Reading the Room

Holding the groove, and the trust that never came down the org chart.

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 hard thing to reconcile when you bring high standards and high energy to a low-profile, low-authority seat.

The realization surfaced a couple of years ago, and I wrestled with the lack of affirmation quietly in the car after a podcast episode ended or during the last set of incline bench press in the gym, compartmentalizing everything the workday threw at me. I mulled it over in the comfortable silences with my wife while we walked the dog after dinner. I was working out how to convince inner Chris that it was okay for work to withhold the trust I wanted.

In previous essays I’ve used the word Consigliere. It 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 land heavy accents on SIG and ERE when you imitate someone speaking Italian. And just for the record, I’m half Italian, half Welsh. The four syllables sat in 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 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 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 cocked and loaded, the most dangerous mind in the room precisely because he spent nothing on being seen.

It’s funny to look back on now. My 20s had their share of dangerous rooms. Bar fights that almost happened, loud rock concerts packed with aggressive guys in black t-shirts and piercings looking to do anything but sit and watch the band. I learned the demonstrative loud one was never the threat. He was a yapping chihuahua. I scanned for the quiet one, the guy watching everything with narrowed eyes, staying out of the conversational melee, the one who would land a huge impact when he finally moved. Little did I know that I was the quiet one in many cases.

Speaking of rock concerts, I play bass guitar, so of course I watched the Consigliere role play out on stage too. Every band tells you the same story about attention. The lead guitarist is Sonny, prancing 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 Tom Hagen? He’s 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, but 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 know this because I used to wear a black t-shirt while playing live that said, in simple white letters, “You would notice if I stopped playing.” Todd Snider nailed the dynamic in Joe’s Blues back in the ‘90s, the way a crowd fixes its eyes on the star up front while its hips answer to whatever the bass is doing.

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 that 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, no questions about the cost. The widow who gives 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 review. People handed me that trust 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 this 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 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 Consigliere became the word I use for the work. After 29 years under the 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...