"Engagement" has become an overused and misunderstood term. Engagement is not just about marketing, and the secret to real engagement lies deep within yourself.

As a communication coach, I often work with people to improve their messages and the way they deliver them (whatever the medium – written, verbal or visual) so they can be more effective in their jobs. However, if you really want to influence people (and make no mistake, that is the goal of a good deal of our communication, in both our work and our private lives), there are three underlying realities that you must take to heart.

The first is that you will never get your message across – and you certainly won't be able to influence anyone – if you don't have their attention. Period. And guess what: A person's attention is not something that is yours by right; it is something you earn – by being genuine, relevant and focused

Ever try to get someone to change the way they do something that they've been doing the same way for years? Ever try to break one of your own habits? It's not easy. Not because people are intentionally contrary or obstinate, but because big parts of our brains operate on autopilot, in deep grooves of habit, and establishing new pathways is hard.

This can be a serious problem for individuals or managers who find themselves in the midst of major change efforts.

About five years, ago, when I was still editor in chief at CIO, we began a major transformation from a print-centric media company to online. During that time, every day brought new challenges, frustrations, discoveries, joy and despair. I think many of us thought we'd power our way through all that turmoil and, eventually, things would get back to "normal." After a couple of years, it began to dawn on us that if there was ever to be a new normal, it was well over the horizon, and in fact, we'd better learn to live in a state of change.

Steve Bandrowczak, former CIO at DHL, Lenovo and, most recently, Nortel, knows what IT leaders can learn from sales and vice versa because he has recently made the transition into a sales leadership role himself. As vice president of global sales at Avaya after that company's acquisition of Nortel, Steve leads sales, marketing, channel strategy, services and service strategy for Avaya's data business. I spoke with him recently. This is the third in a series.

Great communicators focus on the perspectives, priorities and frames of reference of the people they seek to communicate with. At Genentech, that means science. Todd Pierce, SVP and CIO at Genentech, views effective communication as the “circulatory system" of business. Everything he does takes that into account.

Being in the drug discovery/drug development business, Genentech runs on quickly gathering large volumes of information and analyzing it effectively. With 30-40 clinical trials going on at any given time, that's a lot of information.

Effective CIOs all have their own style and approach to leadership. One thing they have in common is the ability to communicate well at all levels of their organizations. They understand that communication is a collaborative process, as much about asking questions as answering them; as much about listening as talking. It's a conversation.

Storytelling is a powerful tool when you want to drive organizational change, sell an idea, or just make a point.

There's nothing new about storytelling. As a species, it's in our DNA. Long before we had books and newspapers, telephones and telegraphs, the Internet and Kindles, our ancestor's sat around the fire and told stories. More than storytellers, we're story consumers. Even people who think they're no good at telling stories generally love to hear them. We just respond better to information when it's delivered with a memorable anecdote or example (i.e., story).

Communicating effectively with business colleagues has ranked as one of CIOs' top three critical success factors for as long as I've been tracking these things -- and I've been tracking them for a long time. I've wondered over the years why this issue hasn't gone away. Why is it so damn hard for IT leaders to get their message across?

First of all, this is not just a CIO problem. People in general are terrible at conveying a concept or message intact from their brain to that of their "listener" (a misused term if ever there was one). As Celtics coach Red Auerbach used to say, "it's not what you say, it's what they hear." Influencing what people hear involves a lot more than just forming the right words.

In today's tough economy, many companies find they must lay off some of their most experienced (i.e., expensive) employees in favor of lower cost labor. But research -- and history -- shows that experience has value that can't be achieved any other way.

I'm reading a report just out on "Women CIOs & the Art of Influence" from the CIO Executive Council, in partnership with The Leader's Edge (you can access the report on the Council's website). One of the findings shows that when it comes to effectiveness and the ability to influence outcomes, age and seniority matter. Women with more than 25 years of experience and with senior IT leadership titles were more effective than those with less than 25 years on the job and lower level titles. The ability to influence, deemed "very important" by 92 percent of study participants, manifests itself in various ways, including that "more senior IT leaders consider what's in it for the stakeholder more frequently than do their less experienced counterparts."