1. Trustworthiness.
People never respect a person they cannot trust. Never. The best coaches know this and work immediately on letting their players know they can be trusted. Mike Krzyzewski, head basketball coach of Duke University, put it this way. “If you set up an atmosphere of communication and trust, it becomes a tradition. Older team members will establish your credibility with never ones. Even if they don’t like everything about you, they’ll still say, ‘He’s trustworthy, committed to us as a team.’”
2. A caring attitude.
In all my years of leading people, I must have said this more than a thousand times: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” It’s true. If players sense that you really care about them, that you have their interests at heart, they will listen to you and respect you. As former University of Michigan head football coach Bo Schembechler said, “Deep-down, your players must know you care about them. This is the most important thing. I could never get away with what I do f the players felt I didn’t care. They know, in the long run, I’m in their corner.”
3. The ability to make hard decisions.
Players cannot respect a coach who cannot make the hard decisions necessary for a team to succeed. When a coach is willing to make those decisions, the players know he is acting in the team’s best interest. They feel secure, and they in turn are more likely to act in the team’s best interest themselves. Tom Landry said, “Perhaps the toughest call for a coach is weighing what is best for an individual against what is best for the team. Keeping a player on the roster just because I liked him personally, or even because of his great contributions to the team in the past, when I felt someone else could do more for the team would be a disservice to the team’s goals.” He would also lose his players’ respect.
From "Developing the Leaders Around You" by John C. Maxwell
