Why? Because there are no such things as cold, hard facts. Most facts are so controversial and generate so much anxiety that they’re too hot for people to handle—or at least to handle well. In fact, most of the time people try to avoid them, which is how we got into these hard times in the first place. What’s more, once facts are in the hands of people with competing interests—namely, all the time—they become far squishier than we like to admit, their interpretation endlessly subject to different partisan perceptions.

The truth is, hard and soft issues are inextricably intertwined, and you can’t succeed at the one without mastering the other.

When you ignore soft issues—like how to handle this or that person or relationship—you’re more apt to increase inefficiencies, not decrease them, as those around you discount, dispute, or discard your facts while counting, touting, and flouting their own.

Until we can take quantitative facts out of the hands of the people who make qualitative judgments about what those facts mean, there will be no such thing as “Just the facts, mam.” And that’s why, without the soft skills needed to handle hard facts well, hard times will only get harder.

In his most recent book, Reading the Room, Kantor brings us with him as he works with the leaders of ClearFacts, a fictional fast-growing green-energy company.

Right from the start, you are in the room with Kantor, seeing what happens with and to these leaders through his eyes—or, in keeping with the book, through the eyes of fictional coach Duncan Travis. For the next 300-some pages you watch the drama unfold, as CEO Ralph Waterman and his top team deal with everything from decision rights to the childhood stories that shape their interactions and the decisions they make.

Over the course of the ClearFacts story, Kantor demystifies the magic he brings to his work by giving us the ideas and tools we need to read the room the way he does. Because the phenomena are multilayered, so is Kantor’s treatment of it, covering everything from diagnosing leader behavior to uncovering the origins of a leader’s identity to building your own leadership model.

Over the course of Kantor’s highly generative life, he has written extensively and wisely about relationships and communications. He brings it all together here, giving leaders and coaches exactly what they need to navigate the room when the stakes are high.

But just how should leaders go about influencing culture? The most common approach is to focus on written documents like value statements or mission statements, to launch communication campaigns, to redesign office arrangements, and/or to closely manage symbols—all in an effort to drive changes in cultural behavior. Trouble is, most of these efforts fall flat, even when reinforced by training, which is why design experts David Nadler and Michael Tushman say culture is the most difficult aspect of organizational architecture to reshape in a lasting way.

But why is that? Why is the soft stuff of culture so hard to change? After 30 years of observing culture change efforts, I suspect it’s because we make three basic mistakes when seeking to influence culture:

• First, we confuse the more visible aspects of culture with the invisible assumptions that lie at its core. While the face of a culture may be as malleable as clay, the core is more like glue: quick to adhere, hard to unstick.
• Second, we invest a lot of time in articulating a firm’s cultural values, beliefs, or assumptions. But all this does is change what people espouse. Only by changing the social experiences that give rise to people’s assumptions can assumptions be changed. Seeing, after all, is believing.
• Third, we focus on changing how individual leaders behave. But it is only by changing how leaders interact with each other that people will change their assumptions about how things really work around here.

These three observations have led me to a single conclusion: If the relationships at the top of a firm are siloed, hierarchical, and internally focused, then so will the culture be, no matter what leaders espouse.

To change the core of a culture, you need to change how high-profile, high-stakes relationships operate along three axes that define a firm’s culture:

• Lateral: How key leaders operate in cross-functional relationships across the organization.
• Vertical: How key leaders interact with one another up and down the hierarchy.
• External: How key leaders operate with customers, suppliers, channels, investors, and the like.

If I’ve learned anything the past 30 years, it’s that you create more cynicism than change when you reshape the surface of a culture while leaving its core intact. To learn more about how to transform a culture’s core, see my recent article Changing Culture Change.

Throughout, he was able to use conflict, constraint, fear, even bad luck to get the most out of people and situations. Here’s what he had to say about each.

• Constraints: I once heard that Spielberg wanted a classier, more expensive shark for the movie Jaws than the one he ended up with. This interview explains why. On the day the shark first appeared, he came barreling out of the water, tail first, wagging like Flipper, only to sink down again under an explosion of water. “That was the last we saw of him for about three weeks,” says Spielberg. After that, they used the shark only sparingly, keeping him mostly out of sight, where the viewers could use their imagination and John Williams’ music to conjure up something far more frightening than any shark a studio might create.
• Bad Luck. Anyone who’s seen Raiders of the Lost Ark knows the action scene where a guy in black robes appears out of nowhere, whips out a scimitar, and starts waving it at Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford. Originally Spielberg had planned to take about four days to film an extended action sequence of whip versus scimitar in the tradition of John Woo. 
   
