Proposal Leadership: How to Build, Train, and Retain Your Team

Chloe Norwood:            Thank you for joining Proposal Leadership, How To Build, Train, And Retain Your Team webinar today. My name is Chloe Norwood and I’m a part of the VisibleThread Marketing team. I’m super excited to introduce Rebecca Link, director of Proposal Operations at Gunnison Consulting Group. Rebecca has set aside some time at the end of this presentation for q and a. Our next training webinar will be on August 17th at 11:00 AM Eastern time. During this training webinar, the VT team will be covering how to use Watchwords in VT Writer. We had such great success at Optimize23 in February. We’re bringing it back for a full day on the future of business writing. This virtual one-day event will take place on September 12th from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM. This jam-packed event will now include over seven speakers in nine sessions.

Chloe Norwood:            And now finally, I will hand it over to Rebecca Link.

Rebecca Link:    Hi. Good morning everybody. Can everybody hear me okay? Chloe, are we good?

Chloe Norwood:            Think we’re all good, yeah.

Rebecca Link:    Good morning. So, this is such a topic that’s near and dear to my heart because I think that to be successful, we must surround ourselves with great people. So, some of this is going to cover some basic kind of things that I’ve learned along my journey, some fun antidotes, and hopefully some things that will stick in your brain and kind of help you along your path as well in building out high performing teams.

Rebecca Link:    So, four major sections we’re going to cover today. The emphasis on this is just kind of giving some thought-provoking questions and things for you to consider as a leader. Building out the high performing teams, leveraging technology and automation to support those teams. How to train people, not just within your team, but across the company effectively, and how to keep those people stick with you and your organization. Whenever I come into an organization, and not just to look at how to build out a team, but just in general, like any good proposal manager, I said, okay, well, let me see if I can figure out what type of process. If I were to turn it into a graphic, and admittedly I’m not a graphics girl, but obviously you come in and you kind of analyze what’s in front of you.

Rebecca Link:    You analyze the people, the processes, the current tools and technology and the overall culture. You communicate with people, and you gather information and you kind of build rapport and a foundation to move forward from. And once you’ve communicated and gathered information, then you can start building. And that is your team or just new processes or new ways you’re going to approach doing business. And once you’ve got that building phase mostly ironed out, then it’s your responsibility to train and make sure that everyone is an effective participant in all those new things that you’re implementing. And then we’re going to talk more about retention strategies. The goal is to retrain, retain those people to continue performing for you down the road. So first module in this is building out high performing teams, the skills, assessments, motivation and positivity in corporate buy-in. So, what is the most important quality you look for in a candidate?

Rebecca Link:    Energy and personality, that’s where I go first too. Absolutely. Because if I don’t, we’re going to have to talk to each other daily, and we’re going to have to work very closely together. And if I don’t want to talk to you, or if I dread having to communicate with you, that’s going to be a problem down the road. Leadership skills is a little lower than where I would’ve put it. Tactical know-how, strategic thinking. All right. Interesting. So, let’s move into looking at skills assessment. So, when you’re building out a team, you know, whatever organization you’re at, you have to kind of determine what that labor mix is going to look like. Do you need, you know, just proposal managers? Do you need senior managers, writers, designers? What kind of budget do you have for those positions?

Rebecca Link:    And what kind of salary price tags are those people going to come with? So you need to kind of determine your labor mix. Obviously working within the constraints, of your budget, but doing your best to try to make sure that that mix is the right mix for whatever your organization’s needs are. And long-term goals are. Cultural fit is important. Back to that initial process graphic where your kind of analyzing things. When you come into an organization, you get a feel for the vibe and for the culture at a company or within a department that you’re going to be primarily working in and supporting. So, making sure that the people that you’re bringing in are kind of on the same wavelength are going to have, you know, personalities are always going to be a challenge, but I think having somebody that can be flexible and that can kind of roll with punches is important.

Rebecca Link:    So, figuring out that cultural fit is important with communication styles and work ethic as well. If you have a company that typically, maybe you’ve seen through communications and stuff, doesn’t always work within that nine to five kind of business hour model, and you have people that have very strict boundaries with their time, maybe they wouldn’t be a good fit for your organization if they’re not going to be flexible with getting emails in the evening or having to pull weekend hours. So those are conversations you need to have. So, in that labor mix, maybe some of that is going to be new hires. So, when you’re doing new hiring, maybe you don’t have the budget to hire five people all at once, and you’re going to have to stagger it out. So, plan for how you’re going to build the team over a period.

Rebecca Link:    Who you need to bring in first, who can wait until maybe six months down the road, but stagger that out if you need to. And then looking at the onboarding and training process, you know, you’re not going to hire someone and they’re going to come into your organization and be perfect on day one. You’re going to have to train and, and mentor them and get them immersed in the organization. And that takes time as well. So, you must be strategic with bringing on new people. And maybe you’re going to inherit some people, right? Maybe you’re coming into an organization where there are already proposal staff or business development staff that you’re inheriting and you must get to know them, and you have to kind of see their work performance and are they a good fit and match for your leadership style, which is important. And are they a good fit and match for your growth goals down the road?

Rebecca Link:    And are they going to be able to grow and change and mature with you and your team? And sometimes they’re not a good fit, and that is a decision that you must make as well, which can be tough. So, looking at that long-term growth plan and making sure that you have the right people that are going to be a part of that. You know, is it one year, five years? Where do you see the size of the team in that timeframe? And making sure that you’re making decisions that are going to match what your goals are. And a mix of skills, right? So, if you’re working at a smaller organization or at least in my opinion I like people that can be dual hatted proposal managers that also know how to do desktop publishing, or graphic designers that can also maybe do some coordination help and, you know, do some SharePoint you know, support and things like that.

