Game Face

I’ve been told more than once that I was hard to read. Distant. Unapproachable. That my blank stare made someone nervous or questioned my motives. As a leader, that can be both an asset and a liability.

“Boy, you have a hell of a poker face,” my boss at Putt Putt said. I was fifteen. He was teaching me to upsell from single games to a ten pack ticket. “Don’t say anything once you’ve made the offer.”

When I interviewed to work at Disney, they flew me out to Los Angeles, put me up in a hotel, and dropped me in the C-suite with two secretaries and a leopard print couch.

“You don’t say much, do you?” the executive remarked.

In reality, I was petrified. Afraid of being exposed as a fraud. Afraid I didn’t belong in that room.

I shook my head no, and waited him out. While sweat trickled down my back and my hands shook under the table, he negotiated with himself, offered me more than I was expecting, and a generous move package to boot.

I’m sure I learned it watching my father. He spent years managing a department store, talking to customers and employees without ever betraying what he was really feeling. He nodded along, while a Winston burned on the counter between him and whoever he was talking to.

He rarely raised his voice, and I don’t ever recall him losing his temper in public. But I remember how he would adjust his glasses and clench his jaw when a customer walked away angry.

“You can’t please everybody Billy,” he explained. “But you can’t let them know that.”

After school or on weekends I would hang out at the store, waiting for him to finish up and give me a ride home. I would wait in the customer service department where portraits of all the managers hung.

To me his framed picture looked like a different person than the one I knew. Hair slicked back. Suit and tie. A starched collar barely hiding razor stubble along his neck. The corner of his mouth turned up, not quite in a smile. More like he knew something you didn’t.

Once an assistant manager who worked under my father saw me looking at the pictures.

“What do you think of your father’s photo?”

“It’s cool.”

“That’s his game face.” he chuckled. “Your father puts that on when he’s planning to win.”

Outwardly, he was always in control, never rattled when things didn’t go his way. Quiet. Observing. Clocking everything and filing it away for later. A bad day meant he turned inward, smoked an extra cigarette or two, and relied on a few drinks to soothe the edge. Looking back, I realize he was probably petrified too.

But that emotional control comes with a price. It did for my father. And at times, it has for me too.

Once for Halloween, I wore a pull over Chewbacca mask with fake fur and white fangs. I loved that mask but wearing it made it hard to breathe. I figured out that I could take it off walking between houses, and slide it back on for “Trick or Treat.”

As my career progressed, my game face became that mask. I wore it to protect myself, but the longer I did, the harder it became to breathe.

My wife says I like the perception of being unreadable. That, deep down, I enjoy keeping people guessing. That I use it to my advantage at work. To her, it’s a bit of smoke and mirrors, my “Jedi mind tricks.”

“Once you get to know him” she deadpanned at a party “he’s an easy read.”

She has an unfair advantage, I took the mask off for her a long time ago.

In negotiations, the ability to sit in uncomfortable silence pays dividends. But that silence can unsettle a team if you sit in it too long, trading connection for the upper hand. If people can’t read you, they will write their own story. And the story they write is rarely generous.

A while back I was asked to speak in front of a few hundred people, something I generally hate doing. I had worked at the company for a number of years. I was in the C-suite by then and didn’t have a personal connection with the majority of the employees. I was tolerated because of my position but I don’t know that I was liked.

When I sat down to write the speech I remember thinking I had an opportunity to take my mask off. Recently an employee died, and the company had barely mentioned it.

Rather than avoid it, I leaned in and I talked about him as a real person, and what his passing had meant to me, and to the company. I choked up when I mentioned his name. I felt the familiar urge to clench my jaw and wait the moment out but I didn’t. For once they saw the real me. More than one person told me they were moved by what I said too.

I don’t know if anyone told my father they couldn’t read him. I’m not sure he would have thought about it much if they did.

I think about it a lot. I still put on my game face sometimes, it’s a hard habit to break. And honestly, it’s comforting to know that I can. But I don’t wear it all the time. I’ve learned to leave it off long enough for people to see the person underneath. Even if that means letting them see me sweat.

This One’s Called… Game Face.