The Whiner, the Gossip and the Rest
Nicola Gentile, our old acquaintance, remembered the general meetings of the American Mafia at the start of the century with contempt. According to him, the general assembly was made up of men who could barely read or write. What impressed the hall most was the gift of speaking eloquently. The better a speaker could express himself, the better they listened to him, and the more surely he could steer the opinion of those yokels wherever he wanted.
A hundred years have passed, and I’ve been to meetings that were exactly the same. Only the people sitting there wore good suits and had diplomas.
Every team, whatever it is, has its types. The talker, the whiner, the gossip, the bully, the quiet one, the one who’s always hard done by. You need to know them on sight, because each of them affects the business in his own way, and not always the way it looks. Let’s go through them.
The Talker
The talker speaks better than anyone. At meetings people listen to him, his ideas seem the brightest, his reports the most convincing. Sometimes there’s real work behind it. More often, only words.
The danger of the talker isn’t that he lies. Often he believes what he says. The danger is that the team starts judging people by how they talk rather than by what they do. And then the quiet worker who does the most gets the least, and the talker who does the least gets the most. A year later you have a team of talkers, and nobody’s working.
There’s only one cure: judge by results. Not by how a man described his work, but by what was left once the work was done. Salvatore Contorno told the judges that in his world the less you said the better, and half a sentence was enough to tell whether a man was one of us or not. Answers that ran too long, he said, harmed a man of honour’s reputation. The office isn’t so strict, but the idea holds: a man who needs a lot of words to explain what he’s done has most likely done very little.
The Whiner
The whiner is always in trouble. Something has always happened to him, he’s always short of money, time, people, and it’s always somebody else’s fault. And the whiner has a goal he often doesn’t recognise himself: to load his troubles onto you.
Once, when Lefty was staying with Pistone in California, his daughter rang him: his son Tommy had been arrested for armed robbery in Manhattan. He had tried to rob a man carrying diamonds, and while running from the police he’d opened fire. In that world this in itself was no tragedy. The trouble was that the man he’d robbed turned out to be a made man from another family. Lefty went to pieces at once. In Pistone’s account he moaned about what a stupid ass the boy was, said there’d be a sit-down now, and that he needed to lay his hands on a ton of money: did Donnie have any ideas? Pistone notes that Lefty was trying to squeeze money out of him, though he obviously had plenty himself. That’s how these people are made: even when their son is in mortal danger, they look for money elsewhere before they look in their own pocket.
You should hear the whiner out: sometimes there’s real trouble behind the complaint, and it has to be dealt with. But then ask him one question: what do you suggest we do? A whiner who’s asked for a solution either finds one or stops whining in front of you. Either way suits you.
The Gossip
The gossip knows everything about everyone and tells it to everyone. He rots a team from inside: people stop trusting each other because they don’t know what will be said about them. The usual advice is to get rid of the gossip. But there’s another way, which I picked up from Pistone.
Once he was helping a colleague, Agent Larry, worm his way into a crew in Los Angeles. It was slow going. And then in the restaurant where the crew was sitting there turned up a New York bartender called Johnny, who knew Pistone as Lefty’s man. Pistone went over, said hello, said Larry was a pal of his. And he writes that he knew Johnny would blab to the whole crew about the associate from New York that Larry hung around with, which meant Larry was all right too. Things took off for Larry straight away.
The gossip is a channel. He spreads everything he hears. If you know he’s a gossip, you can decide what to send down the line. Good news you want everyone to hear. Praise for someone that’s better delivered indirectly. Just never say anything in front of a gossip that mustn’t get around. And if the gossip starts spreading lies that poison the team, then it’s a different conversation: face to face, short, and for the last time.
The Bully
The bully is looking for an excuse to pick a fight. He tests everyone around him, especially the new ones. In Goodfellas, mind you, this is a film, there’s a famous scene: Henry Hill tells Tommy he’s funny, and Tommy suddenly asks him what he means, funny how? Funny like a clown? He amuses him? The whole table freezes until Tommy laughs. It’s a joke, but a minute later you understand that with this man jokes are never just jokes.
You remember Mirra, who promised in front of everyone to cut Pistone up. Same type, only the real thing. The bully keeps the team in fear, and fear is bad glue: it holds while the bully’s around and falls apart the moment he turns his back. Don’t hire a bully. And if you already have one, put him in his place straight away and in person, the way Pistone did on that walk down Madison Street. If that doesn’t work, part company.
The One Who Listens
And the last type, the most underrated. The man who knows how to listen and promise nothing.
Saviano describes the Neapolitan “ghosts” who take the clan’s wages round to the families of jailed camorristi. The complaints they hear from the wives! About the rent, about children failing their exams, about other wives whose husbands are craftier and have risen higher. While the women lament, the “ghosts” repeat in a monotone, “I understand, I understand.” They let them get it all out, and at the end they say something like, “It’s not up to me. I just bring the money. I don’t decide anything.”
That’s a high art, and every team needs at least one such person. Someone who can hear out a disgruntled man without fanning his grievance, without promising what he can’t deliver, and without passing the complaint on in a distorted form. A person like that puts out more fires than any boss. Value him.
The Bottom Line
Hear the whiner out and ask him what he suggests; value the one who can listen and not promise. When all’s said and done, at any meeting, as Gentile observed, people listen to whoever talks best. Your job is to pay whoever works best.