9 ways to change attitudes and improve corporate culture

Most corporate cultures are a mixed bag. Other than aspirations, no real effort is put into it. As a result, it is defined as much by the personalities of key staff as it is by intent. Without nurturing, a corporate culture will grow like a weed instead of being designed. If you are in charge, the odds are that your corporate culture is not what you think it is. The reality is different from your aspirations. The reality is how people are behaving when you are not in the room.

How your proposals go tells you a lot about your real corporate culture. The decisions they make, how they engage, how they cooperate, and how they disagree all surface. Their real priorities, goals, and agendas also surface as they deal with conflicting priorities. You can see whether people reflect or ignore the stated corporate values. The result is how well they perform and that directly impacts the company's ability to win new business. Your corporate culture is as important to your company’s ability to grow as the steps in your business and proposal development processes.

So what do you do about it?

How do you go about changing a culture? It’s not just about speeches. It’s not just about how people treat each other. It’s about changing behaviors. But behaviors don’t change just because the boss says they should.

It helps to model behaviors. People tend to emulate their leaders. It also helps to synchronize how people do things with the results you want to achieve. Unfortunately, when the leaders behave in a negative way, that tends to get emulated as well. When the leaders describe the culture in a certain way but model different behaviors, the culture will not actually become what they describe.

Here are nine examples of things you can do to change the culture in your organization to one that encourages behaviors that support winning:

1. Require all levels to focus on ROI. The economics of resource allocation and priority setting should be based on ROI and not cost control. That should become part of the culture, encouraging people to track ROI and make decisions accordingly. Focusing on ROI shifts the debate from what is the least expensive way to win contracts to what is the most effective way to win contracts. This is where I like to start with companies, since understanding their pipeline and how to calculate the ROI of business development and proposal efforts drives so many other decisions. Focusing on ROI helps companies pay more attention to their win rate. 

2. Require achieving top performance measures. For Federal contractors, having a top past performance score is critical for being competitive. Instead of making "the highest levels of customer satisfaction" a "value," I recommend making it a mandate. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the top score, the company's expectation should be that all projects will score a 5. Scoring below a 5 shows a disconnect between the customer and the company, and should be corrected immediately. You can't be a winning, high-growth company if you are disconnected from your customers. You need your project managers to advocate for the customer and help the company understand the customer’s expectations.

3. Make evidence-based decisions. Bid/no bid decisions should be evidence based, with the burden of proof on why leads are worth bidding based on ROI. Having the evidence means tracking metrics and measurements to provide the data required. Arguments should be over what the data means and how to get more of it, instead of about opinions. A company focused on evidence of performance and quantifying ROI will make better decisions, win more business, and be more profitable.

4. Define accountability properly. If your approach to accountability is based on authority or a chain of command, it will reduce the quality of your proposals. Great proposals are not written in fear. That's how you get merely compliant proposals. Maybe. Go back to the root of the word and think about the practice of accounting. Accountability should be based on information accuracy and feedback loops. Accountability should not ensure that every step is precisely followed. It should ensure that goals are accomplished by informing those responsible. Accountability should enable people to do the right things and inform them when they have deviated. You don't want people spending so much time accounting for their responsibilities that they don't have enough time to excel at them. Also, it's good to remember that most innovations come from deviations. When people avoid innovation because they are too busy establishing accountability or are afraid that being accountable means being subject to being punished, you get well-executed proposals that are not competitive. You can flip the script on this by focusing on accomplishing goals and being tolerant of how they are achieved. Make accountability about accounting for the information people need and what to do with it so they can better achieve their goals.

5. Validate quality. Quality should be validated and not simply claimed. If your company values "the highest levels of quality" no one will pay it any attention. But if it values the validation of quality, then action is required. And validating quality will start by defining it. Making this part of your culture means that everything people do should be checked to make sure it got done in the correct way. It means every assignment should be defined and have a means to verify that it was properly completed. Most proposal assignments are defined, but no one has anything more than a feeling about whether they were successfully completed. Give them the means to validate successful completion. When this is part of your culture, it becomes simply the way people work. And it is a much better way of working than trying to satisfy whims. Implementing this requires completely changing how most companies conduct their proposal reviews.

6. Cherish customer insight. The best competitive advantage is an information advantage. Gaining an information advantage requires customer insight. If growth is your top priority, then every single customer interaction by every single person who has customer contact should be part of a coordinated effort to gain customer insight. This should not simply be a standard operating procedure, it should be part of your culture. Gaining customer insight should be part of what you do, at all levels and in all departments. This is a key step toward ensuring that all of your proposals reflect customer insight. It takes more than a salesperson or a capture manager. Throw the whole organization behind it to create a culture of winning. Most operations staff can't explain what customer insight is, let alone how to get it. If your organization is like that, try teaching them about gaining customer insight to get better results.

7. Value perspective. Your entire proposal should be written from the customer's perspective and not your own. You need to train your organization to see things through your customer's eyes. When you achieve that, your staff will also be able to see things through each other's eyes as well, and better understand how to work together. When winning is determined by someone else, perspective becomes a key ingredient. Perspective avoids the stovepipe mentality, departmental walls, and excessive bureaucracy. Perspective facilitates teamwork and collaboration. Perspective across the organization is needed for being a winning organization.

8. Advocate creative destruction. You can claim to value "innovation" all day long, but how do you actually make innovation happen within a company? When you advocate creative destruction, you encourage looking for ways to obsolete the status quo. You might prefer to call it reengineering. Or continuous improvement. But the key to it is continuously obsoleting the status quo. This should inform staff looking for what offerings to develop or solutions to propose. It also directly contradicts people who have a fear of doing something new that might cannibalize an existing business line. It sets the stage for disruptive marketing. It's about competing by changing the rules, instead of following the pack and trying to work your way to the front.

9. Institutionalize clarity of expectations. Failure to manage expectations leads to friction. Sometimes lots of friction. Win rate killing friction. Assignments that shouldn't have been accepted go unfulfilled. People meet deadlines with substandard work. People are asked to complete assignments without being told how or by what definition of quality until they hand in their completed assignment and find out it's wrong. Achieving clarity of expectations works in both directions. Not only must assignments be clearly given, they must also be accepted. Or not. Or discussed. Anything but passive acceptance leading to predictable failure. Availability, capability, and progress reporting also depend on clarity of expectations in both directions. All proposal expectations should be discussed, reviewed, verified, and confirmed by all parties. When expectations flow in both directions we get collaboration instead of rework and substandard submissions.

The difference between tasking and culture

Mandating reports to track performance is not the same thing as building a culture based on evidence-based decisions. When you mandate reports, people will do what is required. When you have an evidence-based culture, people will think differently. Complaining about quality is different from having a culture that prevents quality issues by validating everything habitually. Making understanding the customer the salesperson’s job puts all your eggs in one basket and doesn’t ensure that insight makes it into the document that closes the sale. 

Imagine how your work environment changes when leadership models ROI-based thinking based on evidence-based decisions, translated into a clarity of expectations during collaboration, and implemented with quality validation driven by customer insight that leads to an awareness of the customer's perspective, which is then translated into solutions that go beyond the status quo and result in top past performance scores. Let that run-on sentence seep into your culture, not as a mandate, but as simply the way you do all the things. When it becomes habit and becomes part of the way things are done in your company, it has become your culture.

Why

Because you want people to do these things without being told to. Because your corporate culture is as important to increasing your win rate as the steps in your process. Because win rate is critical for growth. And growth is the source of all opportunity.