Proposal Land

Everyone leads at some point.
Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson

Proposal teams need proposal managers: I’m goodwith that.  They also need leadership.  What’s the difference?  Stephen Covey’s distinction can help us here:

Effective leadership is putting first things first.
Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

It’s also expressed as the distinction between “doing the right things” and “doing things right.” Both formulations work.

Proposal Managers: There Can be Only One

Proposal managers are busy folks, doing all those standard management tasks related to doing things right:

• Assembling resources, defining roles and responsibilities, supervising performance
• Liaising with executives, teaming partners, and in-house resources
• Overseeing requirements definition, solution development, proposal writing and review, and costing
• Managing schedule, schedule, and (yes, again) schedule

And, as in “The Highlander” movie, there can be only one proposal manager.

Proposal Leaders: There Should be Many

By contrast, there can be (and should be) many proposal leaders, both formal and informal,  supporting the team’s quest to do the right things by making invaluable contributions:

• Challenging assumptions
• Broadening perspectives
• Bringing focus
• Resolving conflicts
• Flagging priorities

Task-Focused and People-Focused Leadership

Like all work, proposals are about more than the task: They’re also about the people executing the task.  Depending on their skills and personalities, leaders can also help to maintain team morale and effectiveness:

• Listening more than talking in meetings
• Acknowledging contributions
• Bringing in a new joke every day
• Including everyone in social occasions

Staying on Track

Effective proposal managers create an open, respectful, and yet disciplined environment that fosters appropriate leadership from many sources, while never losing sight of their own management responsibilities — or the need to maintain schedule!

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 Proposals are schedule-driven projects that require a strict project management discipline. Right? Partly right. In proposal terminology, I’d call that answer incomplete.  Proposals are projects, for sure, but they’re also the output of teamwork. I’ve recently been learning how much the design business has in common with proposals.

This post is one of a series on proposal teamwork, inspired by a fabulous article on Medium on design teams:
“No Dickheads! A Guide to Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams.”

Meet out in the open.
Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson

Shared secrets instill a sense of us-and-them like nobody’s business: ask any grade-school kids giggling together on the playground.  But like the Force in Star Wars, that sense has both a good side and a dark side to it in Proposal Land.

The Good Side of the Force

Proposals demand exceptional effort: an effort that is often fueled by a sense of belonging to the team.  A sense of being in on things helps to build that cohesion. (A little trash-talking of the competition doesn’t hurt either!)

Actually being in on things – the strategy, solution/plan for doing the work, sales themes – helps to build coherence in the response and helps people align their efforts more easily, without even being aware of it.

The Dark Side

Meetings behind closed doors, by contrast, fairly shriek that there is information you’re not privy to, and maybe can’t be trusted with.  The former builds insecurity; the latter, resentment.  Neither feeling motivates people to do their best or to make that extra effort.

Rules for Meetings

Newman and Johnson suggest just one rule: “Meet in the open.”  I’d add just one caveat: “. . . as the default.”

From my experience, there are exceptions that warrant a closed-door meeting:

• When discussing information that is so competitively sensitive that it must be closely held: pricing and mark-up discussions fall into this category.  Costing discussions, by contrast, should be open – someone might know of a cheaper way to acquire some needed good or service.
• When discussing information that is personnel sensitive; for example:
  • Candidates for positions after contract award
  • Performance problems on the proposal team itself

Otherwise, daily stand-ups (status checks involving the whole team) and meetings held in open areas build both the sense of belonging and the common understanding that are essential for success.

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Proposals are schedule-driven projects that require a strict project management discipline. Right? Partly right. In proposal terminology, I’d call that answer incomplete.  Proposals are projects, for sure, but they’re also the output of teamwork. I’ve recently been learning how much the design business has in common with proposals.

This post is one of a series on proposal teamwork, inspired by a fabulous article on Medium on design teams:
“No Dickheads! A Guide to Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams.”

 

“Mind your language.”
Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson

Newman and Johnson make the case for standardizing terminology for design teams, and you won’t get any argument from me about that for proposal teams.  My book even includes a checklist of categories of terminology to be standardized.

But here, I’d like to address a different point they make about the language we use and its effect on proposal teamwork, using the specific (and extreme) case of profanity to illustrate the general point.   Continue reading“How to Foster Teamwork: Rule #5”