Rebecca Link:    Because you do need people that can kind of be those chameleons that can help in other areas. I personally love people that bring a mix of skills. If down the road you look to increase the number of bids that you’re doing and getting out the door, then maybe you’re going to build a model of staff that’s going to grow over a period. If you’re not in the position to, if you don’t have the budget, if you don’t work for an organization that is backing you on, on building out a large team, there are options that you can use to supplement your staff, whether it’s a graphic designer or a writer or a proposal manager, even capture managers and things like that. There are opportunities, great consulting companies available in the proposal world.

Rebecca Link:    All great options for, to augment your staff and resources. Personally, I think that leveraging social media, I don’t know about like Facebook or anything like that. Let me be clear, clearer about that. LinkedIn, I think, is a great tool for networking. And so if you are in the proposal industry. It’s great to start trying to attend some events or get involved because it opens your doors to relationships for future opportunities to, of employment, either for yourself or if you are looking to build a team. You can say hey, you know, I worked with this great proposal manager a few years back, or I met this person at a conference. I wonder if they would be open to a conversation. So, LinkedIn and word of mouth in the proposal industry, I have found to be a really, great asset when you’re looking to build out teams and kind of have those long relationships.

Rebecca Link:    The last little thing I’ll say here is hire the person, not the resume, right? Especially in proposals, you’re going to get resumes that have all the right words, right? Color reviews, RFPs, compliance matrices, you know, debriefs, lessons learned, blah, blah, blah, all the jargon. So, they all can look very, very similar, but interview the person, talk to the person, get to know them. So we hire the person, not the resume, because that cultural fit, that personality fit. As you guys showed in the poll, that is the most important thing when you’re building out a team. So how do we motivate and keep things positive for our team? We need to build trust continually. I like to say, you know, don’t talk about it. Be about it. How do you want to be treated as a manager?

Rebecca Link:    Do you want to be feared? Do you want to be respected? Do you want to be loved? Because when you’re able to build a healthy foundation of a relationship with your staff which takes effort and energy, by the way, you’re able to implement something that’s called radical candor. There’s a whole book that’s written about that. Radical candor means that because I care about you, I’m able to come to you with challenging or difficult information. It makes it a little easier for both of us to work through those moments together in a constructive way than me as a manager coming in finger wagging at you, and then the employee leaving, feeling undervalued, underappreciated, or just bad about themselves. So when you’re able to really form a meaningful relationship with the people that work for you and with you, then it makes those tough conversations a little bit easier.

Rebecca Link:    So, I’m a huge proponent of that. And then micromanaging versus strategic support. I think that this is super important with proposal managers especially. You need to ask yourself as a leader, do you need to be there? Or can this person handle it? Maybe you need to give them some tools, one-on-one, or some ideas on how they can handle a certain situation. But stepping on a proposal manager’s toes discredits them as the leaders of their opportunities and the deals that they’re working and undervalues and undermines them in their role, trying to lead proposal efforts. So, I’m very cognizant of that as a leader. And I’ll ask my proposal manager, do you need me on this call? And they’ll be like, no, I got it. I’m like, okay. But they know that if they need to escalate something to me that I’m here and that I will handle things for them.

Rebecca Link:    You can figure that out also through getting to know someone. Again, building that foundational relationship, knowing their personality, knowing what their strengths and weaknesses are will allow you to provide better and more strategic support versus stepping on toes and micromanaging. We always want to let our people shine. We provide them opportunities to step up and be a thought leader and step up and own something. I have a little note here that says, don’t swoop and poop, right? So, if something went wrong or whatever, don’t jump in on a call and just poop all over everything, right? Try to empower your team to handle and mitigate things on their own and be a support system and not a swoop and pooper. Other things that I find of value is corporate initiatives to support employees with leadership training or courses.

Rebecca Link:    Other opportunities for growth, whether it’s in what their current role is right now, or maybe they want to learn a little bit more about program management or be, you know, capture or whatever. So providing opportunities, I think is the constant motivation for a team. Regular communication and socialization opportunities are also important. Virtual happy hours. Giving out GrubHub gift cards for a lunch or something like that, where a lot of us are virtual these days, so we kind of everything seems to have shifted more where we’re not going out and doing in-person stuff, but that’s absolutely encouraged as well. We do something fun. We have meme wars, so we even have a meme repository where we can drop like ridiculous memes that sometimes we’ll throw into an email just to keep things lighthearted because proposals are stressful enough, right?

Rebecca Link:    So, opportunities to have laughs and connect with one another. Attendance at company functions is important. They’re maybe offsites or all hands meetings that are held at the corporate level that we should all participate in. The last point here is becoming Swiss cheese. So you should always take those bullets for your team, right? You should be the kind of the buffer and the protector from other people in the company being antagonists or, you know, delivering criticism and things like that. It should all flow through you as a director and as a leader. And then you can use that radical candor and that trust that you have to communicate more effectively. But it also goes both ways. Don’t let your employees turn you into Swiss cheese too. You have an employee that is constantly rippling the waters or making a lot of mistakes.

Rebecca Link:    Maybe it’s an opportunity for some positive coaching or training. But if it is an ongoing issue and you are becoming Swiss cheese in one way or another, it is something to look at. Corporate buy-in is super important, right? So obviously when you’re building a team, you need to communicate with executive leadership about what your goals and your plans are and say, hey, I’ve followed the process of analyze, communicate, build, you know, train, and retain, this model that I showed you guys at the beginning. And here’s what I’ve assessed the needs to be for this organization. And here’s the duration of time, right? Little Gantt chart or something, of how we need to hire or how we need to grow and get that buy-in because you don’t want to do all this work and then get to a point where you’re like, okay, I’d like to put out a requisition and start, you know, interviewing resources.

