Match the Work, Not the Gestures

The books for salesmen say you have to make the other person like you, and to do that you have to mirror him. He crosses his legs, you cross yours. He talks slowly, you talk slowly. He says “in principle,” and a minute later you say “in principle.” Then, the books promise, somewhere deep down he’ll decide you’re one of us.

I saw how that works on Don Vincenzo. A man came to him once to sell cash registers, new ones, with a paper roll and a key. The Don sat with his chin in his hand, and the salesman put his chin in his hand. The Don rubbed the bridge of his nose, and the salesman rubbed his. About ten minutes in, the Don leaned back in his chair, looked at his guest for a long while and asked whether his neck was hurting. We didn’t buy the registers that time.

A month later another salesman came from the same firm. This one copied nothing the Don did. He asked to spend a day behind the counter in our laundry. He watched the cashier get muddled over change on Saturdays, who brought the washing in, who picked it up and when. A week later he came back with one question: how much money are you losing on change? The Don bought three registers. Then he kept buying from that man for another twenty years.

What the Handbooks Get Right

To be fair, the books aren’t entirely lying. In 1999 the American psychologists Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh sat people down to talk with a planted partner. With one person the partner quietly mimicked posture and gestures; with another he didn’t. The one who was mimicked later rated the partner as more likeable and the conversation as smoother. The scientists called it the chameleon effect.

The key word there is “quietly.” People copy each other on their own, without thinking, when they’re getting on well. It’s a result of liking, not a lever. Once the copying is noticed, it turns into mockery. The cash-register salesman mixed up cause and effect, and the Don asked about his neck.

Five Years at Someone Else’s Table

The longest lesson in fitting in that I know of came not from a salesman but from an FBI agent.

From the autumn of 1976, for almost five years, Joseph D. Pistone lived in New York as Donnie Brasco, a small-time jewel thief. He didn’t learn to mirror postures. Before going in, he took a two-week course in gemmology: at the FBI’s request a big New York jewellery firm arranged it for him. Because a thief who can’t tell a stone from glass will last in the Family until the first ring. He knew how stolen goods were sold, how much the fence took, how people in that trade talked.

He knew the street prices too. Once he gave a bartender some rings and watches to sell, on condition he got back two and a half thousand. The bartender said there were buyers, but they’d pay less. Pistone didn’t haggle; he just asked for the goods back. He explains it himself: if his stuff was worth 2,500 bucks, he wasn’t going to knock off a cent, and agreeing to 800 would only make people suspicious. Giving in too easily gives away an outsider faster than the wrong word.

And where he didn’t have the knowledge, he kept quiet. In the crew he moved in, absolutely everybody had done time and loved to reminisce about prison. Pistone didn’t invent a prison past for himself; as he puts it, that was an easy way to get burned. A man who has done three years knows which guard is on which floor. So when the talk turned to prison, Donnie listened like an outsider. Honest silence is safer than a made-up story.

They Asked Him In

Pistone didn’t ask unnecessary questions, didn’t push his way up, didn’t ask for money. He waited to be asked in. They asked him in.

A soldier of the Bonanno family, Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero, took him under his wing and vouched for him for years. And the capo Dominick Napolitano, known as Sonny Black, was planning to make Pistone a full member of the family: the agent was, as he himself writes, one step away from being made. He didn’t get there: in the summer of 1981 the FBI shut the operation down, deciding it was time for the agent to get out while he was still alive. The result was more than a hundred convictions. Lefty got twenty years on cases in Milwaukee, Tampa and New York. Sonny Black was killed that same year, 1981, in August, less than a month after the operation closed. They didn’t forgive him for the man he’d been about to make.

Now think about why it worked. Pistone didn’t pretend to be like them; he became useful and easy to read. He spoke the language of the trade because he knew the trade, not because he repeated their words. His gestures didn’t matter. What mattered was that in almost five years he never once got wrong the things insiders never get wrong.

The Bottom Line for You

You want a man to think of you as one of his own? Learn his trade at least well enough to ask one right question. And where you don’t know, keep quiet and listen.

And here is the second half of the lesson, the one Lefty learned too late. The most dangerous man at your table isn’t the one who mimics. You’ll smell a mimic in five minutes, the way the Don smelled that salesman. The dangerous one is the man who knows your business better than your own people, asks for nothing and waits patiently. He might turn out to be the best partner of your life. Or he might turn out to be Donnie Brasco.

That’s why the Family never asked “do you like him,” but “who vouched for him, and who vouches for the one who vouched.” In the office this goes by the dull name of due diligence. Don’t skimp on it. Charm can’t be checked; references can.