Leading a bid or proposal team isn’t exactly an ‘easy breezy’ task. In fact, many Bid/Proposal Managers say that, from time to time, it can feel a little more akin to juggling with knives. While riding a unicycle. On a tightrope. Over a pit of fire.
You need technical knowledge, interpersonal skills, the ability to inspire a diverse group of individuals, and the skills to manage several moving parts to deliver high-quality proposals, often under tight deadlines.
With a role description like that, there’s no instant recipe for effective leadership—but these 9 top tips can help you to hone your leadership skills and boost outcomes for your team.
1. Work on situational leadership
The bid/proposal process involves different phases where different leadership styles are required. This means that you need to be adaptable—both to ensure seamless transition between phases and to keep your team motivated and efficient wherever you are in the process.
A useful framework for this is Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Theory. This model identifies four leadership styles:
- Telling: One-way communication wherein the Bid/Proposal Manager defines roles and directs how work will be performed.
- Selling: The Bid/Proposal Manager is still directive but uses two-way communication to encourage the team to buy into their decisions.
- Participating: The Bid/Proposal Manager and team share decision-making about how some aspects of the work will be performed; the manager’s behavior is less directive and more supportive.
- Delegating: While still involved in decisions, the Bid/Proposal Manager has delegated much of the responsibility for performance of the work to the team but retains responsibility for monitoring progress.
Knowing when to use each style is crucial, especially as proposal teams evolve and face new challenges.
2. Communicate clearly
Communication is the backbone of leadership, and of any bid/proposal effort. As the team’s leader, ensure that information flows seamlessly across all stakeholders. Use multiple channels—email, video calls, collaboration tools—to reach your audience effectively. Regular updates, clear objectives, and feedback loops can eliminate confusion and keep everyone aligned.
Remember that communication is just as much about listening to your team as it is about what you say to them. Creating an environment where team members feel comfortable voicing concerns or sharing ideas not only makes those team members feel more satisfied and motivated, but also ensures that you don’t miss potentially winning ideas that could be hiding among your team.
3. Build trust
Trust is the foundation of a high-performing team. Leaders who are vague, opaque or duplicitous about their actions, beliefs and intentions quickly lose the trust of their team. And a team that doesn’t trust their leader is unlikely to feel motivated to engage in the process.
Being transparent about what you’re asking them to do and—importantly—why you’re asking them to do it, can help keep your team working collaboratively towards common goals. Being a trustworthy leader also means following through on commitments you make, owning up to your mistakes, and making sure your team members know that you value them as individuals as well as the work that they do.
4. Encourage teamwork
Not every group of people is automatically a team. Creating a cohesive team requires developing balanced roles, collaboration, and a sense of shared goals and responsibility.
Each member of your team will bring unique strengths to the table, and will naturally have unique weaknesses too. Optimizing team outcomes requires balancing those strengths and weaknesses within your team and ensuring that each person can contribute in a way that helps you move toward your goals.
This means getting to know your team members and working out how they can work best together. A good framework to consider for this is R. Meredith Belbin’s Nine Character Types—an analysis of nine different personalities that may exist within a team, including the areas of contribution they are best suited to and their weaknesses.
Many proposal teams are temporary—formed and dismantled at the beginning and end of a proposal development cycle—so you should focus on quickly establishing roles and encouraging shared ownership of the goals to keep the team united.
5. Delegate effectively
Delegation is not simply offloading tasks. Effective delegation is a crucial leadership skill that empowers your team and develops their capabilities.
This starts with clearly defining what needs to be done, and working out who is best placed to complete each task. Once you have identified the people responsible for each task, and the desired outcomes and milestones, you can take a step back, providing guidance and support as needed, but avoiding the fatal, creativity-stifling sin of micromanaging.
Overcoming obstacles to delegation, such as reluctance or unclear authority lines, is essential. A strong delegation strategy helps build high-performing teams while allowing you to focus on strategic leadership tasks.
6. Motivate and recognize your team
Proposal work is demanding, often involving long hours and tight deadlines. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to keep morale high. So, when your team meets a deadline, smashes through a milestone or simply shows up with consistency and motivation on the regular, publicly celebrate those contributions. This can be as simple as an outward expression of appreciation, or as elaborate as a formal rewards system. However you do it, just ensure that your team feels recognized for what they do. If you’re happy with their work, tell them!
It’s also important to recognize that your team members are human beings with personal lives, and a finite supply of energy and time. As the leader, you should have oversight of everyone’s workloads, and should make sure to adjust those workloads to prevent burnout and ensure team members have the resources they need to succeed.
Tailor your motivational strategies to suit your organizational culture and the individual preferences of team members.
7. Develop your team’s skills
A well-trained team is your greatest asset, and assets that important require nurturing. Instead of expecting your team to pull everything you throw at them off straight out of the gate, make sure you’re assessing your team’s collective skills consistently. Where you identify skills gaps, make sure that you provide targeted training to fill them. Learning on the job is all well and good, but a little training can go a long way in ensuring that your team is well-equipped to take your bid/proposal over the finish line with a winning evaluation score. (By the way, APMP certifications are an excellent way to ensure your team is up to industry standards.)
Track progress and assess the effectiveness of training programs. A culture of continuous learning will benefit not just the proposal team but the broader organization.
8. Manage conflict constructively
Conflict is inevitable in high-pressure environments, and it isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, a certain amount of conflict is actually necessary for a high-performing team. As long as your team members are respectful of one another, healthy disagreement can help to develop individuals and provide learning experiences.
Any conflict should be carefully managed, however. Watch out for the early warning signs of emerging conflict, such as hostility, lack of cooperation, exclusion or gossiping, and passive aggression amongst your team. All of these signs become very damaging to morale and productivity if left unresolved.
Use conflict resolution strategies that align with the situation. For example, compromising can be effective when equal parties are involved, while avoiding might work when the conflict is minor.
Try to make your conflict resolution strategies issues-focused rather than focused on the personalities or individuals involved.
9. Conduct personal lessons-learned reviews
When you complete a project in the bid and proposal field, there’s often little time to sit back and reflect before you launch into the next one. However, if you’re seeking to improve your leadership skills, taking a beat to analyze what worked well and what didn’t is vital.
Take note of any conflicts that you feel weren’t well managed, any roadblocks you hit, or even just tactics you took that you realized in the moment didn’t work as well in reality as they did in your head.
Evaluate behavior you’d replicate in the future, and behavior you’d avoid with a ten-foot pole next time. Learning from each leadership opportunity is the key to continuous improvement and effective leadership.
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