Rebecca Link:    And they’re like, oh no, we’re not looking to add a graphic designer right now. And you’re like, oh, I thought I thought that was part of the plan. So, plan, communicate the plan, get the buy-in on the plan, and then execute against that plan. Communicate about things, about what kind of skill mix you’re looking to create in your team, what the expectations of that team will be and what the leadership and the rest of the company could expect from them, and what we’re going to expect in return or from other people as well. I think expectations are super important. What I expect from the capture team as a proposal person, what I am expecting to get from them, what type of business development I’m expecting to get done on the deals that we’re going to be getting out the door for them.

Rebecca Link:    Kind of make sure that you have these conversations about how the machine and all those parts and pieces will work together. And just overall time management, right? If they’re like, oh, well, we want to get out, you know, 10 proposals a month, but you’re only allowed to hire three people. And it’s like, okay, well then, we need to have a conversation about when there’s, you know, four live proposals and I’m going to be bringing in a consultant right? And make sure you have those conversations and you’re not expected to just burn your team out because it puts you in a very challenging position as a leader. Whether you’re going to have a centralized team or a decentralized team, you know, just conversations that you should have to get that corporate buy-in. I love to make my team what I call corporate celebrities.

Rebecca Link:    So, we host proposal center town halls, we invite ourselves to other departments meetings with having an all hands, or if they’re having like some sort of staff thing be like, hey, can, can I throw in a couple slides in your presentation? We’re constantly putting ourselves out there in front of the company to make sure that people know who we are, what we’re doing, and just have that, maybe these are not people that we talk to on a daily basis, but these are very awesome ways of building that trust and that ability, that foundation that we talked about of a relationship because then people feel like they know us and they can come to us. And it goes both ways, right? If we end up working with someone that we don’t normally work with and they’re, let’s say writing a proposal section for us, like, hey, you know what?

Rebecca Link:    You’re late. I needed that writing done by two o’clock. You know, it makes it a little bit easier when you know that person, you have a relationship and you’re not just some stranger floating head on a team’s call. So, invite yourself and your team to as much stuff as you can and make your team what I call corporate celebrities. We host the meetings as well, and we invite everyone. I remember when I came to the company, I’m at right now, and I was like, I want to host a town hall. And my boss, well, who would you invite? I’m like, everyone, I invite the entire company. And same with the training. We’ll, we’re going to get to a training slide here later. And they asked me the same thing. Who do you want to invite to these trainings?

Rebecca Link:    I’m like, everyone, we want to invite everybody. Inclusion is amazing. Again, it opens doors and opportunities for relationships and if people want to get more involved in proposals or if people in proposals want to learn other things about the company, I just think that it’s very valuable to have that inclusion and its visibility and respect as well. Cool thing too is if you have a corporate newsletter, when I realized my company has a corporate newsletter, I was like, can I take out some real estate? So now we have a little area that we call the Growth Garden, and it’s got a stupid little picture and we do lots of fun stuff, neat ways to kind of little reminders for people. Or sometimes we’ll do something funny and we’ll throw some of those memes in there and just kind of keep things, get that visibility as the proposal team and also continually train the rest of the company on who we are and what we’re doing and the ways they can get involved.

Rebecca Link:    Staff spotlights is always good too. Putting a staff out there and to their level of comfortability, including some pictures of them. Maybe they have a dog, maybe they have a family or whatever. And building that rapport and getting to know them on a personal level is always great. The last piece here is actively collecting feedback from the company and ways that you can improve the ways the team can improve. Constantly creating new material for the company to use, whether that’s tools, templates, processes, and just keep things fresh. I like to think of it as giving little gifts, right? We have this thing that we call, so that my company is called Gunnison, I initially called it zingers, and it’s just a big spreadsheet of accolades, proof points, metrics. And it’s organized where if I’m looking for like a cyber metric, I can go and I can search the document and find things.

Rebecca Link:    And my proposal manager’s so smart and witty, and she was like, let’s call it gun zingers. And so it’s dumb, but it’s fun and it is like a little gift that we’re, we’re building and giving for the company to make their lives a little easier. So, try to think of things to do that it gets that corporate buy-in. I’m going to try to not fall down a hole here because I absolutely love this topic very much. Leveraging technology and automation. And like, I must talk about AI because I’m kind of in love with it right now. So, we’re going to talk about how this can help augment your resources too. Fergal McGovern, the VisibleThread CEO wrote in a blog article on it and said, this stuff is powerful.

Rebecca Link:    It just needs to be handled with care. I think everybody has seen headlines that look very much like this. The robots are coming, and AI is going to take over the world, and we’re going to be rendered extinct and can be very melodramatic and a little extra but it’s amazing stuff. The train has left the station and now we must keep up with it, right? Like Ross from Friends when they’re carrying the couch down the stairs. We must pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot and grow with this new tool and technology that’s available to us.

Rebecca Link:    There’s a bunch of different offerings out there. Microsoft Co-Pilot, Chat GPT, ask Jasper AI. And these things are really becoming fascinating in the proposal world because there are a lot of companies that are creating ways for you to be able to feed these models, your corporate proprietary information, and it creates a data lake in a data warehouse of just your stuff. So instead of pulling from the internet of things to formulate responses and answers, it can pull from your personal information, which is cool. And I think kind of the new frontier of proposals and just writing in general. And we’re going to see some fascinating things happen over the next, however long with, I think, what’s the word I’m looking for? Like security and other kind of provisions put in place, for these models.

Rebecca Link:    I think the White House came out with a statement this week saying that they have gotten voluntary commitments from all the big AI companies to start exploring security around these things. So, we’ll see what happens with all of this, but we need to be champions and thought leaders and get in front of this as proposal professionals. There are other resources which are fantastic to still use, such as VisibleThread. They can shred RFPs, help with writing content, and do formatting and editing. So, we have a lot of things available to us as proposal professionals that we can leverage to help our teams, save time, and do things more efficiently. So, we need to think of these tools, especially ai, that they’re tools that can give your ideas form.

