Some events make it simple to realize that you have achieved a positive gain on time and money. In these cases, the gain has been immediate, clearly recognized, and sometimes even documented for you. Go to a supermarket, buy something on sale, and there is your money savings recorded for you on your receipt. Easy. Take a shortcut on a journey; a simple glance at your watch tells you how much time you have saved. Easy. Post that unused item in the want ads; someone gives you cash for it. Easy.

Comprehending your time and money gain on communication, however, is not so obvious. This is true for a number of reasons. The actual loss of time and money might never have been documented or considered, so there is no basis for evaluation. The time from initiation to implementation for a communication project can be months, sometimes years, and unless time and money are carefully tracked, there can be an enormous disconnection between the before and after.

I like to think about measuring your time and money gain in communication as a journey. Whenever you take a trip—whether it’s a simple jaunt to the supermarket or an extended vacation—you always know where you are starting from and where you are going. It’s the same way with communication: you must know where you are starting from and where you are going.

Before beginning any communication initiative, first take the time to pound a stick into the ground. Where are you now? Identify and quantify that as clearly as possible. Then, identify where you want to go, your destination, your objectives. Use the markers from your starting point. These objectives should also contain your time and money savings, and your making money quantities. In other words, your return on investment.

Now, go on your journey; launch your communication initiative: your marketing campaign, your employee survey, your newly updated web site, your supporting campaign for a new product or service launch. Whatever it is. Then, periodically, throughout the campaign, assess where you are. You can also use these assessments to consider changes in direction that might help you better get you where you want to go. When you finally reach your destination , you’ll know it.

And you’ll know how much time you have saved, how much money you have saved, and, ultimately, how much money you have made. That’s the value of simple, clear communication: it makes you money.

Certification creates two enormous benefits for our profession and for practitioners. First, certification establishes a sold foundation for the legitimacy and economic contribution of technical communication. Second, certified practitioners clearly demonstrate their expertise as technical communicators, greatly enhancing their value in the marketplace.

Practitioners become certified in six core competency areas:

• User analysis
• Document design
• Project management
• Authoring (content creation)
• Delivery
• Quality assurance

As a result, employers and clients alike will now have a concrete idea of the expertise, contribution, and value that technical communicators bring to the marketplace. STC is developing a page on its Web site dedicated to promoting certification and explaining the value of certified technical communicators.

On 30 April 2010, the STC Board of Directors accepted a business case from its Certification Task Force. This historic event occurred after 35 years of ongoing and difficult discussion. The Society has embraced the idea of certification for technical communicators, and in the coming months will be developing a certification program.

Certification is based on assessing portfolios and work artifacts, not examinations. (In other words, there are no tests.) This method takes advantage of the existing methodology and infrastructure of both the publications competitions and the Associate Fellow and Fellow process. To implement the program, STC is defining assessment criteria for each of these six competency areas, then recruiting a network of examiners to review applications. In the future, as the Body of Knowledge is fleshed out, STC will assess adding an exam-based assessment as another certification method.

Once conferred, certification is valid for three years. To ensure that competencies are kept relevant, certified professionals must become recertified for another three years. As with many other professions, recertification involves completing and participating in educational and professional activities. STC currently has a number of these opportunities available, and will be creating more in the upcoming year.

Member and non-member certification and recertification fees are still being developed, however, these fees will be comparable to certifications programs of similar associations.

The certification task force will report on its process, progress, and future. You can also expect to hear much more about certification in the coming weeks!

Think of your life-changing moments. Rewarding, aren’t they? I had one in the spring of 1995 when two local technical writers asked me to join them and others to start the Vermont chapter of the Society for Technical Communication—STC. Sounds worthwhile. Sure, I’ll join.

And with that simple decision, I embarked on an incredible journey that has enhanced both my personal and professional life far beyond any heights that I could have imagined. To that, I am indebted to STC and its members.

