Proposal Soft Skills: How To Leverage Dale Carnegie’s Best Seller to Get What You Need
This year at Bid and Proposal Con 2019, I had the honor of
participating in Kristin Dufrene’s panel, “How to Win and Influence People,” inspired by her own experiences as
well as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends
and Influence People. Mr. Carnegie’s book covers some of the soft skills
necessary to succeed in life and in business. These soft skills are critical in
the world of proposals—from the writer up through the management level.
Not surprisingly, Kristin’s panel had a great turnout. A
summary of our presentation was even featured on APMP’s Winning the Business. Another testament to the
criticality of these soft skills are the courses being offered to help teams
better hone them. For example, Kevin Switaj’s company, BZ Opportunity Management, offers an extremely popular course, “SoftSkills for Proposal Professionals.”
In this week’s article, I summarize Mr. Carnegie’s book and
principles, and I discuss my journey with developing these soft skills and
learning how to successfully “win and influence.”
Summary: How to Win Friends and Influence People
How to Win Friends and
Influence People was first published in 1937 by Dale Carnegie. In his
original introduction, Mr. Carnegie explains that he had taught courses for professional
men and women since 1912. At first, he originally taught courses in public
speaking, but as time passed, he eventually realized that the adults actually
needed training in the “fine art of getting along with people in everyday
business and social contacts.” And from that, the book was born.
According to the preface,
his wife and the publisher updated the book in 1981 with a few more “contemporary”
examples. The preface mentions that even though they updated the book to
modernize it a bit, Mr. Carnegie’s “brash, breezy Carnegie style is intact—even
the thirties slang is still there. Dale Carnegie wrote as he spoke, in an
intensively exuberant, colloquial, conversational manner.” This is definitely true.
It’s a very quick, very easy read. But I did get hung up on the general lack of
transitions between the many stories and examples. Because I haven’t read the
original version of the book, I don’t know if this is a stylistic omission on
Mr. Carnegie’s part, or the stylistics omission of the revision—but I did get
distracted by this lack of transition throughout the narrative.
However, despite the grammatical criticism, I very much
enjoyed Mr. Carnegie’s book, the overall message, and the structure as a whole.
He presents four parts broken down into distinct chapters, and each chapter
ends with a very clear principle. And then, at the end of each of the four parts,
he summarizes the key principles of the entire section. Here’s an overview:
Part 1 – Fundamental
Techniques in Handling People
Principle 1: Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain
Principle 2: Give honest and sincere appreciation
Principle 3: Arouse in the other person an eager want
Part 2 – Six Ways to
Make People Like You
Principle 1: Become genuinely interested in other people
Principle 2: Smile
Principle 3: Remember that a person’s name is to that person the
sweetest and most important sound in any language
Principle 4: Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves
Principle 5: Talk in terms of the other person’s interests
Principle 6: Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely
Part 3 – How to Win
People to Your Way of Thinking
Principle 1: The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it
Principle 2: Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say,
“You’re wrong”
Principle 3: If you are wrong, admit it quickly and empathetically
Principle 4: Begin in a friendly way
Principle 5: Get the other person saying, “yes, yes” immediately
Principle 6: Let the other person do a great deal of the talking
Principle 7: Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers
Principle 8: Try honestly to see the other person’s point of view
Principle 9: Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires
Principle 10: Appeal to the nobler motives
Principle 11: Dramatize your ideas
Principle 12: Throw down a challenge
Part Four – Be a
Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment
Principle 1: Begin with praise and honest appreciation
Principle 2: Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly
Principle 3: Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other
person
Principle 4: Ask questions instead of giving direct orders
Principle 5: Let the other person save face
Principle 6: Praise the slightest improvement and praise every
improvement. Be “hearty in your appropriation and lavish in your praise”
Principle 7: Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to
Principle 8: Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct
Principle 9: Make the other person happy about doing the thing you
suggest
My Journey with Soft Skills and
Applying Mr. Carnegie’s Principles
Over the years, through the help of mentors and leaders, I have learned
to develop and hone the soft skills necessary to succeed in the world of
proposals. However, my journey wasn’t exactly what I would call smooth. As a
young female entering the field, I faced some particular challenges that I wasn’t
always mature or seasoned enough to tackle gracefully. In this section, I’ll
reflect on some of my communication failures and then discuss some of my
successes as I developed what I’ll call a communications “toolkit” over the
years.
A Failure to Influence
I have a had particularly unique challenge as a female professional who
tends to look much younger than I actually am. It’s much less of a problem now,
but when I was still fairly early in my career, I was assigned to work on a
management volume with a new employee. This new employee was a male, former
military, and maybe in his 40s. We’ll call him Bob. Bob had never worked on a
proposal for a large business before, so the Proposal Manager teamed me up with
Bob to help guide him through the process.