Rebecca Link:    So, when you’re prompting in Chat GPT or some other open AI model prompts or conversations to collect information, this is not a copy and paste exercise. You don’t go into Chat GPT and say, write me a transition plan and then whatever it spits out, you copy and paste it into your proposal document. That’s not what we’re doing here. You can use it to help generate content, matrices. You can use it for grammar and editing support. And there’s even ones that you can use for graphics now too. So proposal managers can benefit coordinators, graphic designers. I did something for fun here on Chat GPT, and I was like, well, what about pricing? And so, I put build me a pricing model for two employees on a firm fixed price contract over a four-year period of performance.

Rebecca Link:    And in two seconds it spat this out. Now, I cannot use this. I mean, I could, but it’s not accurate. This is what we call a hallucination in AI where it’s giving you an answer, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s correct and that you should go use it in a pricing volume. You still need to collect, you know, competitive information. You still need to tailor it for the customer, but it gives you a rough idea about what salaries might be and total costs, year over year, based on the limited information that you put in here so that it’s a starting point and it’s thought provoking, right? So it’s kind of exciting. We must go back and refine and review. You know, we trust but verify things that we put into these models.

Rebecca Link:    There are courses available to help teach you how to do this stuff. There’s a prompt engineering for Chat GPT from Vanderbilt. There’s a certificate in AI strategy from Cornell, Virginia Tech is offering AI bootcamps. There’s a whole prompt engineering course available on Coursera. And the proposal industry is now coming out with trainings as well. So definitely start looking into that. And just be careful because what we say is garbage in, garbage out, right? If you’re inputting garbage information or you’re not, you don’t know how to interact with these AI tools in a meaningful way, then you’re going to not get very good or usable information back from these AI models. So, it’s good to start looking at how we can train and get at the forefront of all this amazing stuff at our fingertips. We kind of already touched on this as I was alluding to, there are ethics and standards that we really need to take into consideration.

Rebecca Link:    I took a little snapshot of that White House memo that came out this week. There are moments when it’s okay to leverage AI and when it’s not okay. One of the big things right now, I know Lockheed Martin has completely banned their employees from using Chat GPT, because they don’t want their corporate information being fed into an open model that is now part of the Internet of things and accessible by competitors or even foreign countries. So, we should never use AI if it could compromise a company, the government, or any other entity that we might be supporting when we’re leveraging these tools. So it’s our responsibility to be ethical with these things because that will begin to limit the instances of bad publicity and the frequency of issues that we’re seeing. This is moving faster than we are.

Rebecca Link:    Because we haven’t put security or, you know, ethics or standards in place yet. And I think that’s what we’re going to start seeing happen now. So right now, it is our responsibility to become those experts and train other people on how to do and use these things the right way. As I mentioned, the use of AI is to support the thought process and save time conceptualizing or doing basic research on material. It is not always correct. It has biases and nor should it be used without reviewing and editing the material it produces, it’s an augmentation tool, not intended to replace the human element. Okay? There was a lawyer in New York, there was a case, this made headlines that had used Chat GPT for case information.

Rebecca Link:    So, to build their argument, they went to Chat GPT, and they said I’m paraphrasing, I have no idea what the actual prompt they typed in, but they were trying to find just proof points or like a case that resembled you know, the case that they were supporting. And so, they were like, find me a case on, you know, I don’t know, murder, and drugs or whatever. And Chat GPT went to the internet of things and was like, here’s a case, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was not true. It fabricated it because it’s ai. And you asked it a stupid question, garbage in, garbage out. And it gave this lawyer a hypothetical case that never really happened. And then this dumdum turned around and actually put it in as part of their submission for prosecution.

Rebecca Link:    And now they are being sued and in big trouble when they said they didn’t know, they were unaware that the content could be false. So we have to train. We have to learn how to use these things. Think about everything floating around on the internet and the vastness of the information that these open AI models pull from. True or false, it’ll generate stories or hallucinations for you. So be careful when you’re using this for proposals. Make sure that you are verifying your information. Yeah, I think we’re beating that horse. So, something else that I saw on the news that I thought was interesting to mention is, you know, the political landscape and how when we’re approaching elections, that AI is now going to be used in ad campaigns as well. We’ll see how much of what they’re putting out there is true or false.

Rebecca Link:    Is it a hallucination or is it real information? So be careful with these models, please. All right, moving on. Effective training strategies. So again, this is for your team as a proposal organization or growth organization, but also the company as a whole. Because remember, my line of thinking is inviting everyone. I think that it’s so important to not only cross train people, give them the opportunity to learn new things, but it also helps them become champions of the process and know how to engage and interact with your team when they come and work on proposals or any other kind of growth initiatives. So, we’re going to explore three things, your corporate maturity, the content planning, and delivery of that content, and then opportunities for ongoing professional development. So corporate maturity, I love this. That’s like the first thing that came to my mind is, you know, are you a small organization trying to do big boy and big girl things?

Rebecca Link:    And I thought of a child wearing grownup clothes. So, you can’t just put an outfit on anybody, right? You have to find something that is the right size and the right fit for your organization. So the type of training is built on a handful of things. How big is your company? How many business units, you know, or lines of capability are you supporting? How many of them actually participate in proposals? Do you want to increase the participation of these people as writers or reviewers? Do you kind of have to start asking some questions to be able to build out the right model for training for your organization? Maybe your company’s like, yeah, we don’t care about the rest of the company, we just need to focus on the growth division for training. It’s like, okay, cool. Well then you’re talking to a group of your peers, right?

