I have spent time this week working on a retreat I am leading next week with our school leaders. I feel blessed by the space they afford me to reflect back my own experiences and understandings. Below I share a resource that informed my perspective on a core competency of leadership – humility- that I highlight throughout the retreat.

Blessings on your week ahead!

From the Harvard Business Review:

The Best Leaders Embrace the Role of Supporting Character

by Jamil Zaki

May 5, 2026

Supporting-Character Energy

Leaders interested in adopting supporting-character energy can take [this] important step:

Get aggressively curious.

Supporting characters can’t tell their stories alone. If you want to become one, you must instead understand what life looks and feels like for the protagonist you want to help. This means getting intensely curious about others, and learning to be aware of what you don’t know.

Humility is a natural antidote for naïve realism. Research finds that when leaders are intellectually humble, their teams perform more effectively, in part because humility is contagious: It encourages people to learn from one another and catalyzes ideation and performance.

For all its virtues, humility remains undervalued, but it is not hard to access. Try to explain how a bicycle (or a laptop, or democracy) works and you’ll realize how little you know. This is true for social life as well. Writing last year for HBR, Jeff Wetzler suggested a “curiosity check” before important conversations: Ask yourself, for instance, what you don’t know about the person you’re going to talk with or how your actions might be impacting them in unintended ways.

Curiosity checks prime the pump on humility and inspire leaders to ask better questions, counteracting their tendency towards naïve realism. This can allow us to better understand other people’s stories, and our role in them.