You're right about not yelling. Yelling at people doesn't make them any smarter. Teaching them makes them smarter...but not everyone is teachable.
New people screw up, that's a given, and new Foresters aren't any different. It's a lot more productive to explain to them what they've done wrong and how to correct it than it is to yell at them, intimidate, and eventually alienate them.
But what do you do when the SA is very green, is very defensive about being green, has some personal issues having to do with being thrust into a job they're not prepared for and don't really want, and adopts an attitude of "my way or else" simply because they lack the experience to do it any other way?
Case in point...a new Forester, young, female, just transferred in from some other district, and immediately put in charge of a bug salvage sale that was a miserable money losing monster to begin with before she even got there.
Okay, it wasn't fair to her to put her into that kind of a mess. But she showed up the first day, drove right onto an active landing, parked right in the way, got out of her pickup, and asked to see whoever was in charge. Now. Like right now. She had a copy of the THP in one hand and a clip board in the other. Her boots were new and unscuffed and she had nail polish on. That should have been a clue.
In the meantime the skid Cats were coming in with turns, the delimber deck was plugged because the shovel couldn't swing to deck his logs because the Forester's pickup was in the way, trucks were coming back and starting to bunch up because they couldn't back in because of the Forester's pickup and what had been a fairly routine non eventful day in the woods was rapidly becoming a gigantic non productive time burning, money wasting mess. I looked around and all I saw was idle machinery, wages going out and not a log moving anywhere.
I asked her politely to move her pickup off of the landing and she replied that she wouldn't be there all that long and we "could just take a break or something". That did it. I yelled...I did and I admit it. I really shouldn't have but I did. I told her that if her agency had let us build landings bigger than the average suburban back yard there might be room enough for her to park any place she pleased and not be in the way. But since we were given the minimum amount of room possible to process, deck, and load logs the space her pickup was taking was preventing us from working at all. That being the case she could either give me permission right now to increase the landing size or she could move her pickup out of the way and allow us that small space to continue our work. She got into her pickup and left.
She came back the next day, a copy of the THP in hand as usual, but she parked off the landing a ways. She had an older guy with her, a supervisor of some kind I guess. You could see him pointing at things, machinery, people, skid trails...and as he'd point and talk she'd nod her head. He was telling her a bunch of stuff that he should have told her before he sent her to the woods.
She never did turn into much of a SA but we helped her when we could. She in turn did what she could for us...as long as it was spelled out in the rules or the THP. No variations allowed. We finished the sale and moved on. I heard later that she transferred again and wasn't doing SA work anymore.
