What was it that made William Shakespeare the greatest writer of all time? According to the great poet John Keats, it was what Keats called "negative capability." That's the capacity to hold yourself in balance between the two poles of a situation without imposing your will in order to force a resolution. Doing so allows ambiguities to fully play out and opens everyone up to new levels of understanding. Keats described this quality as "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

I devote much of my time and effort helping leaders build capabilities, yet this one is really tough. In our culture, we're not good at negative capability. We rush to judgment, facts be damned, and are eager to find solutions even if no good ones exist. Humans don't tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty well, yet it's the tension between uncertainty and resolution that makes our greatest drama, fiction and music.

In organizations, negative capability empowers leaders to approach problems and conflicts without rushing to one side or the other. It lets them "slow down the game" and allow all factors in a situation to become apparent before a solution is even contemplated. Negative capability is the purview of wise, calm, and controlled. It's a quality we could all do with more of.

How might building "negative capability" improve how you lead your team and yourself?

Tis the season for high school and college commencement speeches, which means it's time for millions of graduating seniors to roll their eyes in boredom. Who can blame them? The typical graduation speaker is somebody the students have never heard of. He or she delivers predictable lines about "being the future" and "believing in your dreams" to people who only want to get out of their hot caps and gowns and go party. I get it.

But one of these days, I'm hoping I'll be honored with a request to deliver a commencement address-perhaps even to my alma mater, UCLA. If I am, I won't talk about dreams and careers and the future. I won't bury my audience in boring clichés. I'll talk about wisdom, and these are some of the points I'll make:

• Listen twice as much as you talk. People want to tell their story.
• Accept that achieving the life you really want will be ten times harder than you can possibly imagine today.
• Go after that life anyway.
• Tools change. People don't. Integrity and character still move mountains.
• You're entitled to air, space, and freedom of speech. That's all.
• Don't worry about being famous. Strive to be respected.
• Slow down, wait, and listen. There are wonders to be found in silence.
• Be present. Don't tweet about the past or text about the future.
• Regardless of their politics, 99.9% of people want the same things you do: love, family, health, purpose, peace and prosperity.

What would you say to a graduating class?

The 2013 Women's College Softball World Series started on May 30th. As you may know, I have a long history of involvement with the sport, and most recently with the UCLA softball team, so I take great interest in this tournament. Countless things impress me about the young women who come to the tournament to try and win the national championship for their schools: their talent, their passion, and their discipline. And I'm impressed most by what drives them - these young women work so hard with the near certainty that they will not receive any reward beyond the joy of competition, love of school, love of team, and concern for each other.

There's one women's professional softball league in the U.S.: National Pro Fastpitch (NPF). It has four teams. The players make from $4,000 to $25,000 a season. Unlike male college athletes in basketball, football and baseball, there's little chance of a monetary payoff at the end of the rainbow. Even a possible Olympic team berth, recently a renewed possibility for 2020, offers little beyond the prospect of competing for their country; Olympic softballers seldom get the endorsement opportunities of gymnasts, women's soccer players, swimmers, and figure skaters.

No, if you're competing at the highest levels of college softball, you're working and sweating and sacrificing for excellence for intrinsic rewards. That's why I believe that these women are such wonderful examples of wisdom. They know they aren't going to get huge shoe contracts or TV commercials, and it doesn't matter. They simply want to be there for each other and to perform at the highest levels possible. I've seen what happens when everyone on a team shares those same values, and it's extraordinary.

Watch the finals of the 2013 Women's College Softball World Series beginning tonight if you can. You'll see some amazing future leaders in action.

Do the rewards in your organization promote real excellence?

Memorial Day is an important and somber time, a commemoration of the people who have died in the service of this country-a gift whose value cannot be overstated.

One of the most poignant aspects of the holiday is this: the men and women who gave their lives overseas in war put themselves into harm's way knowing that there was a chance they would never live to benefit from their defense of liberty. The countless soldiers who fought in World War II did so while aware there was a decent chance they would not be able to enjoy a world without Hitler. Yet they fought for the freedom of others.

Today's leaders can learn much from that selflessness. When making leadership decisions for their organizations, the job of the leader is to do what benefits the led-helps them perform and makes them better team members and people. In my experience, breakthrough results often come when a leader shows the wisdom to sacrifice his own views or needs in favor of the greater good.

As a leader, what are you sacrificing to make your team better?

Less than two weeks ago America got a new hero: Charles Ramsey, a man from Cleveland, Ohio, who interrupted his enjoyment of a Big Mac to respond to the panicked pleas of a young woman in a neighboring house. As a result, three women who had been abducted and presumed dead for a decade were rescued.

Millions of Americans were charmed by Ramsey's self-effacing speech, but I was more taken with the fact he did something that so many of us are reluctant to do anymore: step across the barrier of our own self-containment and reach into someone else's life. We tend to deceive ourselves that our technology-Facebook, Twitter, texting-means that we're connected to other people. It's an illusion, because it allows us to be connected at our convenience. Real relationships mean getting involved when things are messy, chaotic, uncertain-and real.

In our organizations, we sometimes pursue a sanitized version of involvement with our people. We send memos and communicate via calendars. Leading is a full-contact sport - that means being hands-on, asking questions and caring about the answers, and reaching out to learn who the people we're working with truly are and what they truly need.

Are you sending communications or involved with your people?

