Do you talk too much? Most don't realize the damage they do to themselves when they do.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: ON MANAGEMENT - Column

Harry, how much time will you need for your part of the presentation?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Harry, a department head with a small company, replied he would need 20 minutes. His fellow department heads rolled their eyes when he wasn't looking because they knew better. Harry could never say in five words what could be stretched to 50. He ultimately took 40 minutes.

It wasn't the end of the world. The work got done. But nobody wanted to spend a lot of time with him. The immediate reason was simple: If you could put a stopwatch on Harry and the rest of the people in a conversation, you would see he did up to 80 percent of the talking.

The negative for his listeners was that they would get bored, tune him out and miss, many times, whatever it was that he had to say. If he were giving a presentation as a middle manager in his company, he would capture his audience in the beginning and lose them by talking two or three times as long as he should.

Harry (under another name) worked for me for a number of years. He was competent in every way except this. The negative for him as a manager was basically his group members and peers avoided getting into situations where they got cornered and had to just wait him out. Really, no one seemed to think that it was worth talking to him about. No one thought it would hurt him professionally; it was just Harry.

But it did hurt him. Somehow he never seemed to make the cut when we were looking for someone to promote. The people in his group often wanted out; that is, when an opening would come up in another department, the upwardly mobile people working for Harry tried to get transferred. I think they were just looking for a better environment.

I tried to talk to him a couple of times. He would...