Essay Sample on Dealing with Grant Improprieties

Grant errors can sometimes be costly to organizations because they can cause bad reputation and loss of trust. As such, grant managers need to aggressively deal with such errors to maintain the image of the institution. Grant managers are administrative persons tasked with providing high quality services aimed at foreseeing good proposal writing and successful grant award. Among the activities carried out by grant managers include strategic planning, program development, and grant design. Grant managers' roles thus go beyond the work of a program director and grant writers. Mistakes that arise from grants include miscalculations, budgeting mistakes, and mere speculations. In order to avoid embarrassment and lack of trust issues that arise from such errors, grant managers must aggressively deal with them.

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One of the things that grant managers must adhere to is regulatory compliance and best practices. Government and institutional regulations regarding grant management do not condone errors in grants. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the grant manager to ensure that grant reports are free of errors. Such mistakes may be costly in terms of reputation, trust, and even confidence in the grant management (Geever, 2012). In addition, grant management is a system with many levels, which means that an error in one process affects other parts of the grant management system. Thus, in order to avoid such costly mistakes, grant managers must deal with them accordingly before they affect the entire system.

Great grant managers have leadership skills that separate them from average managers. For instance, being a good leader of grant proposal means arising above the normal responsibilities of a manager to ensure complete transparency. Moreover, grant managers possess skills that enable them to influence content of the proposal to ensure that his team produces a proposal of winning quality (New & Quick, 2003). In regards to this, proposal managers must employ some aggressiveness in dealing with errors that arise from grant proposal. Failure to employ adequate aggressiveness in addressing such mistakes reveals that the grant manager is not up to the required skills for a grant manager (Ward, 2010). Moreover, grant managers must be able to show attention to detail, and one way of portraying such skill is by aggressively addressing even the minor mistakes in a proposal. There is no guarantee that even a minute error in the proposal cannot cause embarrassment. An embarrassment caused by errors in a proposal means an embarrassment to the leadership skills and other skills of the grant manager.

Creating a successful grant proposal is not an easy task because it requires due diligence and high involvement of the grant manager to ensure that quality is achieved. Certain errors arise from time to time during proposal development. On the other hand, getting a grant depends on the quality and transparency of the proposal. Thus, grant managers must ensure there are no errors that would compromise the quality of a grant proposal. An embarrassment caused by such errors affects the entire grant system since it is a connected structure undertaking many processes. Moreover, an embarrassment affects reputation and trust of the organization, which may lead to failure in securing grants. Finally, grant manager must ensure a clean report in order to safeguard his skills and ability to hold that position. Given these reasons, grant managers must be very aggressive in dealing, eliminating, and preventing future errors in grant proposals.

References

Geever, J. C. (2012). The Foundation Center's guide to proposal writing. New York, New York: Foundation Center.

New, C. C., & Quick, J. (2003). How to write a grant proposal. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Ward, D. (2010). Effective grants management. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.