Would you rate this attribute higher than the 4 listed (clarity, judgement, integrity & trust)?
I, personally, would not.
And honestly, when I think back to the best leaders I have worked with they didn't necessarily have an enormous focus on the sort of individual development that you talk about. They were focused on the mission. To the extent that individual development furthered the mission it was vital, but the mission was always #1.
Having the clarity of thought to recognize this was clearly helpful to them.
I once had an excellent manager. He told me that he would never think about my career development unless I asked him to. He would never promote me unless I asked for a promotion. If I never said anything, then he would assume I'm happy. But if I came to him and wanted to change something, he would do everything in his power to help me.
One day I came into his office and said, "I really just want to code for a while. I'm finding these meetings to be getting in my way". True to his word, he replied, "What if I went to those meetings for you and sent you a summary? Would that help?"
Although he did actually promote me without me asking -- apologising all the way ;-).
I was at a workshop recently and we had this exercise where participants were to list the attributes that their all time favorite boss had. We then clustered the results and "giving a shit about you" was by far the #1 answer.
I wouldn't have expected it myself but once I thought about it there was a nearly perfect correlation in my own history.
I would put it at number 1, to be completely honest. My life goal isn't to optimize widgets, it's to be happy. That's number 1. Widgets happen to further that goal. If I'm responsible for other people's livelihoods, that's a really important responsibility. That doesn't mean to override business decisions, because better business should help us all, but you shouldn't lose sight of the original goal or how significant the responsibility is.
I'd rather have a trustworthy, honest (integrity), and fair (judgment) boss that doesn't give a shit about my happiness than one who wants me to be happy but will lie or play office politics.
That is ridiciulous. Emploeyee is like any other asset, its just way more important.
If you have a powerfull server you need to tend to its needs - supply it good UPS, do regular maintenance, replace broken stuff, provide good ventilation etc.
What makes you think that human doesn't have any of that and that you can simply ignore its own needs just becuase it doesn't come with the manual ? There is no mission without humans and good humans doing particular stuff are hard to find.
Caring about the people who work for you is a crucial part of integrity. Not all people are the same, and not all days are the same. An employee whose father just died needs to be managed/led in a different way than an employee who just got a nice raise.
If you are indifferent to the burdens and emotional states of your staff, people will notice, and it will harm your ability to hire and retain the best employees. This is a failure of leadership, because the #1 job of a leader is to build a great team.
I would challenge you to consider if job #1 of a leader is really to build a great team. I can think of a lot of great teams working on bad problems (not bad = hard, but bad = not useful). That sucks.
On the other hand if a leader can figure out what problems are important to work on and clearly communicate why this is true it becomes easy to attract a great team.
I, personally, would not.
And honestly, when I think back to the best leaders I have worked with they didn't necessarily have an enormous focus on the sort of individual development that you talk about. They were focused on the mission. To the extent that individual development furthered the mission it was vital, but the mission was always #1.
Having the clarity of thought to recognize this was clearly helpful to them.