I worked for a couple of years with a gentleman in the chemical industry in Mexico. I was around 30 at the time, he was about 10 years older. I was his German tutor, and, as in many of my classes, I ended up learning far more from my student than he did from me.

Fernando S., let us call him that, already spoke very fluent English, some Dutch, and had a reasonable level of German which he wanted to improve on. So we got together three times a week and began to work.

When I started with him he was head of the marketing department of a multinational company in Mexico.

You probably know the kind of people you meet for the first time and you just feel okay, at ease. There aren't too many of them about, but Fernando S. was one of them. I consider it a mayor characteristic of effective leadership, having this special gift of making people around you feel comfortable. It's the emanation of an attitude that recognizes that you can't lead without followers and that every follower is a potential leader.

After we got to know each other a little better, Fernando S. began to tell me about his job, his goals and challenges; he opened up.

At that time he began to have mayor problems with his immediate boss, a conflict that had all the hallmarks of a classic clash of personalities. I never met his boss, but by then I knew that he, Fernando S., wasn't particularly skilled at following orders which just didn't make sense to him. And he was being told frequently just to do as he was told. That's not easy for anybody, and it was impossible for my student. But the boss being the boss, Fernando S. lost.

He didn't get fired, that would have been too expensive. But for the next 6 months our meetings took place in an obscure, last century building, 10 blocks away from the corporate offices of the company he worked for. Fernando S. was now technical consultant to a department nobody had ever heard of, working in an office which used to be a meeting room, and still looked like one, and had to do without a secretary. And he still made me feel good.

He kept doing his work, which was some kind of sinecure job, showing up diligently every morning, writing reports, giving 'technical advise', participating in meetings, while his enemies waited for him to quit. That never happened. And he continued to make me feel special when I worked with him. It wasn't his secretary who offered me a coffee now, remember, he had none. He prepared it himself.

To make a long story short, Fernando S. is now in charge of the most lucrative product line his company sells, working both from corporate headquarters in the U.S. and Mexico-City, supervising production, sales and marketing worldwide. And he still makes me feel good.

It sounds like a cliché, but life is full of up's and down's. And we all have to deal with mood-swings and negative emotional states, but a leader can't afford to take his people with him on that roller-coaster ride. It's relatively easy to be excited one moment because targets have been met on time and depressed the next because the world economy is going for a downturn. It takes skill to maintain (at least outwardly) a balance, where the glass is neither half-empty nor half-full, but just is.

A leader reflects objectivity not only when dealing with production quotas, but by managing and influencing his or her own emotional states effectively.