After having lunch recently with an executive team I’d been coaching, I wrote the following email to each of the team members the following day. 

“Thanks for your time over lunch yesterday and your willingness to speak candidly about the current state of your team. I hope you won’t mind if I share a few final thoughts and a question or two with you before your dinner out together tonight. 

“Your success as a team will depend almost entirely on how much you come to trust each other. 

“Will you honor, and find ways to accommodate, each other’s different wants, needs, and expectations with kindness and compassion? Will you care – truly care – for each other’s learning and well-being? 

“This takes enormous courage because our egos are so fragile. We will do whatever it takes to defend them when we feel threatened by others’ opinions and beliefs, especially when they’re different from our own. 

“One thing I’ve learned as a coach is that the most important leadership quality of all is not strategic thinking, financial acumen, or communication skill. It’s humility, coupled with the capacity to care about the well-being of the people you lead. It’s a kind of open-heartedness that encourages us to let others into our lives, without pre-conditions or judgement. 

“This is not something you learn in business school. You can’t teach people how to care about others. And you can’t inspire people who don’t care about you to work together toward a common goal. 

“So, will you lead? Will you choose curiosity over righteousness? (There’s nothing wrong with being right, of course. It’s our need to be right all the time that can trip us up.) 

“Will you choose humility over ego and arrogance?

“Rise to the challenge of leadership. Make a special effort to build a personal relationship with the one member on your team whose wants, needs, and expectations are most different from yours. Ask a lot of questions about where they’ve been and where they want to go. Start to construct your relationship from the ground up, with sincere and open curiosity about the other and how they’ve become the remarkable person they are today.

“Will you lead?”