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 Henschel, your executive coach, and today we're talking about

your workspace as your calling card. Cynthia was a CFO whom I'd only heard about. Her boss, the CEO, had asked me to warm her up. When I arrived

for my first coaching session, still not having met her, I was invited to wait for her in her office, and almost immediately I

understood why she needed warming up.

There wasn't one personal item in her entire office.

There wasn't a picture on the wall that wasn't from the corporate

art bin. There wasn't a diploma. There wasn't even a book that wasn't a binder. The room was

telling me that the person who worked there was unavailable and well defended. was

unavailable and well defended.

The flip side of that story is the young manager at one of the studios,

you'll guess which one in a minute,

whom I'd been coaching for a while. The goal for his

coaching had been to polish him for a promotion. Our work had gone well,

especially getting him to be taken more seriously by his peers. Then I visited his workspace. It was

overflowing with all things Taz, as in the Tasmanian devil, one of Bugs Bunny's

arch- enemies. There were TAS lunchboxes and action figures and

animation cells and toys, and he wondered why he'd had trouble being taken seriously.

In theater and film, set decoration is an art.

Nothing gets placed on a set by accident.

The grimy curtains in the dank New Orleans apartment of a streetcar named Desire tell us as much

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