There’s been lots of pondering over lots of cups of coffee about what a grown-up version of our profession would look like and how I’d describe it. I first thought it would be a single person then realised it was more like a team, because no single person can embody all that our profession is or does.
The problem is (as in any team) some players seem more important than others to the spectators (people in our organisations and client organisations who look at our teams and interact with them). In some ways those players are stronger than others now because they’re given more attention. In a grown-up version of our profession, I’d like to see balance across the team with each player treated with respect and their role in the team fully understood. With this, I believe our teams would be more successful. The onus is on the star players to promote the supporting players and make sure the spectators understand that without the whole team, we don’t win. I’d also like to see more organisations build their teams out, either by hiring a ‘whole’ person for a role or providing someone else in the organisation with extra skills, allowing them to fill a gap.
I tried to find a sport I could use as an analogy but realised there isn’t one. Whether it’s a tennis pro or a football team, it takes more than one person to score the winning points. There are support teams, including coaches, physios, tacticians, reserve benches – many, many moving parts. The best players, the ones we look up to and respect in any sport, acknowledge that without their team they wouldn’t be where they are today.
Let’s see more acknowledgement of the team as a whole. Let’s see the parts of the team (knowledge managers, proposal support and coordinators) that don’t seem important to outsiders being fought for and supported with training and skills development. They are integral to success!
Let’s also grow and see an across-the-board commitment to continuing professional development in communication skills, project/programme management and mentoring. Let’s find a way of communicating what we need from our organisations to do our job properly, and let’s do it in a way that makes them want to support us instead of forgetting about us until they need us.
Kathryn Potter
Kathryn’s experience in bid writing covers sectors as varied as IT outsourcing to financial services, security services to reprographics and construction and rail. She sees content as the cornerstone of proposal development and understands that no matter what, it needs to be relevant and up-to-date.
