Why leaders must communicate constantly

This week’s Grist is an observation on leadership, excerpted from The New York Times’ usually useful “Corner Office” column.

“One thing I learned,” said Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust of her first job as a supervisor in last Sunday’s edition—she was a department chair at the University of Pennsylvania 30 years ago—“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.”