After reading a column in the Telegraph a week or two back, I couldn’t resist the urge to do something with what I’d learned about the definition of candlepower.

“One candlepower is defined by law as the light produced by a pure spermaceti candle weighing a sixth of a pound and burning at a rate of a quarter of a Troy ounce per hour.”

Try working that into your next dinner party conversation! For good measure, talk about pecks, bushels, rods, and chains, too.

The columnist was railing about the difficulty he had figuring out which replacement light bulb he should buy—a job that was once pretty simple, but not so much anymore

Bulb (incandescent) or tube (fluorescent)? How bright should it be:25 watts (fridge)? 40 watts (back porch)? 60 watts (reading lamp)? 100 watts (suitable for an operating theatre)? There used to be only a few base sizes, until IKEA came along. Suddenly you had a choice of “warm” fluorescent or “daylight” fluorescent tubes. You could also be daring and buy a black light, handy for viewing a velvet painting of a sailing ship or seeing who’d had dental work.

Today, incandescent bulbs are mostly extinct, but that doesn’t limit your decisions. At the hardware store, you’re confronted with a bewildering array of bulbs. The packaging refers to lumens, CFLs, and LEDs. Deciphering this new code is akin to translating the Rosetta Stone.

Ditto for “horsepower” if you’re a gearhead. Horsepower has been retired in favour of Newton-Meters.  A 500HP engine is powerful. This equals 367749.375 NMs – but who really knows? 

Which brings me to today’s topic: wanting to cast a little light on professional business conduct.

What is it? you ask. You won’t likely find a definition in the dictionary, and everyone has their own opinion. But judging from what members tell me, professional business conduct comprises civil communication, timeliness, and consideration for others.

Expected professional conduct should be agnostic of business models, other members’ foibles and characteristics, the mood of the day, and the temperature of the deal. Deciding whether someone has met one’s standard isn’t like marking a math test where the answer is either right or wrong.

Business conduct is governed by what we think is right, but that may not be the same as what others think is right. And the chasm between the two is where misunderstanding, hurt, offence, and anger can live.

This is what I hear from members. Pretty much all of them tell me their colleagues could use a civility tune-up. But what’s meant by that? While the REALTOR® Code mentions civility and the Golden Rule, it doesn’t define the conduct we should expect from a colleague. You might think “not being annoying” would be a good standard. Maybe. But “not being annoying” can be a tad difficult to nail down. Being in the people business, we have to be prepared to deal with all kinds, from nice to not-so-nice.

The old adage about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is more relevant today than it ever was as so we all face so many pressures. Our clients hire us to filter out the annoying stuff—the potholes in the road on the way to a deal—so they don’t have to. Often, that means we need to soak up the emotion coming at us from the other side rather than reflect it onto our clients, relieving them of this extra stress over and above the stress a transaction can cause. But that, in turn, is stressful for us and takes a toll. It’s normal to react to this stress by dishing it out to others. When we do, civility suffers.

And we haven’t even touched on tone and word choice. My kids think it’s hilarious that I use punctuation and full words in my text messages to them. Maybe this comes across as overly formal and stilted to someone who doesn’t know me. That’s something I have to think about. How about you? Do you consider your audience before you press “send” for a text message? It doesn’t take much effort to soften a message, even if it’s bad news. Choosing your words carefully and softening your tone can open doors. If not today, then next week or month, when you meet that colleague again.

Then there’s timeliness to think about. It can be a major effort to get somewhere on time, given the state of city streets. Downtown roads, once four-laned are now two-laned, with predictable results. But with mobile phones within easy reach, what’s to stop you from pulling over to give a colleague a heads-up that you’ll be late? Ten seconds invested in a kindly, civil act pays big dividends down the road.

Our ongoing work on professionalism tells us that members really do want the Board to do more about the level of members’ civility. We’ve heard you. We have ideas and when we’re ready to share them, you’ll be the first to know. 

In the meantime, do your part: think about the way you treat others. Do a self-audit. Ask a colleague to give you an honest appraisal of how you communicate. Hopefully they’ll tell you you’re the world’s best, most civil communicator. If not, at least you’ll then have an idea of what to work on.

People can change behaviour, and peer pressure can be a motivator. Think about smoking—once ubiquitous in offices. Everyone had an ashtray, and all the ceiling tiles were yellow. That scene is almost incomprehensible today. Not lighting up back then made you a bit of an outlier. Lighting up in an office now will get you a large dish of grief, and rightly so.

In the short space of 30 years, our society modified an addictive habit through peer pressure and laws. We can apply that same kind of peer pressure on colleagues who don’t measure up in the civility department. But first, walk a mile in their shoes. Everyone’s expectations regarding civility aren’t the same. Different strokes, as they say.

Our next interaction can be pleasant, or it can leave us fuming. The choice is pretty much ours.

Read the article on lightbulbs, if you have 10 minutes to chortle. (Note: This article may be behind a pay wall.) Then read Chris Johnston’s article on professionalism.