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UPCOMING SEMINARS:
Feb. 11-12 - San Diego, CA
Feb. 20-21 - Charlotte, NC
Mar. 5-6 - Orlando, FL
Mar. 11-12 - Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Feb. 14-15 - Orlando, FL
Mar. 7-8 - Dayton, OH
Mar. 11-12 - Chicago, IL
All seminars can be scheduled onsite at your company by arrangement.
ONLINE SEMINARS:
February 26 - 2:00 to 3:00 EST
Four 1-hour sessions
March 1 - 2:00 to 3:30 EST
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Interactive
Fresh and practical
Immediately useful
Real-world experience
Great pace, right level
AND
Follow-on personalized
assistance!
Register early and save!
Call 800-577-3528
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Engineering Momentum delivers fresh ideas, proven practices, and practical advice. Our goal is to make your job easier, help your career flourish, and to help you and your company bring the advancements of your industry to wherever they are needed in the world.
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Relationships or Results?
By Gary Hinkle
In the last issue, I wrote about what you should look for when you hire a consultant. When a consultant plays a team lead role, the goal is speedy success and rapid termination. Whether stakeholders like the consultant or not isn't the point. What matters is that the business objectives are met.
Relationships between employees who will continue working together do matter, so team leaders (who are employees, not consultants) need to apply methods that are different from consultants' methods in order to quickly achieve results -- and one goal of those methods is to build lasting, sustainable relationships. Relationships take time to develop, so the following advice might seem counter-intuitive when time is of the essence.
Don't Rush It
Think for a minute about those times on the road when a driver zips past you, recklessly weaving in traffic, trying to get where he's going as fast as possible. As he comes close to sideswiping every car he passes, drivers yell obscenities and wave hand gestures at the speeding idiot. Miles ahead, you catch up with him because he got stuck in heavy traffic. People recognize the car that nearly ran them off the road and they wave at him again.
The reckless driver wasn't interested in the other people, which is the foundation of building relationships. He's only interested in going fast.
Read the rest.
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Stress for Success?
Three workplace scenarios:
Scenario #1
An aggressive project deadline is looming, and there's still tons left to do. You've been told repeatedly that if you miss this deadline, there will be hell to pay. It's impossible to stop thinking about this project, even for a moment, because there's no time to waste. You lay awake at night thinking about it, which leaves you exhausted in the morning and short-tempered all day.
Scenario #2
You struggle with your boss. She micro-manages, she has a temper, and today she's mad at you. She's summoned you to her office, and you're dreading it. You're picturing the whole thing now: she's letting you have it, and you can't get a word in edgewise. You cancel your lunch appointment because, frankly, your stomach is in knots.
Scenario #3
There's a serious critical system outage situation in progress. Everyone is furious about how long it's taking to fix it, and that's only making the situation worse. You're working as fast as you can. You want to shout "Leave me alone!" but you don't. Instead you pound the steering wheel all the way home--when you do finally get to go home.
All normal reactions. Right? It's just the way we are. Stress and pressure make us angry. We pound the steering wheel, bite our lip, toss and turn, kick ourselves for our mistakes, and picture things getting worse.
We're very good at doing all of that. We have a lot of practice. We might even think that stressing out is required to get ahead. If you want to be taken seriously, agonize over your job! People who throw themselves into their work and never crack a smile, they're the ones who get ahead! Calm, smiling people, therefore, must be losers.
Not! There's no correlation between on-the-job success and agony. None!
If you'd like to be less stressed at work, first you have to decide that composure under pressure is okay, that you can smile and you can react calmly no matter what hair-on-fire situation lands on your desk. You have to believe that neutrality in the face of frenzy is strength, not weakness, and that passionate outbursts are overrated.
If you already believe that and you're just not sure how to put it into practice, we have a new online class just for you. Peaceful Under Pressure, a four-week series, starts February 27, and again in March.
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Tight Budgets
We know that budgets are tight, so this year we're continuing to offer 2-for-1 registrations and other opportunities to save on training.
We've added a "super-early" 20% savings for reservations made at least 8 weeks in advance. Groups of 4 or more save an additional 15%. Group registration can easily be done online with our new shopping cart system, or over the phone.
Current 2-for-1 Offer
Register one person online in any public seminar before Feb. 5, and another person from your company attends at no additional cost. On the checkout form enter the names of both participants. Write "2-for-1" in the Comments box below the Participant Names box.
Here's our class schedule:
http://www.auxilium-inc.com/public.htm
Best regards,
Gary Hinkle
President
Auxilium, Inc.  |
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