Reading the Room

A realization emerged in my mind, and in my professional heart, a couple of years ago. The clients who trust me most have no authority over me. The institution that has authority over me has kept me at arm’s length for 29 years. That’s a tough concept to reconcile within a high-performing professional with high-standards exhibiting high-energy in a low-profile, low-authority role in a workplace.

I had to wrestle with this lack of affirmation for a long while, quietly in my car after the podcast episode concluded, during the last set of incline bench press as I’m mentally compartmentalizing all that happened to me in the workday, and even during the comfortable silences with my wife while we walk our dog after dinner in the early evening. I was figuring out a way to rationalize inner Chris that it was okay for work to not give me the trust I desired.

In previous essays I’ve used the word Consigliere. The word entered my mind before I understood it in my internal operating system. I picked it up the way you pick up any good Italian word, more sound than meaning, a little cool on the tongue, always inviting you to wave your hands and put heavy accents on SIG and ERE when imitating one speaking Italian. And for what it’s worth, I’m half-Italian, half-Welsh. The four-syllable Consigliere sat in a the recesses of my mind for years. Then I started paying attention to why I’d kept it, and took the word out for a test drive.

I’ve watched Francis Ford Coppola’s movie The Godfather most of my adult life, and for most of that time I was watching the wrong people. Sonny Corleone, a son of the Godfather, running his mouth in every strategy meeting, emotions out ahead of his judgment. Vito Corleone, the boss at the head of the table, the man everyone came to. It took me six or seven viewings to notice the guy who barely spoke. Tom Hagen, not a blood relative to The Godfather but familia just the same, sat slightly back from the table, present in every scene that mattered, reading the room while everyone else performed in it. He said the least and knew the most. His quiet was never timid. He was fully cocked and loaded, the most dangerous mind in the room precisely because he spent nothing on being seen. It’s funny now that I look back on it...my 20s decade had experiences where I was in dangerous situations. Potential barroom brawls and loud rock concerts with many aggressive attendees in black t-shirts and piercings looking to do anything but sit quietly and observe the musical performance. I learned that the demonstrative, loud one in these situations was not a threat to anyone, he was just a yapping little chihuahua. I scanned the room for the quiet one, the guy watching everything with narrowed eyes, not engaging in the conversational melee, but the one who would make a huge impact when he finally took action.

Speaking of rock concerts, I play bass guitar, so naturally I observed the Consigliere role play out on stage. Every band tells you the same story about attention. The lead guitarist is Sonny, all over the stage, squirting notes into every gap, impossible to ignore. Vito is the lead singer, out front, the voice everyone came to hear. And where is Tom Hagen in all this? He is in the backline on bass, locked in with the drummer, holding the groove, walking the whole song up to the chorus so the big moment lands. Nobody claps for the bass player. The bass player is also the reason the song succeeds. Take him out and the whole thing goes thin and wobbly and nobody can say quite why. I always refer to Todd Snider’s song from the ‘90s Joe’s Blues, “The eyes in the room, they all lookin’ at the star...the butts are all shakin’ to the bass guitar.”

That’s the role I wanted. Not the frontman. Never the frontman. The one at the back who makes the thing work for the people counting on him.

Back to my recent realization. The trust that fuels me doesn’t come down through the org chart. It comes laterally, one client at a time. The one who slides the credit card across the table after I recommend a device upgrade for their life without asking what it’ll cost. The widow who allows me permission to back up six years of her late husband’s tangled accounts and trusts me not to lose a single photograph. The professor who started out sure I was useless and ended up nominating me for an award. None of that has anything to do with my job title, my education level, or what any manager wrote in an annual performance review. People handed trust to me across a table, one room at a time, and it turned out to be the only kind of professional food that ever fed me.

I think I finally understand why trust means so much to me. You don’t hunger for what you already have plenty of. If the institution had trusted me the way those clients do, their trust might feel pleasant instead of essential. It feels essential to me because it’s filling a space the frame left empty for three decades. I could have let that space turn into a wall. For a while, I did. What I built instead was a role designed to receive exactly the kind of trust the frame was never going to offer.

So I made Consigliere a word I use to refer to my work. After 29 years of doing the job with a common title of tech support, I’ve got a name for the guy in the corner who reads the room, holds the groove, and makes things happen for the people who trust him. It’s the role I’ll be doing on purpose when the institution and I eventually part ways, and it’s the one I was quietly doing the whole time.

More later...