Renewing my membership. I gain so much as an STC member, learning and applying an abundance of skills over these past fifteen years. My career has been enhanced, and my clients have benefited. Membership has opened new venues for me, some that I couldn’t possibly have envisioned. I simply cannot imagine being a professional technical communicator and not belonging to the one organization that supports and promotes that profession—STC.

This is a simple decision for me. I simply rejoin.

The cost of membership. There has been much debate about the dues for membership including belonging to a chapter and a special interest group (SIG). Is STC really worth the price of admission?

I look at this issue two ways. STC dues are about $5.00 a week, the same as a venti espresso drink. Isn’t membership in your chosen professional organization worth that? Not being a member also has its costs: lost benefits, lost access, lost opportunities, lost revenue. And those losses represent a far greater cost than dues.

Giving and receiving. I have given a lot to STC, volunteering for one position or another for every year I’ve been a member. While that might seem a lot, I have received in return far more. Let me enumerate.

Members. STC members are nothing if not passionate. This tells me a lot about the people who join, get involved, practice their profession, and commiserate with other members. STC members are the real deal. They—we—know our profession benefits others. There isn’t puffery or pounding chests. Just pure competence, integrity, genuineness. Case in point: my three newest clients were all garnered through my association with STC and its members. Billings this year alone will exceed many tens of thousands of dollars, with more next year.

My continued membership keeps me in touch with other members, many of whom are my friends. I continually meet other members. I almost always come away from encounters with members with a profound appreciation for that person.

My local chapter. Don’t ever let it be said that a few dozen people cannot impact the world. They can, and we did. At our meetings, we learn from each other. Our local chapter raised the bar for our profession. Employers and prospects look for and prefer STC credentials. Over the years, my company has received a number of contracts because of our STC membership, totalling well over one million dollars ($1,000,000+) in billable services.

Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Early on, I joined the Consultants and Independent Contractors (CIC) SIG. Later, I also joined the Marketing and Instructional Design SIGs. All three are ready platforms for ideas, assistance, perspective, and simple camaraderie. Through the listservs sustained by STC, I have met and discussed much with members from all over the world. Always a helping hand, from people I respect and trust.

Intercom and Technical Communication. Recently, I was instructing a client on how to create meaningful slides (incorporating graphics and text) for their presentations. They balked. “What’s wrong with bullet lists?” They wanted to know. I pointed to six articles from Technical Communication to support my position with valid research, as well as a number of articles from Intercom. That is the value of STC’s publications.

Friends. “So, why aren’t you playing music anymore?” This question, from a close STC friend, spurred another one of those life-changing moments. I didn’t have a good answer. So I bought a new drum kit and began playing again. That led to the genesis of The Open Jam, which led to the formation of The Rough Drafts (see photo), and a number of gigs at STC annual conferences. This is just one anecdote in a procession of joyous encounters with my many STC friends.

Annual conferences. For a professional technical communicator, there is no other venue for collaboration, commiseration, education, repartee, consideration, reflection, growth, interaction, wonderment, and just plain excitement than STC’s annual conferences.

Professionalism. In 2008, I became an STC Fellow. I had been striving for that goal since first becoming a member.

While I am quite proud of my accomplishment, it’s more than just an award. What is most important is the professional that I have become because of that quest, how I am able to apply my expertise, how I have been remunerated, and the contacts I have made along the way.

Over the years, STC has provided the framework for my professional growth. My current level of expertise and professionalism is due in large part to the value of being an STC member.

—Rich Maggiani

Poor communication costs business millions of dollars every single day. Most executives and managers understand this, yet they don’t realize how big a part they play in this miscommunication.

Financial statements do not carry a line item for poor communication, although they should since, with a little effort, it can quickly be quantified.

Communication is vital to the success of your organization. To be most effective, communication must circulate and reach all levels, not just the core.

