In what way is psychological safety important? As part of her PhD, Professor Amy Edmondson found that, counter intuitively, high performing teams made more mistakes, and have more errors than others. Let me say this one more time. High performing teams make more mistakes. How can this be a good thing, and add to safety and performance? In her TED…
Is there an “Us” and “Them” in your bid team? It can be hard to create one winning spirit in a bid team, where everyone visibly lines up with equal enthusiasm against the goal. As a bid team member it can be upsetting and frustrating if others don’t seem to be working as hard as you. As the Bid Director,…
Do you have experience of corrosive conflict in bid teams? Here’s a brief quiz for December! Was it: (A) Put under the carpet. In other words, it was denied that the conflict existed, had any impact on the team or the bid outcomes. (B) The precursor to aggression. Of course people are polite first. When all else fails, aggression is justified…
It can be wearing when enthusiasm fails and you only see the problems in a bid. When the parameters, pressures and requirements expressed in the tender seem a massive problem, with a focus only on price. It can feel like being in a tunnel rather than a creative, exploratory, innovative approach to improvement. And yet, as an experienced Bid…
Effective interdependency with other team members is an essential component of winning a bid. From coaching members of numerous teams – Bid, Sales and Leadership teams – I know that working interdependently to achieve high performance is much more easily said than done. It‘s much easier to stay comfortable huddled around our stovepipes or deep inside our silos than it…
For me, visiting the five million year old red sand dunes in the Namib Desert was the most important part of our family trip to Namibia last summer. I found images of the tall, vibrantly coloured dunes almost unbelievable, and yearned to see them. The thought of the dunes going on for miles and miles intrigued me. …