  But as bad luck would have it, Harrison Ford came to the set that day doubled over with food poisoning, telling Spielberg he could stand only about an hour of shooting. Immediately a thought leaped to Spielberg’s mind: “What if you just shoot the guy?” Within an hour, Harrison had shot the guy and returned to his hotel, leaving behind one of the great comedic scenes of all time. Of that moment, Spielberg says: “If something doesn’t work, you might even get a better, cheaper idea with your second thought. So I always covet my second thoughts.”

• Conflict: Early in his career, Spielberg found himself butting heads with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond during the filming of Sugarland Express. Even though Zsigmond was far more experienced at the time, that didn’t stop the young Spielberg from standing his ground. “For the first couple of movies I needed to tell my stories,” he explained. “Even if they were bad stories, I needed to tell them my way.” Still, he welcomed the conflict. As he saw it: “If somebody has an opinion, and it’s not your opinion, it tests your resolve; it tests your vision.”

• Fear: To the chagrin of some actors and the delight of others, Spielberg insists on no rehearsals before shooting. “I want whatever happy accidents, as Arthur Penn calls them, to occur on Take 1 or Take 2,” he told Lipton. “When an actor is both aware of who he or she is, but also frightened about showing it, some magic happens. Fear produces such extraordinary moments in film. It really does. Fear is really something to embrace and something to get your actors not afraid of showing.” He then added: “The big thing is getting your actors to trust you, so they’ll give you those unexplored moments on Take 1 or Take 2.”

With Spielberg’s knack for making the most of bad situations, it’s no wonder he’s ended up being one of the most trusted and versatile directors of our time—and a truly remarkable leader.

To see and hear the interview, go to http://videosift.com/video/Inside-The-Actors-Studio-Steven-Spielberg

Photo by Mike Baird, Creative Commons

It’s easy for leaders to lose their way in a world of unprecedented turbulence. It’s not that things are that much tougher—economies have been more depressed, wars more devastating, poverty more intractable, disease more widespread. But never have events and circumstances shifted so quickly, so fundamentally, or so unpredictably. One day the Berlin Wall is standing, the next it’s gone. One day apartheid is the law of the land in South Africa, the next it’s gone. One day the Twin Towers are standing, the next they’re gone. One day we’re sitting on top of a growing economy, the next it’s gone. And so the list goes on, each item swept away by underlying structural changes very few saw or predicted.

Turbulence of this kind poses two fundamental challenges for leaders.

• First, they must be able to chart a coherent course through uncertainty, constantly adapting, even changing direction as conditions shift.
• Second, they must be able to motivate others to follow them into that uncertainty and to learn well and quickly from each other as things change.

To master these two challenges, leaders need both a compass and some ballast. Both are critical; neither is dispensable. A leader’s compass is his mission. With a highly developed mission, you can plot a clear course through the fog of uncertainty, orienting yourself relative to your North Star as conditions on the ground shift. A mission is more specific than a vision, more general than a strategic plan—allowing you to revise plans while staying on your vision’s course. A good mission keeps you focused on whom you’re going after, with what capabilities in hand and what ends in mind. Most leaders spend a good deal of time thinking about these questions and are wise to do so.

A leader gets his ballast from relationships. Strong relationships create a modicum of stability in the midst of turbulence, not because they provide solace or support—although the best ones do—but because they allow you to learn quickly, to sense and adapt to even the most subtle shifts. That learning, sensing, and adapting helps you avoid, or at least prepare for, more cataclysmic changes. When your relationships are strong, people tell you what you need to know. More important, they tell each other, so they can help each other reduce the uncertainty around them or give each other the courage needed to make the most of it, as comrades-in-arms do in times of war.

It’s surely what Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did during World War II. According to Jon Meacham who wrote of their “epic friendship” in Winston and Franklin: “They always kept the mission—and their relationship—in mind.”

We all would do well to follow their example in our own turbulent times.

So begins a riveting chapter in a new book by Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson called Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in a Knowledge Economy. Citing dozens of case examples and decades of rigorous research, Edmondson directs our attention away from individual leaders and onto teaming. Today’s world, she argues, is far too complex for any one leader alone to grasp, and teaming is the most powerful vehicle for both learning and execution in organizations.

The mining accident in Chile shows you why. Within 70 days all 33 miners were rescued. That any miners were saved was a miracle: initial estimates of finding anyone alive were put at 10 percent. But as Edmondson shows, this miracle is no mystery. It was the result of bringing together a diverse team of people across cultural, professional, and geographic boundaries and enabling them to learn and execute quickly across boundaries.