Different forms of poor communication. Here are but a few:

• Long, unproductive, numbing meetings without a clear purpose or agenda, often reaching no conclusions, result in lost productivity as well as the collective time of everyone attending.
• Poor documentation neglects to mention the purpose of the software or hardware and only explains how it works. Users, however, don’t care how it works; they want to know how to use it!
• Uninspired selling skills and anemic sales presentations showing no interest or understanding of a prospect’s needs, result in missed opportunities and lost sales.

• Rambling, cryptic, and incoherent emails that are misunderstood or ignored, result in wasted time. Often (up to 50% of the time) an email’s tenor is incorrectly perceived, simply because body language cannot be analyzed and tone of voice not perceived; this results in hurt feelings, ill will, and inaction.
• Distracted managers who simply do not or cannot truly listen alienate staff and lower morale. Staff members who realize they are not being listened to and simply patronized, themselves stop communicating.
• Staff members from different generations or gender lack a basic understanding of each other, their communication styles, and preferences. Incomprehensible and inappropriate statements are commonplace. Baby boomers (thinking it’s still the ’70s) and today’s generation (who were not even alive then) simply do not share the same communication foundation.

Poor communication squanders time, wastes effort, erodes loyalty, and loses business.

Squandering time. Poor communication simply takes longer to process and understand, if understanding can be attained. Unnecessary questions are asked, discussions are needlessly lengthy, the communication is recreated, only to be foisted again on a wary audience.

Here’s an example of an email received by a colleague: “The company may need the more accurate methodology since it’s the standard approach employed of the more approximate method that may result in an estimate that underestimates and not on-target estimates.” After a lengthy conversation with the sender, my colleague’s client rewrote the email. Final squandered time for one email: six hours.

Wasting effort. My bank’s CEO recently sent every customer a letter explaining the bank’s checking account overdraft policy: five dense paragraphs. The policy was more onerous than the current overdraft protection plan. Many customers didn’t appreciate the change and called to protest, inundating the bank. The customer service representatives explained why the letter was misleading and inaccurate. As a result, the CEO planned to rewrite and resend the letter. The CEO’s effort fell prey to the 30% of business letters that initially fail.

Eroding loyalty. According to an Accenture study, American consumers returned $13.8 billion in electronics in 2007; Europeans returned $11.5. That’s over $25 billion. Between 60%–85% had nothing wrong; that’s between $15.2 and $21.5 billion in perfectly functional equipment returned. Why? Confusing interfaces, features difficult to access, no customer education, weak documentation were overriding factors—all issues that superb communication could solve. $25 billion! That’s a lot of lost loyalty.

Losing business. The presentation was wonderful, beautiful slides, expertly delivered—all about the expertise of the company who was leading the proposal. Unfortunately, the state agency wanted to know how the company would solve the agency’s problem and support their budget. Instead, the agency got egotistical fluff. The agency, rightly, awarded the contract to another firm; the company came in “second”.

How big a cost? Poor communication cost Merck $253 million after losing their Vioxx trial. Why? The jury was befuddled by Merck’s scientific explanations.

Positive results. Thoughtful, effective communication delivers unparalleled benefits to both you and your audience. Effective communication reaps positive results: increased market valuation and stockholder value; greater employee commitment, involvement, retention, and morale; and stronger customer loyalty. All of which saves you—and makes you—money.

How much is poor communication costing you?

—Rich Maggiani

The Buyers Guide section lists companies that provide a specific product or service; it’s organized into several helpful sections. The Consultant Directory lists over 600 professional technical communicators, all of whom are just an email or a phone call away; many are just a Web site click away. (We are listed on page 53.)

Research has demonstrated that clear technical communication created by professionals who understand the needs of their audiences — your customers among them — return solid benefits: greater customer satisfaction, less technical support calls, increased sales, and fewer returns.

Do you want to know how a technical communicator differs from a technical writer? Go to page 7. Then go to page 9 to learn about the value that technical communication can bring your company. The return-on-investment (ROI) is clear.

