Five Ways Institutional Leadership Can Better Support Their Faculty To Write Successful NIH Grants
Today I’m advocating for the hundreds of faculty members at universities I’ve worked with who are pursuing NIH funding.
I’ve heard the struggles and challenges they face to be able to support their own salaries, run their labs, get promoted, and achieve tenure.
Due to my experience with this special group of health researchers, I’ve come up with five recommendations for what you, as a leader and decision-maker in your department or institution, can do to help your motivated junior faculty feel supported and achieve R01-equivalent funding.
1 Articulate Clear Expectations For Tenure & Promotion
Many faculty members I speak with are confused about the requirements to achieve tenure and promotions because leadership has been more cryptic than explicit in providing these details.
In response to the uncertainty, they stress out trying to meet unclear expectations, which usually leads to investing valuable time, energy, and resource capacity in areas that aren't actually going to serve them in reaching their goal of being promoted.
Trying to guess what the expectations are is distracting them from the work they could be doing on writing fundable grants and field-advancing publications.
When more clarity is brought into the equation of what it actually takes for tenure and promotion, it becomes a simpler process for faculty to understand how to prioritize their time, energy, and capacity to meet those expectations.
As a leader, you should never want your people wandering in the dark, wasting their time and energy on tasks that don’t move the needle for them or your department.
2 Minimize Requirements or Expectations for Non-Tenure Related Activities For Junior Faculty
This may be quite controversial, but I believe faculty leadership should consider minimizing the requirements for non-tenure or promotion-related activities for junior faculty so that they are able to focus on the activities that will make a difference for them in terms of tenure and promotion. More often than not, this is related to grants and publications.
Because there’s so much to establish in the early years of a faculty position, supporting those faculty to focus on what will help them lay a strong research foundation and achieve the requirements for tenure will help them be successful.
For example, if faculty are spending a lot of time on service activities beyond the minimum requirement for tenure and promotion, it’s going to distract them from the work they really need to be doing–generating those grants and publications that are going to serve them and the institution.
As a leader, one of your most important jobs is to set your faculty up for long-term success because when your junior faculty member is on a track where they can focus their energy and efforts on what is most relevant and useful in their career progress and contribution to the field, the entire department benefits.
3 Promote Quality Grant Applications
This is in contrast to the practice of departments and institutions being more focused on quantity over quality in regard to grants—the most obvious example of this is implicit or explicit quotas for the number of grant submissions in a year. (Please don’t do this!)
Having a grant submission quota contradicts the main goal of ensuring faculty members are funded—because quality, simplicity, and persuasion actually do matter in terms of funding success, and those are difficult to achieve when you’re focused on quantity and volume rather than clearly communicating the value of your research.
Getting my clients R01 funding is my job, so I say this with the confidence of years of experience:. If you continue putting quantity over quality, it will take your faculty longer to get an NIH grant funded.
If you switch your focus back to quality applications, it will allow your faculty members to secure funding much faster. Contrary to popular belief - achieving funding success is not a numbers game (it’s a strategy game), so when measuring the efforts of your faculty to get funded, a better approach is to measure their efforts to improve their grantsmanship. Which brings us to…
4 Focus On Developing Grantsmanship
It’s undeniable that every research proposal must have strong scientific merit, but that’s just the beginning of a successful application. What a research proposal also needs is strong grantsmanship–the ability to clearly and persuasively communicate the value of the research. In my experience, the applications that get funded have the right combination of scientific merit and grantsmanship. If you only have one and not the other, you’re not going to get funded. Unfortunately, this skill is undervalued by most institutions and consequently underdeveloped in the vast majority of junior faculty.
Grantsmanship is not only about persuasive communication, it’s also about planning and strategy. This is mostly about giving yourself the time and space to think deeply about what you’re doing and how you can put yourself in your reviewer’s shows to convey the overall value of your research.
Leaders can give their junior faculty this time and space by doing what we discussed in recommendation number two. Allowing them to focus on essential tasks and minimizing non-essential activities. Allow securing funding to be a main priority at this stage, and let them know they have your full support.
5 Identify & Share Institutional Resources
Faculty need to be aware of the resources their institution has available to support grant success as well as the knowledge of how to access them.
Two supremely helpful resources most institutions have available are internal mock reviews and administrative support for submitting completed applications.
On the other side of offering support is making sure you identify gaps in your support. Determine where support is needed but you don’t have an offering. As a leader, your next decision should be determining whether you want to fill in this missing piece in-house or hire externally.
For example, in our business, we provide strategic grant reviews for faculty who are resubmitting R01s. They’re close to getting funded, but they need some support, particularly around the grantsmanship piece, to get it across the pay line. So individual faculty, as well as institutions, hire us to come in and consult on these grants to ensure they are successful with the resubmission.
We also offer half-day and full-day workshops to improve grantsmanship skills, and we offer an institutional license to our Grant Funding Formula self-paced course for R01 grants.
If you want your faculty to be successful and competitive in this extremely challenging funding landscape, and bring that level of grant funding to your institution, one of your best plays is to make the investment in your faculty by providing them with resources like this. Whether finding someone in-house, creating a new position, or bringing in consultants, your faculty are worth the investment.
Support Your Faculty
Faculty, especially your junior faculty, need a lot of support to be successful. There are lots of different ways departments can support them, but these five suggestions are a good starting point. To recap, make your expectations for tenure and promotion clear and release your junior faculty from non-essential activities so they can focus on securing funding. Forget quotas and start promoting quality grants, which leads to a department-wide focus on helping researchers improve the quality of their grant writing. Lastly, give your team the resources they need to be successful.
Support your team and watch the amazing things they do for their careers and your institutions.
Connect with me
If you’re ready to improve the grantsmanship of your faculty today, I invite you to contact me and we can set up a call to discuss your needs.