“What happened during those 70 days,” Edmondson writes, “was an extraordinary teaming effort involving hundreds of individuals spanning physical (those 2,000 feet of rock), organizational, cultural, geographic, and professional boundaries. “

Most of us think in terms of teams-as-a-noun. Edmondson thinks of teaming-as-a-verb: acting in ways that help us rapidly collaborate, adjust, learn, and execute across boundaries. As such, it is essential to any organization that must “build learning into day-to-day work to meet ever-shifting needs and promote success over the long term.”

I have known Amy’s work for years, and like so many others, have learned so much from her way of seeing and describing the learning demands today’s organizations face, as well as her accessible advice on how to meet those demands. She captures all of that in her new book.

Anyone who must team up to get things done—and that’s almost all of us—will find Teaming an invaluable guide to a poorly understood territory.

Artist: Cornelia P. Ashley

“As conflict—difference—is here in the world, as we cannot avoid it,” wrote pioneering management scholar Mary Parker Follett in 1925, “we should, I think, use it. Instead of condemning it, we should set it to work for us.” Just short of a century later, we still struggle to follow Follett’s advice.

Not for lack of opportunity, that’s for sure. We deal with differences every day. The most obvious ones are what we might call demographic differences—those based on gender, ethnicity, race, class, age, culture, religious preference, sexual orientation, weight, attractiveness, and the like. But other differences also figure into our thinking: differences in ideology, party affiliation, functional specialty, expertise, hierarchical level, industry, sector, and the like.

Our differences are endless, as are opportunities for handling them better. Yet they continue to trip us up, to divide us, to block progress on problems we urgently need to solve.

So why is it so hard for us to put our differences to work? I believe three factors are at play—factors that, if changed, would free us up to do better:

• We are unaware of our biases. We all hold implicit beliefs. These largely unconscious beliefs help us navigate our way through the world each day. Without any conscious thought, we sort people, things, and activities into categories; we value some categories over others; and we tease out the relationships among them, so we can figure out what causes what. In the end, again without much conscious thought, we know exactly how to see and handle this or that person under this or that circumstance. While this makes it a whole lot easier to move seamlessly through our days—we don’t have to think about every single thing we do—it makes us vulnerable to unwitting biases in our beliefs, and those unwitting biases make it a lot harder to handle our differences well.
   

  That’s why Harvard Professor Mahzarin Banaji launched a project to help us detect our implicit biases—even those we try to hide from ourselves! To uncover your biases, go to Project Implicit’s website and take their tests. But don’t be discouraged if you discover you’re much more biased than you thought. You have a lot of company. According to Banaji’s research, despite our differences, we’re all in the exact same bias-heavy boat.

• We make our biases undiscussable. We view most, if not all, bias as a conscious moral choice. As a result, we feel ashamed when we uncover our own, and we feel outrage when we see bias in others, especially if that bias harms us. Worse, though we’re all biased, we tend to believe that others are more biased than we are, assuming that we ourselves are mostly rational and fair. This makes it easy to lambaste others when their biases are showing, hard to see our own, and impossible to talk about anyone’s openly.       

  What a recipe for maintaining unwitting bias! We’d be much better off if we could take our biases out of the morality closet and instead view them as unconscious mind bugs, as Banaji suggests. Only by helping each other uncover our mind bugs can we manage our biases more consciously and stop them from unconsciously managing us. For help on how, download “Debugging Mind Bugs.”

• We assume one group’s gains come at another’s loss. Even when we’re aware of our biases, we still struggle, largely because we fear that another’s gain will be our loss. This pervasive zero-sum belief governs most of our dealings, not only in Washington, but in our everyday lives. As a result, we tend to create adversarial dynamics that lead us to squabble over who gets what piece of a shrinking pie rather than working together to grow the pie.
   

  Perhaps no one knows this better than Larry Susskind, whose life work is devoted to helping groups handle disputes more intelligently. In a blog written on January 8, 2012, Susskind distills much of what he’s learned in a single sentence: “There are two ways to think about conflicts and conflict-resolution efforts. The first assumes that there has to be a winner and a loser—that the gains to one side must be matched by losses to the other. This is how zero-sum thinking emerged. But, there’s another way to think about negotiations, whether between countries, companies, communities or other actors. This involves non-zero-sum thinking, or mutual gains.” No one thinks about this alternative better than Susskind. For more on how to avoid zero-sum thinking and create mutual gains, visit Larry’s Consensus Building Approach blog.

Differences are here to stay. Whether we, as a species, are here to stay depends on how well we handle them. With folks like Banaji and Susskind on the case, we’ve got a fighting chance, especially if folks like you tell others about them.