The best part of all: the Directory is free! Just go to http://www.stc.org/ and click the link on STC’s home page.

An increasing percentage of the tweets you receive are spam. Twitter is especially vulnerable, given its inherent automation. Anyone can easily follow tens of thousands of people, and then gain a large percentage of followers in return. An easy, ready market for spam from lurid “marketers”.

What does Twitter spam look like? Twitter spam can take many forms. Legitimate companies spam when they endlessly promote their products through dummy Twitter accounts. These accounts often bear no resemblance to the products they pitch. Con artists attempt to shift your money and to gain your identity through a series of shady financial transactions. You are probably wary of these: “Help me access my dead uncle’s $20 million from a backward third-world country and receive a 15% fee.” Still, a small percent click through.

Many times, spam tweets are sent by members with few followers yet following as many as possible. This should be your first tip-off when someone starts to follow you. These people send tweets with blind tiny URLs linked to those click-here-if-you-are-18-years-or-older sites—except that requirement is frequently omitted. These can easily be identified by the busty, cleavage-popping, young lady’s photo on the account.

Then there are the “See how I got 3,000 followers in one afternoon” spammers. Another come-on: “I can show you how to make $1,000,000 by tomorrow afternoon by following this simple method. No, really I can!” Hair removal treatment for women garners a good share of spam tweets. You get the idea.

The quality of tweets. Pear Analytics, a products and services firm based in San Antonio, Texas, conducted a study of tweets. Over a two week period last month, they sampled the Twitter stream every 30 minutes from 11 AM to 5 PM for 10 days. They then organized this sampling of 2,000 tweets into six categories:

“Pointless babble”, 40.55%. Described in the study as the “I am eating a sandwich” tweets. These are the kind of tweets that blindly follow Twitter’s original query, “What are you doing now?” Let’s be honest though: who cares?

“Conversational”, 37.55%. That immediate dialogue, questions, answers, replies, and back and forth better suited for instant messaging. Again, who cares other than the two conversing, and even then…?

“Pass along value”, 8.7%. Retweets passed along from other Twitter members that actually might have some value.

“Self promotion”, 5.85%. Tweets that market the member, generally about products, services, demos, or the companies themselves. Actually, not that large a percentage.

Spam, 3.75%. The unwanted tweets you hoped never to receive.

News, 3.60%. Generally, these are re-tweets from mainstream or alternative media sources. As one wag stated, “It’s sad that news tweets are more rare than spam.”

What to make of all this? Here’s one thought: the vast majority of tweets—81.85%, the total of “pointless babble”, “conversational”, and spam—are virtually worthless. Adding “self promotion” to that total gets 87.7%, although this category could also contain valuable information depending on your point of view. That means that a mere 12.3% of tweets, between “pass along value” and news, contain worthwhile information. Thus, for the sake of argument, one could conclude that approximately seven out of eight tweets are spam or spam-like. That represents a lot of time sifting through your personal twitter stream to garner some real usefulness and value.

What you can do. First, Twitter has been especially proactive in identifying spam accounts. In late July, Twitter simply deleted accounts that automatically follow people. They called it “Correcting follower and following counts.” As a result, counts dropped on many accounts, some precipitously. You can add to this protection by reducing the number of accounts you follow. First, don’t automatically click to follow everyone who follows you. Take the time to check out followers before following them. Block them if you want. If you think they are spammers, don’t send them a direct message or retweet them. Instead, follow the official Twitter spam account: type ‘spam’ into Find People (the account from Twitter HQ uses a Spam can as its photo); click the account’s Follow button. Report suspected spammers to this @spam account. Go to the account’s home page for more tips on thwarting spammers.

As a final resort, consider ticking the ‘Protect my tweets’ check box under Settings/Account. You must then approve anyone who attempts to follow you.

