and work.  When I was a child, I think I benefited from moving around with my family during my school years.  I don’t believe my own daughter would have benefited from such moves.

            I’ve faced the same kind of pressures that you are talking about.  I was asked to apply for jobs at the national level before I was ready to move on.  I said no.  These were jobs that I didn’t feel ready for, and we were not ready to move our daughter.  It wasn’t easy to resist the urge to take the opportunities, but I did learn that other opportunities will come later.  I was told, “This is the only chance you’ll get.”  But that wasn’t true!

WiNR:  It sounds like you have managed very well to balance your personal and professional life.

Collins:  I’m still learning to do that.  It took a lot of time and effort for my family and me to sort that out!  But, we did figure it out, and we continue to figure it out.  That’s just one of those things that you have to work at all the time.  I work very hard not to take my personal life for granted.

            One thing I have to keep in my life is time for physical fitness.  I like to run, cycle, and swim.  That’s how I manage stress.  I also make time for my family.  

WiNR:  What does your husband do?

Collins:  John is an oceanographer for the National Marine Fisheries Service.  He has made many sacrifices over the years for my career.  He got a Master’s degree in Oceanography at Oregon State University, and then moved with me to Bend, Oregon.  Bend is in eastern Oregon—there’s no ocean there!  He taught at the community college there for a while, and he also worked as a fish biologist for the Forest Service on an adjacent forest for a few years.  He’s done lots of different things.  Here in Washington D.C., though, he was finally able to be employed as an oceanographer and works in marine restoration. 

WiNR:  What was your experience on the Deschutes National Forest regarding relationships with local communities? 

Collins:  My goal on the Deschutes was to create an environment where the Forest Service was so instrumental to the community that no major decision on anything, such as education, transportation, economic development, or technology, was made without somebody saying, “Hey, we need the Forest Service at the table.” 

When that happens, the Forest Service finds itself so completely a part of the community that as challenging decisions are made in the agency, we find we have a broad base of support.  We have communicated about those decisions and actions so completely—through many, many venues, such as United Way, Rotary, Lions Club, Chamber of Commerce—that people will understand and support us.  We want to be so involved with the community that we will undrestand how what we do in the Forest Service will impact them and be received by them.

Members of the leadership team on the Deschutes National Forest placed themselves on boards and committees throughout the community.  We participated as leaders in those groups.  This came naturally, as most of us had developed leadership skills through our careers with the Forest Service. 

Our participation in the community helped us to understand the issues facing our communities.  In Bend, Oregon, we had transportation problems, higher education problems, problems with displaced timber workers, and some problems with at-risk youth, and to name a few.  On a state level, there was a concern with the increasing resources being drained to support growing prison populations.

We focused on finding how the interests of the Forest Service and the Deschutes National Forest intersected with these interests of the community.  As a result, we started a program where County Corrections crews worked on National Forest lands; a partnership with the Oregon National Guard that had at-risk kids working on Forest Service projects; and a program with state prisoners within a year or two of release working from a camp on National Forest lands in Oregon.  This last program won the Chief’s Award this year. 

On the Deschutes, we worked toward the Forest Service having a truly meaningful relationship with the local community, and not just occupying rental property.  We were right there working on education issues, supporting the soccer teams, everything.  We did all of this not only as individual citizens living in the community, but also in appropriate ways in our Forest Service role.

WiNR:  I have heard from now-retired Forest Supervisors that in the past each National Forest had an “I and E plan,” that is, an information and education plan.  Individual staff members were assigned responsibilities very much in line with what you are describing—regular involvement with different community groups.  It seems that the Forest Service has a history of strong connection with communities.  Your program on the Deschutes seems very much in keeping with that tradition.

Collins:  You’re right.  I don’t think it’s anything new; it’s just using your instincts!  I had an experience when I first became Forest Supervisor on the Deschutes.  The Editor of the Bend Bulletin, Bob Chandler, asked me to come to his office.  When I got there he said to me, “Sally, do you know that a Forest Supervisor here in Bend hasn’t met with me since the late 1950s?”  Of course, he’d interacted with the Supervisors over the years in community groups and organizations, but no Forest Supervisor had come to him, sat down with him, and said, “Let’s just talk about what’s going on.”

            Bob gave me some great insight.  He told me that the Forest Service had a reputation in the community as an isolated organization, set apart from the town and the people.  I resolved to change that.

            I think Forest Service-local community relationships are set by the individual at the top.  If the Supervisor doesn’t find his or her way into the local network, they can’t expect any of their staff to do so.  Bob Chandler told me that I had to show that I cared about the communities of Bend, Oregon, and that I truly wanted to be part of them.

WiNR:  Do you think that your good community relations led to more acceptance of your unpopular, difficult decisions?  Or did you still get a lot of criticism that is typical when those kinds of decisions are made?

Collins:  When we had opposition in the community to some decisions, programs, or projects, these folks tended to work through their criticisms with us.  Not only did they understand us better, but they also knew that the Forest Service had a good ground base of support in the greater community.

            We were given the benefit of the doubt.  People would ask us about what was going on and try to get the whole story, while before they would probably have just started right in on a loud negative campaign.

WiNR:  What’s your vision for the Forest Service in ten to twenty years?

Collins:  I see the Forest Service as still being very field-oriented in twenty years.  I see the Forest Service still standing as an agency, not combined with others.  We will be doing more work in an interagency way, though.

            I think we will continue to build our connections with our local communities.  We will continue to lead in research.  We have the very best forestry research organization in the world.  I think that will continue to thrive.  I think we will be a resource for forestry issues worldwide.  One of the things that will carry us into the future is the hundred-year history of the Forest Service.  It gives us great strength.  I want the Forest Service to attract the best and the brightest.

WiNR:  Since you’ve only been in your current position a short while, this may not be a fair question, but what are your plans for the future?

Collins:  My plans are to be as effective in this job as I can, and to work as hard as I can to facilitate positive changes for the agency.  Becoming Associate Chief was never part of my career plan, but I guess I’m here because Chief Bosworth believes—and I do, too—that I have a contribution to make.  So, I’ll plan on making that contribution, and support him and this agency to the best of my ability.

            One thing that I plan to focus on is leadership development.  I believe strongly that we need to work on that at all levels of our organization.  We need to counsel, mentor, support, and encourage our employees, from the day they start with the Forest Service and throughout their careers.  I think we have not done enough of this, and I want to build an agency culture in which supervisors spend some of every day doing that kind of work.  It’s growing the future—if we’re going to do well tomorrow, if we have to do well today.

            Daina Dravnieks Apple is a natural resource economist on the U.S. Forest Service Policy Analysis staff, Washington D.C.  She has served as a strategic planner for the National Forest System; as an Assistant Regulatory Officer in the Washington Office; and as regional Land Use Appeals Coordinator and on the Engineering Staff in Region 5, San Francisco.  She began her Forest Service career as an economist at the Pacific Southwest Research Station, Berkeley.

            Apple is active in the Society of American Foresters and is Past Chair of the National Capital Society of American Foresters.  She is a member of Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society and was elected President of Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association, and served as National Secretary.  She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a B.Sc. in the Political Economy of Natural Resources and an M.A. in Geography.