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(The New York Times)This interview with Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Q. Do you remember the first time you became somebody’s boss or supervisor?
A. I became chair of the department of American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, and so it would have been in 1980. But a department chair is an interesting kind of boss, because it’s not clear that academics have an understanding of the notion of “boss.” So it’s a little bit different from having a purely administrative role in an organization.
I had been trained in the department, and yet I thought it was time to shift its focus somewhat, in its relationship to changes in the field, in relationship to changes in the university.
I was pushing for change in an organization that had produced me and that had a tremendous amount of loyalty to what it had been. So there was a friction that emerged from that early on and a sense of resistance to change, and I needed to cultivate a willingness to change. That was an interesting set of obstacles, hurdles to be faced with early on.
One thing I learned, though, very soon, was that people impute all kinds of things to leaders, and sometimes it’s thinking of them as disproportionately powerful, and imagining them to be much more transcendently significant in what they can accomplish, to have many more tools and weapons than they actually do.
Another is to imagine that they have all kinds of designs or purposes that they may or may not have. So communication seemed to me something very important from early on, so that people not have that sense of mystery about what a leader is up to.
Q. And was there a moment where you learned that lesson about people imputing things to you?
A. I remember being told by members of the department that it was clear that I was out to hire so and so, who had been my student, and it never occurred to me to hire so and so. I wondered what I’d done to make it seem clear to them that I had this design, when I had no such design at all.
Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?
A. I think the most important leadership lessons I’ve learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all of whom have a stake in that institution. You’re always interacting with them, learning from them and directing your energies toward helping to pull and push them in the direction you wish to move.
Q. How do you do that?
