Your hardest leadership problems aren’t “soft.” They’re human.

Capable leaders repeatedly encounter the same eight people problems: Accountability, Communication, Engagement, Motivation, Dependency, Silos and Collaboration, Resistance to Change, and Culture and Innovation.

Leaders are taught to rely on goals, metrics, incentives, reorganizations, and accountability systems. Those tools matter—but they rarely explain why people resist change, withhold information, avoid responsibility, lose trust, or quietly disengage.

These are human-nature problems.

Certainty shows you how to stop fighting human nature and start working with it.

Fully updated, this second edition introduces the eight Soft Issues, 13 Human Nature Levers, and the latest remarkable research on Ötzi. Drawing on cognitive science, decades of leadership research, and more than 50 years of field experience, Mike Mears provides a practical operating system for creating trust, engagement, accountability, and innovation.

INSIDE, YOU WILL LEARN HOW TO:

• Create enough certainty for people to act while change is unfolding

• Reduce the threat and resistance that make sensible changes fail

• Use the Human Nature Levers to improve accountability, trust, communication, and execution

• Replace vague leadership advice with practical, repeatable habits

• Diagnose the people problems that dashboards, reorganizations, and incentives miss

• Build a workplace where people speak candidly, take responsibility, collaborate, and innovate

Certainty is written for frontline managers, experienced executives, CEOs, coaches, consultants, and leadership-development professionals who want practical tools instead of platitudes.

Great leadership isn’t mysterious. It is human nature—and it can be reverse-engineered.