Appreciate the point of Twitter: rapid, immediate communication that enhances your social media experience and educates, entertains, and informs. Anything less than that is unacceptable.

—RICH MAGGIANI

And, as suspected, when Dave arrived in Nebraska, he found the guitar’s neck broken. So Dave complained and asked for compensation. Enter the airline albatross of denial, as any of you know if you’ve ever had to file a claim for damaged or lost baggage. You probably can conclude the results: claim denied. And that was the beginning of United’s nightmare… justifiably.

A number of events occurred after that, the most caustic and influential being a song written by Dave in United’s “honor” and performed by the band.

This video already has had almost 5 million (!) viewings. Subsequently, articles about Dave’s plight appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Independent (British). That’s viral social media at work. The power is tremendous!

So what has come of all this. Well, United donated $3,000 to the Thelonius Institute, a charity that supports jazz. Then, Bob Taylor, the guitar’s maker, gave Dave two free Taylor guitars.The video and resulting publicity has put the Sons of Maxwell on the musical map. So Dave came away fairly well.

How did United fare? Apparently, not so well. Within days of this video being published together with a flurry of related articles, United’s stock dropped 10%, costing shareholders about $180 million.

Social Media: a force for the rest of us.

With your social media goals set, measure your progress to ensure you are on the correct path. To continue with our travel analogy, after being on your journey for awhile, check your map, gauge your progress, consider a different route, a better route, or perhaps even test an intriguing path that appeals to you.

What most matters are the people you meet along the way — you must engage them and influence them to believe in you, to travel with you, to support you. In other words, you want to influence this audience to embrace your brand, embrace your products and services, and ultimately become your customers.

Traditional corporate communication is dead. You cannot do this with traditional corporate speak, the whitewashed prose and polished text that you have traditionally been written for your web site, marketing materials, press releases, and other corporate communiqué. You must engage your audience, entertain them, invite them in, and ask them to participate. It’s then, and only then, that you gain a community that supports and promotes your brand, with its resulting positive effect on sales, profitability, market share, and valuation.

You no longer control your brand. You must fully realize that you are no longer in charge of your brand.

Where once you controlled the message, now you can only influence the message. Think about that for a moment. You do not control your brand. Anybody, and every body, has the ability, literally at their fingertips through the myriad of social media — Twitter, blogs, YouTube, email, texting, forums — to publish their thoughts and opinions of your brand. And there is nothing — absolutely nothing — you can do to stop it.

You must engage and influence. The only thing you can do, and this is the crux of your social media efforts, is to influence the behavior and opinions of your community (and by extension, their communities) to be positive about your brand. Your social media efforts must be personable, real, truthful, appealing, entertaining, but more importantly—human (which is the main reason why our blog is entitled Toward Humanity).

This kind of engagement represents a complete shift in your communication strategy. This is persuasion of a different yet similar sort: to influence your audience to speak for you. It is a core component of your brand. It builds your community who in turn, build a positive and stellar impression of your brand.

That is why you set social media goals, so that you can test your efforts against these goals, evaluate how the journey is progressing, determine whether to stay the course or change routes, even alter your ultimate destination if that is necessary: essentially, to adjust, be agile, and be flexible. In this way, you come full circle in your social media journey.

One of the truest tests of how well you are influencing the greater community is by seeing what they are saying about you, either proactively or reactively. And then, how you are responding to it. Let’s look at two examples.

How not to respond: Domino’s. You’ve probably seen it by now—after all, millions have in the course of a couple of days—the YouTube video (now removed) of two Domino’s employees demonstrating how they “creatively” and unsanitarily assemble a simple submarine sandwich. After watching their video, you wouldn’t want to eat their creation.

Yet while the acts of these two employees were clearly disgusting, their video was engaging: they talked to the camera and connected with their audience as only eye-to-eye contact can. As a result, Domino’s suffered a hugs backlash of angry and disengaged customers. Their sales precipitously dropped.