Rebecca Link:    Your growth organization is going to be your capture managers, your account executives, your proposal people, you know, so you can build your training around those people. If you’re doing the entire company, then you have people that are like, what’s an RFP? Like, what’s a color review? I’ve never done that before. So, yourkind of must figure out who your audience is going to be. How big is the growth team? Do you have a BD team? Do you have a capture team? How many people are on your proposal team is going to also kind of affect the style, size, and style of your trainings. Because if you have a small team, then maybe you’re not going to be teaching them, you know, doing all these lessons and trainings on building storyboards. You don’t have time to do big, you know, elaborate storyboards.

Rebecca Link:    If you’re working on a five-person team, if you’re a GDIT, you’ve got a ton of people, then yeah, teach people how to do big, beautiful walk the wall storyboards. So, you have to kind of figure those things out. And how mature are these people, right? Do you have a lot of junior people? Do you have people that have been doing this for a super long time? So, do you need kind of intro 101 level courses, or do you need to maximize the training here and make maybe an intro and intermediate and advanced level course in whatever you’re going to be teaching? And back to that initial approach model where you’re analyzing, communicating, and building, during that, you’re already seeing what your organization does. Maybe they are really great. Maybe you have a ton of great writers, so maybe that’s not an area that you want to focus on, but maybe you guys are struggling, in color reviews and getting actionable feedback and having meaningful recovery sections, and the writers aren’t being supported in the right way.

Rebecca Link:    So maybe that is somewhere you want to focus on too. So you kind of can cherry pick what the organization’s needs are. You don’t have to offer a training in everything under the sun. Figure out what’s going to be important to them. Who else can you get involved in these trainings? So, I’ll show you here, a little bit in a few slides. The trainings that I do at, at my company, and I have sessions on contracts and pricing, which I could probably muscle my way through, but I’m not, I’m not the one who should be leading that training. So, I went to my contract’s director, and I went to my pricing director, and I said, hey, would you guys be willing to lead a training? I’ll support you in developing your slides. I gave them kind of like an outline of things that I envisioned them talking about, at least as a starting point, and let them build from it, and then let them present it to the company.

Rebecca Link:    Same with your capture managers. We also did a program manager training, program manager and growth, and how program managers and program teams can create relationships with their customers, work to have good cpars and collect information and bring it back internally to help prepare for upcoming procurements and, and other, strategic growth initiatives. So that was a really cool training that I had. I picked three of our really kind of big program managers that manage big programs, at the company to lead that, because that, that’s their, that’s their show, right? So, empower other people to participate in training as well. I always like to kind of think big picture too. How do you envision your organization operating in the future? Maybe they’re not doing some of these best practices or things, you know, that that you want to see happen today.

Rebecca Link:    So, what you’re training them on, obviously meeting them where they are right now, but also kind of incorporating, and communicating those future expectations as well. Where do we want to go? How should we be doing things, you know, moving forward or a year from now? So, building your trainings with growth in mind as well. Do you want us to submit more bids? Is your win rate low? Have you been losing a lot on price or technical solution? So, really kind of looking at asking yourself questions like that when you’re building the trainings. How open is your organization to change? Will you need to get buy-in from leadership to help you sell the need for training, right? If you propose, so my company, I rolled out a nine-week training program. Nine weeks is a long time.

Rebecca Link:    It was a long time. And we just did it. We called them brown bags. So it was like a lunch and learn, you could eat lunch. We did it every Wednesday at noon for nine weeks. And we really marketed it. We put it in that newsletter. We sent out reminders. We, you know, incentivized people to participate. Get that buy-in from leadership. And they helped as well. They communicated to their teams that it was an expectation that their staff participated in these activities. So figure out what your organizational culture is and how they feel about training. And that’ll help you decide how big or how often and what kind of training to, to roll out so content planning and delivery. Here’s the snapshot of the trainings that I rolled out, at my company. And this was based off an assessment of needs.

Rebecca Link:    The contracts and pricing I had never done before. That was something that I added in, here because those two things that my current company, I would say are immature and they lack structure. And so, this is a great way also to start to formalize some of those things that maybe you don’t have strong processes or tools or whatever. Maybe you have like one person that’s performing the activity. It helps bring awareness and it helps bring structure and support to an area where you might be struggling if you can roll out some training, and guidance on how things should be performed or where you want to see them perform in the future. So, we kind of talked about the skill levels already determining whether you have very junior people or expert level people in your company.

Rebecca Link:    If possible, roll out training at the corporate level. Meaning if you have a learning management system or some internal training, you know, module or software that you use, even if it’s through like HR where they roll out, like the ethics and security training and blah, blah, blah, that’s all software. And you can kind of put in different trainings into that and it becomes corporate, right? That this is the company way of doing X, Y, and Z. So if you have that ability, I would strongly recommend doing that. All else fails, send out some team’s invitations to, you know, the all company, email alias, and encourage people to come market it, communicate it, get that buy-in. You can incentivize it by providing, opportunities for people to get continuing education credits or units or you know, sometimes people will tie it to bonuses and things like that.

Rebecca Link:    But also, I have this funny little meme here of people sleeping. I try to make my trainings as fun as possible and include some funny things or storytelling. So, figure out ways to keep people engaged and because proposals can be that can be dry, right? That learning about all this stuff can kind maybe put people to sleep. And you want to create that enthusiasm. You want people to think of proposals as not this annoying hindrance, you know, or scary thing or whatever. So, the more lighthearted you can make it and the more fun you can make it, the more buy-in you’re going to get from across the company. Ongoing professional development. I like to hold trainings annually. I like to collect feedback after I host all these trainings to make improvements moving forward. You don’t have to hold them annually.

Rebecca Link:    You can also do a biannual or however often you want. A nine-week training program is aggressive. So annually is okay, but just remember, you know, you have new people coming into your company and into your organization all the time. So, you need to figure out what kind of cadence you’re going to be offering trainings. I offer to host ad hoc training when and where needed. So if I have my VP of healthcare and she’s like, oh my gosh, I have a bunch of people that I’d like to kind of train up as proposal writers or whatever. Can we get something on the schedule for you to do a persuasive writing course with them? Like, absolutely. So, make yourself available to other people and be willing to host training when and where needed, you don’t need to limit it to that learning management system.

