Why your program managers are winning deliverables but losing recompetes

I met with a very frustrated vice president of programs last year. Good leader. Great team.

"I don't get it," he said. "I've told them what I need. They seem excited, but then nothing changes. It's like they don't care."

He was describing a change problem, not a performance problem. Until leaders understand the difference, nothing changes.

Your Competitor Has Been in That Account for Eight Months

You've been the incumbent for three years. Weekly calls. Quarterly reviews. Green status across every dashboard. Six months before the recompete, the customer began asking softer questions, with a subtle shift in tone, and making a few passing comments about leadership's priorities changing.

Your program manager logged notes from every meeting in the CRM. Hit every deliverable. Never once asked what was really going on.

The competitor who won had been meeting with the customer for only eight months. That loss wasn't a skills problem. It was a role identity problem. Your PM never believed that asking those questions was part of the job.

Good Delivery Is No Longer a Differentiator. It's Table Stakes.

Good delivery has become a commodity. If you are merely hitting your SLAs and keeping the lights on, you aren't winning—you are meeting the minimum requirements to stay in the building.

While your PM is focused on executing the current statement of work, your competitor is focused on the "why" of the next one. Competitors don't win by being better at delivery. They win by surfacing unfunded priorities and customer frustrations that your PM is too polite to ask about.

When a competitor frames those gaps as your failure to innovate, your green dashboard ceases to matter. That is the Execution Trap.

You're Not Asking Them to Learn Something New. You're Asking Them to Unlearn.

Ask most PMs why they resist growth conversations, and the answer comes back the same way. "I'm not a salesperson. That's not my job."

They're not wrong. And that's exactly the problem.

Sales, in their mind, is pushy, transactional — everything they have spent their career not being. Most GovCon PMs have technical, military, or civil service backgrounds and have credibility rooted in execution.

Your strongest PMs got where they are by being decisive, prepared, and efficient — solving problems before customers finish describing them.

You are not asking them to learn something new. You are asking them to set aside the very traits they built their credibility on, because in a growth conversation, those same traits become the obstacle.

The Intel Your PM Just Missed

Picture a monthly status call. Ten agenda items. Your PM moves through them with precision, mentally calculating how to finish before the hour mark.

The government PM mentions, almost in passing, that her director has been asking hard questions about the program's strategic fit. Your PM nods, makes a note, and returns to item nine.

That comment was not a status update. It was critical intel. Catching it requires focus on the other person, not just the agenda.

Now, picture a different version. Your PM slows down and asks: "That sounds like it's creating some pressure, what's driving the director's thinking?" Now the customer is talking. And your PM is gathering actionable intelligence.

The difference between the two versions lies in where attention is directed. The best growth conversations don't sound like a stereotypical sales call. They look like a customer talking out loud about their problems. With your PM on the same side of the table, resisting every urge to be efficient, to offer a solution, or to get back to the agenda. The more the customer talks, the more they own the problem. And it's that discussion that surfaces the critical intel that no RFP will ever tell you.

There Is No Such Thing as a Safe Recompete

Being the incumbent is often a disadvantage. You are the only party with baggage. Every minor friction point over the life of the contract is a vulnerability a competitor can exploit.

If your PM is purely execution-focused, they are playing Defense, avoiding tough questions to keep the relationship smooth. Meanwhile, the competitor is playing Offense, digging into the gaps between the current SOW and the agency's strategic roadmap. If your PM isn't the one surfacing those gaps, the competitor will. A relationship built on delivery alone, with no intelligence, no shaping, and no vision for what comes next, is one-dimensional. And one-dimensional relationships don't survive recompetes.

Three Questions That Will Tell You Everything

If you want to know whether your current contract is at risk, ask your PM these three questions. If they can't answer with specificity, your incumbency is a liability, not an asset.

1. The Priority Gap:

Can you name three specific priorities the customer has for the next fiscal year that are not currently funded in our SOW? If they don't know, they aren't in the inner circle.

2. The Friction Point:

What is the one thing the customer complains about to their peers — the unspoken headache that would never make it into a CPARS rating? If they think there are no complaints, they aren't being told the truth.

3. The Outsider Threat:

If an aggressive competitor sat down with the customer tomorrow, what gap would they point to in our delivery to make us look like yesterday's news? If your PM can't see the vulnerability, they can't defend it.

This Is a Leadership Problem, Not a PM Problem

If your PMs struggled to answer those questions, look up before you look down. In most cases, leadership added growth to the role.

Most leaders create this problem the same way: they add growth to the performance plan, tie it to incentive compensation, and call it done. That's a directive. It changes what your PM is accountable for, without adding the context, tools, or coaching needed for success.

The harder question is the one most leaders never ask: Why does my PM feel that growth isn't their job? What would make them want to ask the next question? Do they know what great engagement looks like?

Those are not the same problem. They do not have the same solution.

Adding growth to a job title without addressing the baggage that word carries — or giving your people the skills to act on it — sets your best performers up to fail in ways they will not understand. They will keep running great programs. And your competitors will keep winning the recompetes.

Simon Sinek wrote that if a movement is to have an impact, it must belong to those who join it—not just those who lead it. Growth in GovCon is no different. The moment your PMs feel ownership, not just accountability, everything changes.

The question is not whether your PMs understand that growth matters. They do. The question is whether you have done the work to change how they feel about doing it.

Take the PM Growth Risk Assessment to see where your delivery teams are leaving revenue on the table.

Nic Coppings is Managing Partner at Hi-Q Group, where he works with federal contractors on the relationship intelligence capabilities that drive on-contract growth, protect recompetes, and surface adjacencies before competitors do. He has more than 20 years of experience in federal contracting and can be reached at ncoppings@hi-qgroup.com.