After deservedly firing the two employees, Domino’s posted a YouTube video from President Patrick Doyle. He blathered corporate speak for two minutes, looking off-screen while reading from a prompter, never once looking at the camera. His voice fluctuated and was emphatic at points, yet this response was bland, flat, and clearly not engaging. His response would have been more effective if only he looked directly into the camera, spoke from memory, curbed the corporate speak, and talked to us as humans.

The better response: Motrin. In an advertisement (print and video) aimed at increasing sales, Motrin directly intimated how physically painful it is for new moms to carry their newborn in a sling. Mothers everywhere were outraged with Motrin for making this connection, incensed that this joyful union between mother and baby was reduced to simple pain. Over the next two days, moms responded with thousands of tweets (using the #MotrinMoms hashtag) and numerous YouTube videos, including one clever parody, calling for a boycott on Motrin products.

Motrin’s response: They stopped running the video ads, wrote an immediate apology, followed in four days with another apology. They owned up to their mistake, said they were sorry for offending moms, and stated they learned their lesson and that they were listening. A human, engaging response. The furor ended three days after it began.

—RICH MAGGIANI

Engaging social media to promote your company is similar to taking a long trip in your car. You must take these four steps:

1. The vehicle you are taking: one you know how to drive.

2. Where you are going: your destination or goal.

3. How you are going to get to your destination; what are the means or objectives, for attaining your goals: the roads to take.

4. Checkpoints along the way: to assess your trip and possibly to make adjustments.

One thing is certain: a long trip does not happen overnight. It simply takes time.

All of these factors about taking a long trip are true about engaging social media, except there are multiple vehicles, goals, objectives, and checkpoints. Let’s look at them individually.

1. Vehicles. When taking a long trip, it’s best to choose a reliable vehicle. In social media, there are many reliable vehicles. Chief among these are blogs (posted from your web site), microblogs (through Twitter), social networks (Facebook being the most popular), and professional networks (LinkedIn by far the largest). There are others, of course, but these vehicles represent a firm foundation for your social media efforts.

Once you choose your vehicles, learn how to drive them. You can easily create a blog on your web site, join Twitter to make an account for your company, sign up for Facebook to create a fan page, and enroll in LinkedIn for a company page and for pages on your key executives, managers, and staff. In fact, you probably already own many of these vehicles. But are you driving them to your greatest advantage? For that, you need to know your destinations or goals.

2. Destinations or goals. These are broad, intangible, even abstract statements of your long-term intentions. Your destinations or goals describe your future expectations, provide direction for your actions (your means or objectives), and focus on end results. Some of your goals might include any or all of the following:

• Build awareness of your brand and enhance your reputation by shaping their perception in the marketplace.
• Generate leads and convert these prospects into loyal customers.
• Interact with your customer community, and influence their behavior.
• Manage customer relations with your prospects and customers.
• Promote your products and services.
• Increase employee morale and empower their collaboration with social media.

You can adapt these goals, add others, or create a list to meet your specific needs. What’s important is that these goals be the ones most important to you, the ones that help you attain your overall company goals.

3. Means or objectives. From your social media goals, enumerate the means for attaining them through the vehicles you are driving. It all works together. The means must be tangible, realistic, and above all, measurable statements of action. They generally fall into three categories: information (what to post); engagement (who is engaging your community); and management (how much time and resources to invest). Make these decisions up front, and all becomes clear.

To be more specific, your means describe the kinds of information—text, images, audio, video, ideas, concepts—to post in your social media vehicles, who is creating them and how, where are they being posted and how often, who is responding to comments, who is interacting with your community, and what are your guidelines for involvement. The means you chooose must directly support your goals.

4. Checkpoints. Once on your social media journey, check at regular intervals to make sure you are still on the right road. This is why your actions must be measurable. Many methods are available. Success, however, depends less on the methods you use and more on what you measure and how well you do it.

