Welcome back to the Look and Sound of Leadership, an ongoing series of executive coaching tips

designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the way you want to be perceived.

I'm Tom Henshel, your executive coach, and today we're talking about staying afloat

in a shit storm.

Rana had reason to be upset.

Her reputation for making large-scale sales was well-known.

She'd been hired by a company and placed on a division leadership team that had been

together for years, in some cases decades.

That leadership team, which included women, had no interest in welcoming this outsider

who was supposed to boost their performance.

Any success she generated they figured could only reflect badly on them.

During our coaching sessions, Rana told me she found the team's blatant displays of

disrespect appalling.

Over and over they would tell her flat-out her ideas were bad and wrong, although they

knew she had done it before, which is why the company had hired her.

When one of her ideas actually got approved, the team simply ignored it and continued doing

what they had always done.

At one session while she was telling me yet another galling incident, she sighed and said,

every conversation with every one of them feels like a battle.

I am tired.

She spoke those powerful feelings quite neutrally.

She went on saying, you know, some days I just stop working.

...