True buoyant leaders can never communicate in percentage points, or charts and figures. First and foremost, they must be storytellers, communicating with their hearts, not heads.

When your people have determined that you understand their lies in their hearts and are dedicated to their functional wellbeing, they will compensate for your weaknesses and shore up your strengths.

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.

Buoyant leadership is not a management technique, it's a leadership principle based on the belief that leading isn't presiding, it's taking people on a journey, and on any hero's journey there will be a setback.

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.

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."

What can be seeds of destruction can also be seeds of greatness.