Rebecca Link:    There’s something that I’m sure some of you have heard. We call it just in time training. So if you have like a really big opportunity corporate priority deal coming up that’s going to be engaging a lot of resources, both maybe, you know, internally and maybe externally with subcontractors as well, that’s a great opportunity to pull one of your trainings out of your backpack and say, hey, why don’t we just do a one hour, you know, writing training on expectations, you can weave in your win themes and your discriminators and things about a specific opportunity into that training. But just kind of go over some of the do’s and don’ts. Talk about active versus passive voice, have that wall of truth, like kind of get some of that stuff out of the way. So just in time training is another really cool thing that I love too.

Rebecca Link:    And it doesn’t have to be as formal as the previous slide where we have, you know, this long list of trainings and you’re rolling it out at the learning management level. You can do training anytime, and I highly encourage and recommend it, especially when you have people joining your team, teaching them about the repository and how to find information and where the tools and templates they’re expected to use are, and blah, blah, blah. So, when I do train two, I always add new content as needed for growing and developing skillsets. I make sure as many roles are represented as possible to make it inclusive and to show a value and need. So it goes back to my theory of inviting everyone, right? And so when I invite everyone, I know that my audience is going to be a mixed bag of people across the company.

Rebecca Link:    So, I want to make sure that I’m saying or doing something within the presentation that’s going to resonate with as many people as possible and gives them a way that they can see themselves engaged in the activity or see themselves, , you know, maybe learning a new thing or just kind of becoming more of a champion, even a like advocate for the proposal center. And what we do, we kind of talked a little bit about this on the previous slide, but giving out little awards for attendance, recognition, and praise. We’ll do like an email blast and say, oh, John Smith has perfect attendance in the nine-week training module so far. Always put that stuff in your newsletter. Sometimes we’ll even throw out gift cards or other incentives. And some companies even tie it to your bonuses, right? Where you must have a certain number of hours or participation in growth initiatives or other, corporate initiatives throughout the year, which will be reflected in the percentage bonus you get paid out.

Rebecca Link:    So, those are all options to kind of get people more involved. I don’t always like that, you know, blackmail approach where it’s like, hey, we’re going to tie it to your bonus. But, you know, if you are trying to grow an organization and mature people out, sometimes, you know, empowered accountability only goes so far, right? We’re going to empower people to be accountable for doing continuing training and education, but maybe sometimes they’re going to need a little gentle encouragement to attend and participate. Alright, I’m trying to keep an eye on time, so I know I’m talking fast, but I’ve got a few more slides. So the last little module here is about retention strategies. And believe it or not, everything that I’ve already covered is all about retention. So, you know that old saying, if you build it, they will come, right?

Rebecca Link:    If you have a good attitude, if you know, constantly innovating and looking at tools and technology to support your staff, if you are, reaching across the aisles at your company and getting other people involved and including people and training the entire company and doing all these things that we just talked about, that builds retention because people see that you care and that you’re trying. And, you know, we all say don’t talk about it, be about it. So I think that people that work with me always know, like, I definitely talk, I talk a lot, but I’m also all about it. So anything that I say I back up to. So, I think that really helps with retention because it builds trust, it sets the bar and the expectation of performance because I operate a hundred percent all the time, and that’s what I expect from people around me as well.

Rebecca Link:    So, I think it is one of those things, yeah, I mean, like expectations, if you have that bar, people will shape up or they’ll ship out, and that’s unfortunate. But are we building a high performing team? And are we focused on growth here? The answer is yes. So, you’re either part of that growth plan or maybe this isn’t the right culture at the company or the team for everyone to be happy and successful. So having that team engagement, you must create an environment where people want to stay, create time for relationship. Something that we do, I have one-on-ones with all my, you know, my staff and they’re unstructured for the most part. It’s kind of just a check-in. I’m not coming with some agenda with things I want to talk to you about. It’s just time for us to connect.

Rebecca Link:    Hey, how are you? How’s your daughter? She’s still doing soccer. Cool. Yeah. Oh my God. Did you see the storm last night? Like you know, you don’t have to be best friends with someone, but you can be polite, and you can be professional, and you can at least get to know them on some level. I’ll tell a quick story if I have time. There was this guy at a company I worked with before, I think he was the COO, this guy Mark. And I think his face would break if he smiled. He just, and I think you guys can tell if some of you know me, some of you are meeting me right now for the first time. I have a big personality and I love to chat, and I love to be goofy.

Rebecca Link:    And so, I’m like, hey, you know, approaching Mark as Rebecca Link, in all of my hundred percent glory. And, I was like, oh my gosh, I felt like I ran into the brick wall, that was Mark and I made it my mission, right? Because sometimes you’re going to have these people with challenging, personalities things like that. And whenever I come across someone like that, my brain goes new, best friend, and I make it my mission to find some sort of common ground. And this took me weeks. And so finally I was chatting with Mark, one day and trying to like, get to know him or whatever, and I made some comment about, drinking wine. And he says, I own, a significant amount of land out in Loudoun County, and I have a vineyard.

Rebecca Link:    I grow grapes. And I was like, oh, here’s my moment with Mark. And so we talked a lot about, I was like, oh, what kind of grapes do you grow? Because I know a lot about wine, living in the Virginia wine country region. And that was the foundation, right? And so, a couple weeks later, we’re walking down the hall past each other, and I say, hey, Mark. And I think I got like half a smile with a hello. So that’s a little anecdote there. You can always find some way to connect with people, but you must put in that work. Different personalities have different needs. Figure out what each individual person needs to thrive, and then meet those needs. So other ways to do that, again, with the one-on-ones and things, are cross-functional team meetings.

