Leadership is not about sitting and presiding, it's about a going somewhere. To be buoyant, you must not only ignite passion around a common quest, you must also mobilize your team to take a journey with you toward a common destination, or what I call a "real ambition."

Once you reach people on an authentic emotional level, they will reward your faith in them with their belief in you, and they will mobilize to get the job done.

The secret is to be prepared, to draw on the strengths of the people around you, and most importantly, to instill confidence that your team will step up and find a solution.

First, define your credo- the belief system of the organization. Secondly, define your real ambition, or where do you want to go as a collective community.

It is so easy to "calibrate" -that is, given the pressures on a smaller company to redefine in less ambitious terms- that which you are in business to accomplish. The moment this happens the downward spiral begins.

Change management is kind of a weird concept to me. We can' t control events any more than we can control the weather. But we control how we deal with it and we can control the opportunities that these moments of change create.

What I've come to realize is that emotional intelligence, which I define as buoyancy, was the only way I knew how to lead, and is, in my option, the only way to inspire real change.