Unlocking Grant Success: How Organizational Culture Can Make or Break Your Application
Why You Need a Team To Win
Leadership development is the number one most overlooked aspect of a successful grant application. And in this context, leadership development means developing yourself as a self-aware leader who will be intentional about building a healthy working environment.
In fact, organizational culture may be the number one most overlooked element of building a strong and healthy organization. Because, who has time for organizational culture when you are out solving the world’s problems?
The hard truth is: great plans need to great teams to execute. Not every collective of employees truly becomes a team. If you have ever been part of a high-functioning team, you know there is a synergy in which the collective accomplishes more than any of the individual parts.
If you take the time to build a strong team, you will have an organization that can stretch and still excel when you apply for bigger projects. This is the context in which you can write and win successful grant applications. A good grant application will highlight your track record (the ability of your team to achieve goals) and your future plans (the ability for your team to set clear goals with actionable plans and work together to achieve them). A strong team will have existing, clear metrics of success, and will have the ability to produce quality outputs. These outputs include the social impact you hope to achieve as well as producing clean reporting and timely responses to funders. A well-managed, healthy and productive culture will cause funders to be interested in you, and can make the application process easier because your organization has a positive reputation.
If you DON’T have a strong organizational culture, you have a group of individuals working for paychecks and individual personal ambitions.
Your employees may be there because they care about the cause and their clients, but may be less concerned about internal collaboration and coordination. Your grant applications have performance requirements, and if your culture is not built for high-performance your results stand the chance of falling short of your goals. This makes it difficult to build the trust necessary to be sought out for opportunities, and to build the recurring funding sources that give your strategies some stability.
Here are criteria that set a healthy workplace apart from the rest:
1. The organization makes decisions consistent with its mission and values: All levels of the organization understand what the organization stands for and the values that drive it. Culture has both spoken and unspoken norms and expectations; and spoken expectations are reinforced by the unspoken decisions. Employees embrace the mission when they sense leadership is directing the organization in alignment with the mission and vision, rather than getting distracted by the newest funding opportunity.
2. The culture is authentic for everyone: organizational culture is not complete unless it is inclusive for everyone across social differences. An authentic culture is one in which people are valued and respected for who they are. When people feel this, they show up and contribute. As America experiences growing diversity, this becomes especially important. Culture is not actually authentic if it is only designed to keep decision-makers comfortable.
3. The best ideas rise to the top: Communication is key. Staff and leadership make time to have thoughtful conversations about decisions, and listen to people across all levels of the organization. Its all too common for frontline staff to have the clearest perspective on the challenges faced by the people you are serving, but to be overlooked in strategic decision making. A good culture deliberately makes time to listen and uncover (and reward) the best ideas, no matter where they come from.
4. People collaborate, share resources, and feel supported by one another: Workplace drama creates barriers to good work. Effective leaders are intentional in developing systems to encourage people to work together instead of against each other. Formal reward systems are part of this process, but a strong organizational culture will dig a little deeper to make sure counterproductive behaviors are not informally rewarded.
5. Hard conversations happen in a respectful way: Our society is polarized, but our workplaces do not need to be. As your organization builds a culture of diversity and collaboration, there will be challenges, conflicts, and mistakes along the way. Its part of life. Not addressing these issues can lead to passive aggressive behaviors that undermine work. Your organization must learn how to talk through conflict so people continue to feel respect and trust among one another. Trust builds teams.
Resetting a culture takes time. But it is worth the effort. Engagement, productivity, and reputation will increase. These are all measurables you can include in your next funding application and improve your chances of winning.
Profound Hope Industries is a consulting agency dedicated to helping community development organizations (credit unions, CDFIs, non-profits, small municipalities, and social enterprises) build effective programs that engage their employees, have clear objectives, get funded and don’t overburden capacity. Learn more
