One of television’s hottest shows, Bravo’s “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy,” is hosted by a group known as the “Fab Five.”

These five gay guys (or, politically correctly, members of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender – or GLBT – community) have become bigger than Martha Stewart. They are, simply, today’s standard of chic.

And now, the Fab Five’s super-awareness of the latest styles in fashion, food, grooming, culture, and design have come to your workplace. This column serves as fair warning. You better know the Fab Five’s new rules of workplace style, or you risk career death (or at least utter embarrassment). If you ignore the Fab Five, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

But before learning from these new stylemeisters, it is important to remember several other enduring at-work trendsetters who came before them. In the late 1970s, author John Molloy’s book “Dress for Success,” the first business style guide to sell 1million copies, hit a home run when he got office women to wear jackets.

Then Stephen Covey came along in 1981 with “One Minute Manager,” which started the time-management obsession, and spawned Covey binders and Day-Timers.

Since then, “One Minute Manager” has sold nearly 8 million copies. Then in 1987 Donald Trump gave us “The Art of the Deal,” which made greed, ambition, and a ruthless negotiating style fashionable, and set the stage for 2004’s smash-hit reality show “The Apprentice.”

If you have never seen the Fab Five, you are at a severe disadvantage to your more chic compatriots. Luckily, through the magic of this column, you now can get a bit more on-trend. Remember each of their mantras, because they represent five new on-the-job attitudes currently reflected in your workplace.

Jai Rodriguez is the Fab Five’s self-described “culture vulture.” His favorite saying is, “When making an entrance always remember three things: face, attitude, and drama.”

For Jai, body language, vocal timbre, and facial expressions are the only languages that matter. And whether we will admit it or not, he is largely right. In business, your words have much less impact than your bearing. Donald Trump can command a board room with little more than a scowl. And even if you are not Mr. Trump, a commanding entry into a room always turns heads and commands respect. A mousy entry guarantees you what you deserve to be – anonymous.

Kyan Douglas, the group’s “grooming guru” says, “If you can actually carve your name in the bottom of your bathtub, you probably need to clean it.”

Some mothers still teach their kids that cleanliness is next to godliness. And some anthropologists theorize that species that are hygienically challenged actually become extinct way before their cleaner cousins. So, go clean that coffee cup. Go do the dishes in that office sink. And, by the way, go get a haircut. You may be saving yourself from extinction.

Ted Allen, the “food and wine connoisseur,” says, “Life’s too short to drink cheap booze.”

This is hardly an endorsement for drinking on the job. It simply means that quality matters, in your communications (remember that spelling error in that e-mail you sent yesterday?), clothes, or cocktails.

Carson Kressley, the “fashion savant,” claims that President Bush is the man most in need of a fashion make over because he wears “far too many black suits and red ties.”

Today’s chic business person has variety in their wardrobe: some colors, some patterns, some sweaters. In fact, even those who wear uniforms are getting several variations. Variety is the spice of life. But remember, of course, that “variety” stops at tank tops and flip flops.

Thom Felicia, the “design doctor,” says that his pet peeve is “bright, bad lighting.”

If you are the boss, or you want to be, the Fab Five’s advice would be to change the lighting in your workspace to anything other than overhead fluorescent tubes or bare light bulbs – preferably something on a dimmer. Good lights allow you to manipulate the mood to suit your goal – whether it is to wake ’em up, calm ’em down, or make ’em buy.

This week’s final reminder is: Never underestimate the on-the-job power of fashionable cable television shows.

Which brings us to next week’s column when “On The Job” will examine job-related lessons to be learned from HBO’s mega-hit “Sex and The City.”

My Trump-O-Nomics column returns in late January to cover season three of NBC’s Donald Trump reality show “The Apprentice.”

Mr. Whitehead is an international workplace expert. He can be reached at trumponomics@aol.com.