Rebecca Link:    So, every month we have a proposal and capture, just lunch chat. And again, those are unstructured. There’s no agenda, set for those meetings. It’s like, hey, how are you guys doing? What are you working on? How can we support you better? And like sometimes it’s commiserating where it’s like, oh my God, this proposal’s such a nightmare, blah, blah, blah. So we have proposals and capture, we have proposals and contracts, we have proposals and recruiting. We have, I have a proposal and senior vp, like my business units, I meet with them once a month and just say, hey, how can we support you better? Like, what do you guys need? And then vice versa, right? I’m like, hey, here’s something that we could use a little bit of support from, from your teams and things that we’ve been noticing as we’ve been working on deals together.

Rebecca Link:    So that’s super important, to have that cross-functional communication as well. Team lunches, virtual or in person, those all hands we talked about. Really approaching it. When you’re building these relationships and talking to people from the, the viewpoint of the whole person. It doesn’t always have to be about work. You should try to find something that you can connect on, you know, like me and Mark and drinking wine. So whatever that is, that’s a really great tactic, especially with challenging personalities. I like to provide my team opportunities to unplug as well. You know, so if you notice you get to know someone and you know their strengths and weaknesses and you can see maybe that they’re burning out a little bit or maybe they’ve been irritable lately, these are signs that maybe you can support them in a different way and give them some personal time or space and have realistic expectations, right?

Rebecca Link:    Make sure that you know exactly where people stand and what their boundaries are. The little picture I have up here is of a broken sewer pipe. And this guy that I work with told this story and it resonated with me that from leadership and management. You know, he used to work as a construction worker and there when a sewer pipe broke and they’re down there in the trench covered with, you know, what poop water. And there’s this, you know, the superintendent or the manager standing on the ground above them saying, work harder, work faster. What are you guys doing? Blah, blah, blah. It’s like, shut your mouth and get down here in this poop water with us and help us fix the problem. So, I try to employ that mindset as well. I just thought that the way he told it was a lot better than the way I told it, but I think it’s a good takeaway, of how to be the right kind of leader for your team.

Rebecca Link:    Alright. So, with professional development and growth, there are corporate goals and, you know, when you’re doing your annual reviews and things like that, there’s just job, job duties that must be met, right? But what I like to do with my teams is I like to pick three attainable goals. And attainable is the key word there, right? Let’s pick something that we know we’re going to be able to achieve because that way, you know, we feel good about things. One internal professional goal, meaning that you’re going to take on something internally or you’re going to learn something or you’re going to work with a different person internally, that is different or exciting or new or whatever. Internal professional goal, external professional goal. Maybe you’re going to get a new certification, you’re going to write a blog, you’re going to speak at a conference, whatever, something externally that will support your professional development and a personal goal.

Rebecca Link:    Maybe you want to learn how to weave baskets underwater, or you want to deadlift 200 pounds, whatever. And I support people with that. The 200 pound deadlift is actually, or no, I’m sorry, it’s a squat. My senior manager right now, that was her personal goal. And so, I have check-ins with her, and I’ll message her, and I’ll be like, hey, what’s your squat today? And I mean, you know, whatever that looks like to your team, meet them, and support them. What that support looks like. Different personalities have different needs. Some people are like, leave me the hell alone. Like, I don’t want to talk to you all the time. I don’t surround myself with those kinds of people because I like to talk, and I want people that are going to talk with me. But maybe you have somebody that doesn’t value constant frequent communication and so you’re going to back off from them a little bit.

Rebecca Link:    So, you +kind of must see what support looks like for them. Maybe they don’t want to do public speaking. Maybe they hate, you know, they, they have all the certifications they don’t need or want anymore. So you need to figure out what support looks like for each per person. There’s lots of opportunities with APMP out there in the industry to get that professional development. So take advantage of all of that. Support your people. Most companies offer some sort of training, money, you know, or professional development, allowance every year. Encourage your people to spend that money because it helps you and it helps them grow. And it’s good support. Shipley, VisibleThread, Feld, Hinz, Busy Opportunity Management. They all host trainings and webinars like this that are great for learning and growing.

Rebecca Link:    Take advantage of those. And if your team does have interest, support them with those things like public speaking, blogging, hosting webinars and engaging in mentor protege programs, that are available to them. Encourage them to take on some new challenges. All right, last one. Recognition and praise. You got to know your team. We’ve already talked about this, right? Their communication styles, what their strengths and weaknesses are, making sure that you are respecting their boundaries, whether it’s their work hours or if they have kids or whatever that looks like. We’re all human, we’re all weird, as I always say. Some of you have heard me say this, people are very peopley. And so be aware of your employee’s weaknesses and triggers play to their strengths. So just be respectful of those things. While I might send emails at 10 o’clock at night, I don’t expect others to read them.

Rebecca Link:    I know that there’s a few people that will. But you know, if you’re doing that, you need to have real realistic expectations. Repay your com, your employees, we talked about that, kind of giving them opportunities to unplug, which I think is incredibly important. So, if I have a proposal manager that’s been killing themselves to get something out the door, then when that goes in, I’m going to be like, I don’t want to see you online for the next two days. And you can charge your time to overhead. Go, do whatever that time looks like and needs, you know, to be for you. Go recharge and, you know, things will be here when you get back. So, there are two different types of people on your team. You have what I call productivity wizards. Some people just want to fulfill their job description and look at, you know, their job as a paycheck, and just kind of do what’s in front of them and, and what’s delegated to them.

Rebecca Link:    These people are needed and necessary. They keep your machine running, right, they are valuable. And then you have your rock stars. You have people that want to, and, you know be a part of the improvement, and changing that machine, making it innovative, making it more efficient, and they need to be praised and challenged or they will leave. So identify these people on your team and play to their strengths and weaknesses to make sure you have a balanced team and to have retention from your team as well. Let your people shine. Avoid using the word I as much as possible when you’re talking about your team. Ask them for their inputs when and where you are able. Sometimes you must make decisions as a director and a manager, and you just can’t take all the opinions from your team but use them as a sounding board.