One day we were reviewing the management volume, and I was providing
guidance on the types of language to avoid. You know, the “we are pleased to
present this management approach,” “our robust management plan,” “we believe we
have the best approach.” I can tell Bob is just getting aggravated with me. We
continue reviewing the section, and finally Bob just blows up on me and says,”
I am not going to take direction from a girl who is less than half my age.”
I don’t remember all the details, but I do know I was still honing my
people skills. I was extremely frustrated, and I just couldn’t understand why
this man was being so difficult. I didn’t have the self-awareness to understand
that part of the problem was me and how I was approaching the task. Looking
back, I would have used the following strategies.
- Get to know them first. It’s harder for people to reject you when they like you. So I take the time to get to know people before getting down to business. This also helps me to understand what makes them tick and what motivates them. This allows me to approach them strategically in getting what I need from them in the future.
- Show respect for their opinions. I probably didn’t show a great deal of respect for Bob’s opinions on how the proposal should be written, and I suspect I likely told him he was wrong—something Mr. Carnegie cautions us not to do. In hindsight, I would have listed to his perspective and discussed the pros and cons of his desired approach.
- Make them think it’s their idea. This is a technique I use frequently today: I let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers by using a series of questions, almost like the Socratic method. By framing things in questions (e.g., “How do you feel about doing it this way instead?”), the path becomes their choice, not yours.
Much later in in my career, I was assigned to work with an
Account Lead that was notoriously difficult. This was for a company that had
fairly recently suffered a merger—a merger that this particular group had never
really recovered from. There was open animosity between that group and the rest
of the company.
This Account Lead liked to be in control—but that often led
to last minute changes that put the proposal and the schedule in jeopardy.
Knowing this, other Proposal Managers had approached him firmly and rigidly,
but that approach always ended in arguments, blowups, and frustration. The last
Proposal Manager that had worked with him was thrown out of the proposal room
and banished to silence when she was finally “allowed” to re-enter. It was a
bad situation.
So I knew that this Account Lead required a different
approach. I approached the Account Lead—we’ll call him John—in this way:
- I used strategies to completely avoid any argument or tension. This was critical. Even if I was frustrated beyond belief, I always approached the discussion calmly. I never let the team see me upset or frustrated. This allowed me to maintain control of the situation. I never let anyone’s emotions get the best of them.
- I became interested in him and I was a good listener. Generally, I try to let my team talk more than me. I serve as a process driver, an advisor, a question answerer, an issue resolver. With “John,” I encouraged him to talk about himself. I learned about his wife and his young son at home, whom he completely spoiled. Through this dialogue, I learned what motivated John—this really let me understand what made him tick.
- I used this understanding of what made him tick to make him feel important. Using this knowledge, I put all the power in his hands. I explained to him that I understood that ultimately it was his job and responsibility to win this work. So really, all final calls were his. I let him know that I was there to support him the best way that I could, and I explained that it was my job to raise any risks that I saw. I clarified that it was my job was to help him win.
- Leveraging these techniques, I ultimately aroused in him what he wanted. What he ultimately wanted was respect—and he wanted to win. So I give him control over content, and we had an open discussion about any outline changes he wanted to make and how late in the game he could make changes without putting the proposal at risk.
- I was sympathetic to his ideas and desires, and I tried honestly to see things from his point of view. I listened to his rationale and reasoning for wanting to make all changes. Many times, if I couldn’t accept his change outright, we were able to come up with a compromise that made both sides happy. If I had to reject any desired change, I was very clear about the reason (typically affecting compliance, straying too far from best practices, etc.). He respected this approach and, ultimately, we didn’t have any problems.
By the end of this effort, this “difficult” Account Lead was
singing Christmas carols in my war room and genuinely asking for permission
before making changes. And we went on to win that contract. It was definitely a
success story in the realm of how to win and influence people!
Final Thoughts
Despite being published over seven decades ago, Mr. Carnegie’s
principles are as relevant as ever. Having the necessary soft skills helps us
to get the job done with fewer frustrations. However, Mr. Carnegie warns us
that these strategies won’t work 100 percent of the time. But, he caveats that
by noting that if these strategies improve things for us just 10 percent of the
time, we will have become 10 percent more effective than before—and that’s a
major success!
Written by Ashley Kayes, CP APMP
Senior Proposal Consultant, AOC Key Solutions, Inc. (KSI)
Thank you. Really loved this!
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