That's a question I ask in my upcoming new book, "The Wave." Most corporate cultures define a winning team not only as one that achieves its objective every time but as one that constantly clears an ever-rising bar of expectations. No resting on laurels or congratulating ourselves for a well-fought campaign, folks; if we're not already finding new ways to exceed our performance from last quarter, we're losing.

Not only is that approach not sustainable, it doesn't reflect how people live, perform, and recover. The creative director who's a dynamo of ideas in Q1 might be running a bit dry in Q2. That doesn't mean she's incapable. It means she needs to recharge. People aren't machines.

To increase the wisdom of our organizations, it's important to appreciate that winning teams are those that combine consistent goal attainment with a culture that respects the natural ebb and flow of individual performance. I believe it is not the point to have one stellar quarter, but rather, to grow steadily over ten or twenty years. That long-term growth and performance only happens when we recognize that winning encompasses not just making the sale but making our people better, flaws and all.

How might you redefine "winning" in your organization?

A friend and colleague who lives in the Midwest told me this story about the long, snowy winter that region endured this year: A group of students living near the local university were freezing in their poorly insulated rental house. Not only were they half-buried beneath several feet of snow, but the howling winter winds turned the house into an icebox. Everyone was miserable...until one enterprising soul had an idea.

This young man made a huge pot of coffee and then hustled everyone outside. There, using shovels and plastic storage tubs, they started making bricks of packed snow. Over a period of about six hours, they made and stacked their bricks until they had a snow wall about six feet high around the entire front of their little cottage. They left a small space on one side for a door, packed up their tools, and then went inside and fell asleep.

The next morning, the students woke and noticed that their house was much warmer than it had been. The snow wall not only blocked the wind, but it effectively insulated the house, reflecting back the heat that escaped through the thin walls and single-paned windows. It was brilliant. Local newspapers came out to photograph the icy feat of engineering.

Where one person might see a problem, a wise person sees a solution. As we build and manage teams of diverse people in widely varying circumstances, it's important as leaders to remember that there are many perspectives on the same situations. Nothing is cut and dried. One person's trouble might become another's building material.

How do you encourage your people to look at things from multiple perspectives?

Not long ago, my partner Matt Brubaker was running on the beach in La Jolla, California. He spotted a young seal on the beach waving its flippers and bobbing its head to get attention from passersby, hoping they would give it food. This struck Matt as funny, because the seal had its back to an ocean full of fish. All it had to do was turn around and dive!

In our organizations, it's easy to become so caught up in the pursuit of one objective that we completely overlook the abundance that's all around us. For example, while corporations like Microsoft and Apple spend billions to develop the Next Big Thing, tiny software app companies like Uber and BabelVerse have been tapping into the vast untapped resources of the mobile economy. Uber leverages limo drivers' considerable downtime by letting customers call for high-class rides from their smart phones, while BabelVerse turns foreign language speakers around the world into an army of on-demand interpreters, also accessible via a smart phone app. That's brilliant.

As we try to infuse our organizations with wisdom, it's important to step back from time to time, lift our noses from the grindstone and look around. We might see new opportunities, new customers, new markets and new ways of doing things.

Are you choosing from abundance or sitting with your back to the ocean?

The famous line from the Pogo comic strip goes, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." The above variation seems apt only a few days after the terrible bombing at the Boston Marathon. This awful event has left many people shaken and angered. But where they see fear, I see cause for hope.

Terrorism is unique among the tactics of war in that it doesn't seek to destroy the enemy directly. Instead, it seeks to sow fear, panic, paranoia and hysteria in its victims and make them destroy themselves. In a terrorist's mind, a perfect attack would lead to riots, arrests of suspicious individuals, economic collapse and the breakdown of civil society.

That's not what happened after Boston. If you watch the footage, dozens of people ran toward the explosion-toward harm-to help those caught in the blast. Runners who had just run 26 miles ran two more to Massachusetts General Hospital to donate blood. All over the city, people rushed to get back to their lives even as they sent leads to authorities and showed support for the victims. That's the opposite of panic and hysterical violence. That's courage, reason, restraint and love at work.

Part of wisdom lies in knowing that we have the capacity to be both our own worst enemies and best allies-and to be aware of the times when we're on the verge of letting fear take over. In our organizations as well as our communities, we can react to adverse events either with panic and rage or with calm and compassion. Which we choose determines much about whether we succeed or fail.

Is your organization more prone to panic or positive action?

...do you know where your tax return is? Today is annual tax filing day and like clockwork, tens of thousands of people around the country will wait until the last second and then rush to their local Post Office to get their returns postmarked just before the midnight deadline. It's a ritual.

Human beings crave ritual. Rituals have always been ways to create meaning, promote a sense of order in a chaotic world, and establish community through shared experience. Understanding the meaning they convey however can be a little tricky.

When we observe the behavior or individuals and groups, observing their rituals can be an important window into that understanding. But observation alone isn't wisdom - it's simply noticing. We could observe the lines of late filers, and the slew of anti-tax posts on FB this morning and conclude the vast majority of our citizens are filing at the last minute to protest government spending. Or...

Wisdom involves seeking to understand motives and behaviors, the "whys behind the what" and not just noticing and acting. It could be that this April 15th ritual means that people are busy, or that completing tax forms is complicated and challenging for most, or that we hate giving away anything we earn to anyone, government or vendor. Maybe all of the above and other things as well. Yet, until we get a little deeper and ask why people behave the way they do, we can't understand their motives and values, and therefore can't lead most effectively.

Wise leaders understand the power of rituals, and seek understanding of their true meaning before acting.

What rituals do you notice in your people, and what wisdom do they offer you about what they value?