Show some return: make money. When all is said and done—your vehicles chosen, your destinations set, your means being implemented—you must be able to answer this question affirmatively: Are we making money? Doing that makes for profitable journeys.

—Rich Maggiani

Would you like to know more about what is going on in your company; about your staff; about your prospects and clients? Then all you have to do is listen.

Ah, but listening is not easy. If it were, more people would do it with verve. But it is just that difficulty that sets those who truly listen apart, and elevates them in the mind of others. People will seek you out because they know you will take the time to truly listen to them. Given that place of honor in their circle of colleagues means that you discover more information faster, are more of a confidant, and gain a deeper association with those around you.

Listening is good for business. How? People feel free to tell you what is really going on in the company, and do not feel they have to gloss over it. And it’s just this kind of in-depth truth that helps you solve problems when they are still small.

There are a number of characteristics to becoming an exceptional listener that are easily within your reach: humility, patience, respect, sincerity, and empathy. You have varying levels of these traits in your character; it just takes a bit of focus to bring them out.

Humility, the misunderstood trait. Probably the most important trait is humility. This seems like a rare trait in business, one that is all too often perceived as weakness. Humility doesn’t mean that you are unintelligent. All humility says is that you don’t know everything, or even every perspective, and that you are willing to admit to that. Listening allows you to receive information that your ego might have already assumed you knew. But you don’t. How could you? No one knows everything. Try this: listen as if your perspective is wrong; think about the different perspective you would take based on what others tell you. Taking this approach can help you gain a deeper understanding of a crucial issue.

Understanding an issue from another’s perspective — taking the second position — is a trait that sets exceptional listeners apart. Listening from the other person’s perspective gains you immeasurable insight into the issue, gains deeper rapport, and can even — gasp! — get you to modify your position or change your mind, even if it’s just a little bit. And to what gain? Clarity.

Patience is a virtue. Or so my mother used to endlessly tell me. However you feel about that cliché, patience truly is a virtue when applied to listening. You must learn to — frankly — shut up! This allows people to talk, allows them to think, allows them to finish their entire thought. When you are quiet, the more people talk — and the more information you get. As Samuel Johnson once blithely stated, “Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.”

Embrace the pregnant pause. Be comfortable with the silence. Be still. Wait quietly.

Awareness. Just by reading this series of position papers on listening makes you a better listener, simply because you are more aware of the value of listening. When you are aware of your surroundings, you’ll be more attuned to when others are telling you something important or relating something that you ought to know. Give them that chance. Just think what you might learn.

Listening demonstrates respect. When you truly listen to someone, you are telling them that they are important, that they have something to say. And when you give respect, you get respect.

Sincerity and empathy. These traits help you connect with people at a deeper level. When people feel that you are genuine and understand their feelings, they feel more secure to tell you the whole truth and complete story.

Listeners are exceptional people. I was once in a conversation with several people. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. Mentally, I took a step back and simply watched the process. As it roiled on, I realized no one was actually listening; that they were all trading stories. How did I know? The same points were made more than once, and no one realized it. Except for one woman: Tracy. She simply moved her head from speaker to speaker. Finally, when everyone had exhausted themselves, one said to Tracy, “Gee Tracy, you haven’t said much.” Actually, she hadn’t said anything at all! “I’m sure you have something to say about this.” And everyone became silent awaiting Tracy’s response. She said, “I’ve been so busy listening to you all that I haven’t taken the time to compose a response.” Then she proceeded to summarize all that had been said so far, and by whom. I’ll never forget that, and neither did the other people in the group. Later, I discovered that Tracy was the person others sought out when they wanted to be listened to. Imagine what she learned.

Getting there. So, you are not quite there with these personality traits? That’s okay; you just need to work on it. Be attuned to how people talk to you, and adjust to be more receptive. Listening is a skill that can be learned, and like any skill, it takes time and a focused effort that is truly worthwhile.

—Rich Maggiani