If you’re encountering win-rate stealing friction during proposals, it’s a sign that this one very important thing is broken

The things you do to win proposals come naturally when you have an effective corporate culture. But if you're encountering win rate stealing friction while doing proposals, it's a sign that your corporate culture is broken. 

Fixing your corporate culture can help you win proposals. But most companies don't understand what a corporate culture is, let alone how to cultivate an effective one. The good news is that if your leadership focuses on what it takes to win proposals, it can create the foundation for an effective corporate culture.

Winning once is easy, especially if you’re lucky. Winning consistently takes hard work. There is no single thing that results in winning consistently. Winning consistently requires the integration of all that goes into it. It is the culmination of what you do and not the individual actions. Culture is the same. 

A winning corporate culture requires not just that you take certain actions, but that you integrate them into something that is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Some of the elements of a winning culture include:

• Purpose. How are you going to get everyone to buy into the purpose of the effort if you can’t even get them to define the purpose of the entire organization the same way? This requires more than a mission statement. It requires all company leaders to be on the same page, make their decisions based on it, and show up committed to it. Most contractors have the wrong mission statement anyway. That will have to change if you want to get everyone on the same page.
• Collaboration. Is there a common approach to how people work together, face challenges together, organize their efforts, make decisions together, disagree, help each other, and grow together? If not, how can you expect people to get along when things get stressful? Proposals have a tight deadline with many people involved, trying to create something that beats all competitors. They will always be stressful. Having common ways to collaborate when facing challenges helps tremendously.
• Process. How can you have effective process implementation if people don’t define and value process the same way? When there is a common understanding of why we have processes, how we go about implementing them, and what matters about them, it means that people will arrive at the proposal process already having expectations for how to interact with that process.
• Strategy. Strategy also requires that people have the same understanding and value for it, if it is going to be successful. You are less likely to be competitive when people come into a proposal thinking strategy is someone else’s job or without strategic considerations for how they complete their proposal assignments. The same is true when a proposal hero shows up and tries to personally own the strategies.
• Branding. Most people don’t even know what branding is. Few branding experts define it the same way. Is branding a set of rules or is it an identity? Is it who you are or an aspiration of who you want to be? Or is it just an appearance trying to manifest as something real? How your company approaches branding tells the truth about what your company really values, no matter what your slogan says. Does your branding reflect what it will take to win, or is it an after-the-fact pleasantry?
• Finance. How do you balance cost control and performance? How do you balance profit and expense? How do you approach maximizing ROI? Finance affects everything. And nothing is real without it being fully integrated and compatible with what you are trying to do.

But wait, there’s more...

Culture manifests through the things we do. But the things we do result from how we conceptualize ourselves and what we do. And the individuals within an organization rarely do this the same. That’s okay. Maybe even beneficial. Unless they are incompatible. Corporate culture can help get people into alignment.

Some additional elements of a winning culture include things like:

• Curiosity. People who have insufficient curiosity tend to stay in their box. If people can’t think outside of their box, they are unlikely to make a cultural shift. Some cultures actually put people in boxes. But people in boxes don’t win proposals.
• Willingness to change. People who are set in their ways are also likely to resist a cultural change. When every RFP requires adaptation, and every proposal requires differentiation and win strategies that can beat the competition who are also improving, you need to be constantly evolving.
• Prioritization. All companies have resource challenges. Culture must be strong to win over territories and personal preferences in the competition for resources. But culture is one of the few things with the potential to unify people and change their priorities.
• Dedication. If you demonstrate inconsistency, that is what your culture will become. If your culture lacks dedication, your processes will be considerations and not processes. 
• Issues, Risk, and Fear. Proposals require a lot of problem solving. And they are chaotic. They need issues to be reported quickly. Without fear. They need an environment where risks aren’t ignored, they are managed without fear, because risks are never eliminated. Risks are never zero. And because of this, proposals require taking risks. Without fear. But also, not randomly. A culture that manages risks and surfaces issues early is more likely to avoid a train wreck at the end of their proposals.
• Honesty. Saying you can deliver something in two days that you know will take longer is a form of dishonesty. Hiding problems is another form of dishonesty. So is ignoring other people’s expectations when you know you won’t meet them. Or having expectations of them that you know can’t be met. Or turning in an ordinary proposal section that doesn’t reflect what it will take to win, but you hope will slide past the reviewers. Creating a culture of honesty doesn’t mean enforcing honesty. It means nurturing it and rewarding it so that people aren’t incentivized to stretch the truth.
• Friction. Friction results where there are things in the environment that impede people’s ability to collaborate. Sometimes people are things that impede collaboration. Look for the root cause of proposal friction and then lubricate it. Processes and tools can lubricate some types of friction. Culture is what lubricates friction caused by people.

Advanced proposal management requires addressing all of these. But this can be like swimming upstream in a company that doesn’t have an effective culture. 

Does your culture reflect what it needs to be to consistently win and grow?

Keep in mind that culture, like parenting, is best taught through modelling. People will do what they see the executives doing, while what they say will only be absorbed so much. If you don’t model your culture as well as describe it, it is less likely to grow. Commit to demonstrating your culture, especially when it's difficult.

What you model during proposal development can become a model for the rest of the company. This only works if the company’s leadership believes that culture is a priority, and that the model you build working on proposals is something that should spread throughout the company. You can build a foundation for corporate culture from the bottom up. But it can’t grow and become fully integrated unless the company’s leadership gives it the same level of attention and commitment. Modelling effective culture does not cost anything except attention and effort.

The thing that can unify us all is growth. And growth requires winning. And winning consistently requires a culture based on it. 

You can start cultivating a winning culture in the proposal department by creating a department-level culture based on growth, winning, and ROI. You can model it for the rest of the company. But you will always be working with people from other departments with other cultures until your company’s leadership decides it wants the entire company to have a culture of growth and winning.