Flight Attendants at Singapore Airlines. Source: Wikipedia.org
Fronting is the requirement to represent in speech and body language the interests of others who have a specific lexicon and level of enthusiasm they want you to employ.
Most of us have heard writer David Sedaris’ story of gaining seasonable employment by becoming one of Santa’s elves in Macy’s New York store. It’s funny in part because we know that it cannot be easy for a sardonic man to put on green tights and prance around in fake snow. The job comes with the built-in need to be a happy supplicant to overstimulated children and demanding parents. As Sedaris first explained it on NPR’s This American Life, he mostly did his part. But each time we read or hear the tale we are aware of the yawning gap between the prickly man and the fantasy of simple innocence he’s required to enact.
This imperative to perform in a non-congruent role has a name: fronting. It’s a handy term because it identifies one cause of the angst we experience when a communication task seems daunting. Specifically, fronting with apparent conviction is often a lie, made worse if we’re born with a strong sense to recognize our own hypocrisies.
Formally, fronting is the requirement to represent in speech and body language the interests of others who have a specific lexicon and level of enthusiasm they want you to employ. It’s the primary job skill for work in customer service, sales, teaching, lawyering, and most forms of inter-organizational communication. Typically, in manufacturing engineers will front and protect each other, not necessarily revealing departmental differences to the sales people one floor up. Professors front for their disciplines to students or deans. Lawyers remain the very picture of client loyalty, even when they have significant doubts. And let’s not forget restaurant servers, who usually know enough to be more optimistic about the food coming out of the kitchen then simple devotion to the Truth would allow.
There is an obvious performance aspect to all this. Professional actors front so well that they seem to become their characters. Who knew that actress Alexis Bledel hated coffee? Her character dutifully carried a paper cup of the stuff with her everywhere in the hundred and fifty caffeinated episodes of The Gilmore Girls. The rest of us are simply amateurs, and often uncomfortable with the gap between our assigned roles and the authentic person we claim to be.
There is some evidence that airline attendants carry around more fatigue than most of us, partly because fronting for air-carriers today means remaining upbeat in the face of the countless real and perceived affronts to passenger dignity. Look carefully, and you can almost see them straining to keep their frustrations out of view. It can be very stressful to serve the interests of an organization if we believe it betrays a core value.
The most difficult kind of fronting is when an individual is induced to deliver as their own what is essentially another’s message. It’s the burden of allowing oneself to seem to be the active agent in an exchange. Thus spouses and partners will sometimes ask the other to represent themselves as a committed believer to a point of view, when no commitment exists. One instructs the other about what to say, as in “When you call the Fredericks back, be sure to remind them that we are opposed to attending any event that. . . [Insert the offending feature here]” Whatever principle is at stake, it is the protesting partner who has passed along the task of an impassioned reply that the other may not share. Couples provide this stress-inducing service to each other all the time.
There is an interesting final irony about fronting. My impression is that its burdens are eased if a person is wearing a uniform. The official garb of an organization implicitly says to all clients and customers, “I am performing my assigned role. I have clothed myself in the firm’s attitudes, but know that underneath I am still my own person.” A policeman has sartorial support to claim that the ticket he is giving you is simply an application of the law. Besides, who would quarrel with anyone with both a gun and a club?
Somehow we are going to have to get beyond celebrating the unilateralism that is our preferred rhetoric.
Lawrence Wright’s book on the intense negotiations that led to the historical Camp David Accords is a timely indicator of what is so frequently missing in our politics. Thirteen Days in September (2014) documents the efforts of President Jimmy Carter to find a way out of the chronic Arab/Israeli impasse, working with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat as his partners. Without doubt the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize had—and still has—the instincts of a peacemaker. By contrast, prior to the negotiations in 1978 Begin and Sadat had contributed more than their share to the periodic blood-letting that still defines the disputed borders that surround the Sinai Peninsula. In modern usage both would have justifiably been labeled terrorists. And yet Carter put his already shaky presidency on the line to cloister these foes in the mountains of western Maryland. There was only an outside chance that Begin and Sadat could be induced to produce a lasting peace.
It was the ultimate act of political courage. Presidents and congressional politicians rarely put themselves on so uncertain a course unless there are guaranteed outcomes. And that’s a problem. A politician who won’t risk failed efforts at conciliation is little more than a poseur: a pretender to the role of policy-maker.
The challenge of negotiating differences is made worse because of an old American habit of honoring heroes who are supposedly unsullied by the impulse to compromise. We cherish the self-made person, the inner-directed leader, the lone single agent who rejects anything less than what they brought to the bargaining table. This preference plays out in the narrative tropes that show up in our love of John Wayne’s film characters or James Bond’s free-style execution of British foreign policy. We like our heroes to be dominant, assertive, fearless and ready to bolt at the first suggestion that they might make a concession. And so they continue to come in waves of narratives that celebrate intellectual unilateralism: everyone from cinema superheroes, to larger-than-life thinkers like Apple’s Steve Jobs. Even the small screen cherishes the mini-rebellions of office workers stuck in the anonymity of drab cubicle farms.
Our preference for the defiant loner has grown so great that words to describe the team player now read like labels of surrender. “Compromise,” “concession,” “conciliation,” and “mediation” all carry the odor of appeasement. And so our interest in performing the rhetoric of defiance is self-defining; its a cheap way to create a persona suggesting “strong values” and ostensibly settled thinking. Even history’s great conciliators—among them: Nelson Mandela, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln—seem more distant than the characters we conjure up to illustrate “decisive” and “uncompromising” leadership. One can only guess at what former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had in mind when he called Russia’s increasingly dictatorial Vladimir Putin a true “leader.” The statement is a reminder that unearned certainty can be the perfect sign of a fool.
Carter’s reputation is always caught in a vice of opposing impulses. His willingness to listen to all sides makes him look weak. And yet the rhetorical opposition rituals we seem to favor have the effect of releasing their participants from any obligation to find common-ground with others. It’s an unhelpful kind of opaqueness that fits our age of self-absorption. But it comes at the expense of the chance to promote joint action and shared beliefs.
If we are wondering where to begin, I suggest that we reconsider the kinds of people we want to serve in legislative offices. Deliberative bodies require deliberators. And yet our Congress is filled with self-styled media stars who show little interest in finding ways to attain mutual consent. They show up for their close-ups in hearings. But they are often absent from caucus rooms where differences must get hammered out.
Somehow we are going to have to get beyond celebrating the unilateralism that is now our preferred rhetoric. It’s a recommendation that especially holds for our chosen leaders, but also for most of us as we weigh the need for ideological purity against the more functional need to work with others.
