Your Office Tells Me Everything I Need to Know About Your Leadership

(and Perhaps Things You Don’t Want Me to Know)

Your office is the most obvious outward sign of how internally developed you are as a school leader. Why? Because we all create our external environments to match our inner consciousness – to reflect how we see the world. Everything about your office is a communication about what you think your job is and the work you’re supposed to do in that job. You’re hiding nothing. Your external reflects your internal. So what does your office say about you? Calm, present and in control, or crazed and out of your mind?

And What’s With All the Kitschy Decor?

It’s the question I find myself repeatedly asking my school leader clients and after 25 years, I think I finally know the answer. You all started out as teachers and you used to love to decorate your classrooms. (C’mon, admit it – you loved it!) You used to come in on your own time; use your own money. “Oh, now it is Christmas!” “Oh, now it is Easter!” ”It’s the first day of school. It’s the last day of school!”

But you’re not a teacher anymore and you don’t have a classroom, so what most of you have done is taken your office and turned it into a little museum dedicated to you. And every time you walk into your office, you walk into the YOU Museum. “Oh look..there’s my picture with the president, next to the picture of my tournament winning fish, beside the apple gifted to me by my first grade class, below the framed banner from the year our school’s team won the state championships.” Who doesn’t want to spend time in the YOU Museum?

Get Out of Your Office and Into the Classroom

The problem is you’re spending more time in the YOU Museum than you are out in classrooms making sure your students and teachers are getting educated, trained and developed. Your YOU Museum has you, and everyone else, confused about what your actual job is.

Want a New Future? Let Go of the Past…

If you want a new future – one that includes spending significant time in classrooms, leaving work by 5:00pm, taking care of your well-being, and enjoying a satisfying personal life outside of work – start by letting go of the past in your offices. Let go of your YOU Museum! It’s your attachments to the past that keep you rooted in the past.

By the way, everything in your office is already on its way to someone else. You came into this world with nothing and you’re leaving this world with nothing, and the term enlightenment literally means “to lighten up.” Everything in your office is temporary, so you might as well be the one to get rid of your own crap, rather than leaving it to your heirs.

How to Begin?

Consider each item in your office and ask yourself: “Would I take this home with me and display it in my living room?” If not, then throw it away. Or put the stuff in a box, mark it with an expiration date, and stow it in your garage. If one day you happen to come across the box and it’s way past the expiration date, throw the entire box away unopened, because if you open the contents of the YOU Museum, you start the clock all over again.