Rebecca Link:    Make them feel included and valuable. We talked about becoming Swiss cheese. Empower your people to handle their roles and responsibilities. Let them decide that their needs to be a new inpro review on content that has fallen behind. They get to do that and be there when they come to you with these challenges and help them figure out, you know, ways to mitigate things and then go execute them on their own. So, take that backseat, only step in when you need to. We already talked about that. And ask your people if they need and want help and what level, what support looks like for them in any given moment. I always joke and say, if I’m joining your standup calls, there’s a problem, right? Like, I don’t need to be on your morning call for your proposal, but if the train is coming off the tracks or if you’ve come to me and there’s support that’s needed, I will be there. And if I’m joining your standup calls, there’s probably a problem, to the extent that you haven’t been able to handle it on your own. And now I must come and hopefully not become Swiss cheese one way or another. Don’t step on their toes. It discredits that authority and ownership be the bouncer, but let them be the club owner. So those are my key takeaways for y’all today. I’m right on time, maybe a couple minutes over. I really appreciate your time. Chloe, did you want to take things back over?

Chloe Norwood:            Yeah. So we have a few questions I’d like to ask you really quickly before we jump off. So, the first one on recognition and praise, is it okay to ask people directly how they would like to be recognized or app praised?

Rebecca Link:    Of course. Wouldn’t you like to? Yeah, I mean, I just think like, if somebody came to me with somebody, okay, I’ll give you an example. I got from my realtor. I just got this package in the mail and they’re like, here’s a special gift for being a customer and it’s this giant waterproof tote. And I’m like, thanks. Like I’m never going to use this. I have no idea how I need it. So, you know, if you really want to do something meaningful for someone, and it’s back to that relationship building, you must get to know them. And I think that’s a great way to understand what your people’s needs are better be like, Hey, what does this look like for you? What are some things that are meaningful for you? Maybe not a waterproof tote to say thank you.

Chloe Norwood:            Okay, let’s move on to the second question. So I am a proposal quality control manager. When I started, I had that critical thinking about each proposal. I was able to read each solicitation in its related proposal and really understand the need and what’s missing. How can I transfer that to my current team?

Rebecca Link:    Okay, so I think that that might be an organizational thing. So it makes me think about my senior manager right now, and she is on a, probably one of the biggest deals she’s ever run. And she is very much like that, where she wants to be in every document, reading everything, fully immersed in, you know, everything that’s going on. But there are six teammates and multiple people across our company that are involved in this. And so, she’s had to take a step back and delegate and assign certain activities and things to other people and trust and check in and verify that those things are getting taken care of because she cannot be down in the weeds with them. So when you have multiple projects and proposals, you think you have to be realistic about what task management looks like when there’s so much on anyone’s given, you know, plate at any given time.

Rebecca Link:    So, it might be a little bit of a mindset shift as a leader where you’re like, ah, I really want to see certain things happening, or I have expectations maybe that you’re still holding onto from previous roles or previous experiences that you’re going to have to shift and tailor for a different team and a different organization. It’s about finding that right fit and that right mix. Remember that graphic from the beginning of the presentation, analyze, communicate, build, train, retain. So, you have to kind of take a step back and figure out what the right solution is going to be. It might feel uncomfortable or you might feel like you’re making mistakes or like, this isn’t getting done, it’s getting done, but it might be getting done differently. And that’s okay.

Chloe Norwood:            And then we have time, I believe for one last question. Any suggestions on how to support transitioning to stepping back and delegating when one is used to being completely immersed in each element?

Rebecca Link:    I kind of just touched on that. I think, I think the first step is acknowledging the uncomfortability of it, right? Because we, especially as proposal people, we become very much like a dog with a bone about how we like things, how we expect things. And something about being able to become an effective leader is to start to let go of some of that. And again, understand that things are going to get done, but they might not be getting done the way you expect them or even want them to be done sometimes. First, another thing I always keep in my mind is that proposals are going to get out the door one way or another. And it might be choppy and, and different and, and bumpy and ugly along the way, but it’s going to get done and it’s probably going to be okay.

Rebecca Link:    It’s easy to just kind of get very trapped in the moment or let your anxiety, take that, that driver’s seat. So, I think that that’s probably the first suggestion is just acknowledging that it’s uncomfortable and difficult, trust other people. So, delegating when, you know, you’re used to kind of being at the helm can be super uncomfortable and maybe the person that you delegate to is going to make a lot of mistakes or do things way differently than you would do them again. It’s okay. And I say that because I have to say it to myself a lot. Let other people do things their way, let other people fail. And that’s hard and uncomfortable too. But again, one way or another that proposal’s going to get out the door and then you can have a lesson learned. You can say, hey, you know what, here’s something I observed, and I wonder if maybe we can approach this in a different way next time and work together to make improvements moving forward. It’s not going to be perfect every time. It’s never going to be perfect. I’d put money on that.

Chloe Norwood:            Okay. Rebecca, do you have any last thoughts?

Rebecca Link:    I don’t. I am available, my email’s here, my LinkedIn is on the slide. Feel free to reach out to me if you have other questions. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I love building and growing my network and seeing everybody be successful. So, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line and connect.

Chloe Norwood:            Awesome. Well thank you everyone for joining us today and thank you, Rebecca, for delivering such a high energy webinar and sharing your expertise. Both the slide deck and the recording of this webinar will be available on our website. Additionally, there is a survey at the end of this webinar. I’d really appreciate if you guys could provide some feedback for us. And have a wonderful day everybody.

Rebecca Link:    Thank you. And thank you to VisibleThread for hosting.

Chloe Norwood:            Thank you guys. Bye.