Here's how you can delegate tasks effectively to meet grant deadlines without compromising quality.

First, I start by thoroughly understanding the grant requirements and breaking down the key components. Then, I divide the work across the team based on each person’s role, ensuring that program, finance, and other relevant areas are adequately covered. To keep everything on track, I set an internal submission deadline at least seven days before the official due date. This provides ample time to review, make necessary edits, and ensure that everything aligns (by final review meeting) before the final submission, maintaining both organization and quality.

Dividing work among team members according to their expertise and holding frequent meetings to receive feedback and monitor delegated tasks is a straightforward formula. This approach helps to stay updated on work progress and identify any gaps. Allocating more resources to tasks that are falling behind is also important.

This also allows you to build skill sets within your team. By assigning roles you get the opportunity to see how people perform and interact in a group. Overseeing and analyzing these roles can help in developing and empowering the right people for the right roles.

Amongst all the roles, it is important to have a good writer who is well versed in consensus building in dynamic and complex multi-stakeholder setups and who can coalesce all inputs that go into the various aspects of the proposal and it's accompanying annexes. It's also very important to have a finance person who is fully conversant with the donor guidelines and templates to produce donor-ready budgets and budget notes. Other overlooked roles are HR in terms of them validating proposed staffing plans and remuneration schemes, procurement staff to co-develop the procurement plan with the finance team. Subject matter experts in the field in question are also indispensable for technically sound grant proposals.

The key to effectively meeting grant deadlines and quality needs is to focus on the goals you share with the grant funder, and to keep your priories on servicing those goals. This may seem oblivious but most often delays, and loss of quality, are the result of losing focus on what you are trying to accomplish. Funds and resources are redirected to immediate needs that arise and the larger goal of what you are trying to accomplish falls to the wayside. Devoting your efforts to accomplishing the original goal keeps the quality high and the final outcomes the best they can be. You may not always end up with exactly what you started out to do, but you often exceed expectations and find a new best practice with better outcomes than you dreamed!

A proposal development calendar is one instrumental tool that clearly spells out who is responsible for what and by when. It must cover all aspects of the grant making cycle from capture planning, needs assessments if required, partnership agreements if applicable, writing/design workshops, writing of drafts and reviews, sign offs, submission and after-action reviews.

Virtual arrangements which allow for centralised live working are vital in quality assurance, time savings, version control purposes, easy monitoring of progress etc.

The soul of effective team grant administration is fostering and sustaining transparency and open engagement among the team members. As team lead it is important to create an atmosphere where all team members feel comfortable in sharing concerns and ideas, and asking questions. It is equally important that the team lead make sure all team members understand and embrace the mission, purpose, and outcomes of the grant to feel a sense of ownership in assuring the grant is a success. Regular open discussion meetings should be scheduled throughout the grant administration process encouraging frank and open discussion and feedback.

Communication is key! How many times have you heard that? What is truly key to successful collaboration is listening and respecting what is being said. Too often a collaborators concern or idea that is voiced is dismissed internally or outright ignored. No consideration is given to why the topic was brought up. Communication requires more emphasis on listening than it does on presenting data. When everyone feels they have been heard, and their input is both valued and understood, you get true commitment and collaboration. Your peers are not mentioning things just to be heard- there is a valid reason for it. If you do not see the reason immediately; ASK! Everyone has experienced feeling unheard- don't be the one killing the collaboration.

It’s very important to focus on providing constructive criticism in order to maintain overall positive morale. If you identify a spot of weakness or error, instead frame it as an opportunity for growth and offer methods for improvement.

Couldn't agree with this more. In the nascent stages of my career, I used to naively think that I could play 'wonderwoman' and do virtually everything by myself. I would willingly, readily, eagerly and quickly bite the bullet to cover for those who went AWOL on pending deadlines but it later dawned on me that this was a bad precedent and not sustainable over the long haul coz you only risk burning yourself out but also you inadvertently do not allow others to maximize on their opportunities to learn and grow so they can be better collaborators in future.