MT260 Unit 9 Intervention Proposal Example

Not One Writer's Disorganization: A Unit 9 Intervention Proposal for a Nonprofit Grant Team

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT260: Group and Organization Dynamics

Unit 9 Intervention Proposal

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The nonprofit, its development team, the funders and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Team and the Problem

Read Forward is a composite youth literacy nonprofit that spends roughly $2.4 million a year and raises about three-fifths of it through foundation and government grants. Its development team has four people: a senior grant writer with nine years at the organization, a grant writer hired two years ago, a development coordinator and the development director, who also handles major donors. The team produces about forty applications and reports a year.

In the past twelve months, five deadlines went wrong. Two applications were submitted late, one was submitted without a required budget attachment, and two went in with budget figures that did not match the narrative. One late application cost the organization a renewal of $85,000. Around the office, the explanation is that the senior writer is disorganized, because she was the lead on four of the five.

The writer of this proposal is the development coordinator.

Why the Usual Explanation Falls Short

The senior writer leads most applications, so she is involved in most failures. That does not show she caused them. Forsyth (2019) notes the common tendency to explain a group's failures by the traits of a visible member rather than by the group's situation, and the office's explanation fits that pattern. The coordinator's review of the five cases found that in every one, the budget figures arrived from the finance office one or two days before the deadline, leaving no time to check them against the narrative. In three cases, nobody had been assigned to do a final review of the complete package. And in two, the team did not know the deadline had been moved up by the funder, because deadlines were tracked in each writer's own calendar.

Diagnosis

Hackman (2002) argued that a team's results depend less on its members' personalities than on five conditions around them. In plain terms, the team must be a real one, with stable members who depend on each other; it must know what it is for; its work, size and rules of conduct must help rather than hinder; the wider organization must give it the information, tools and recognition it needs; and someone must coach it at the right moments. Wageman et al. (2005) developed a survey to measure these conditions in working teams. The diagnosis table sets each condition beside the team's record.

Real team: sound; membership is clear and the four work on shared applications

Compelling direction: sound; the team knows its goal is funding for literacy programs and its revenue target

Enabling structure: weak; no shared calendar, no assigned final reviewer for each application, and no agreed internal deadlines

Supportive context: weak; budget figures from finance arrive at the last minute, and the grants database is not shared with finance

Expert coaching: weak; the development director's time goes to major donors, and the team has no regular review of how applications go

The team's direction and membership are not the problem. Its structure and its support are.

The Intervention

Four changes address the weak conditions.

A shared deadline calendar. Every application, report and funder deadline goes into one calendar that all four team members and the finance office can see, with the funder's deadline and an internal deadline for each.

An internal deadline five working days before each funder deadline. The complete package, narrative, budget and attachments, must be finished by the internal deadline. The final five days are for review and corrections only.

A rotating application owner and an assigned final reviewer. Each application gets one owner, rotating among the three writers and the coordinator, who is responsible for the package being complete. A different team member is assigned as final reviewer, checking the budget against the narrative and the funder's checklist.

Budget figures from finance ten working days before the funder deadline. The development director will agree this timeline with the finance director, and the shared calendar will show finance each request date.

The team did not need a more organized writer; it needed five days nobody could spend on writing.

How Staff Are Likely to Respond

Hackman (2002) warns that changes to team structure meet resistance when they seem to threaten people's autonomy or status. The proposal predicts the likely reception honestly.

The senior writer is likely to welcome the budget timeline and the final reviewer, since both remove the problems that made her look disorganized. She may resist the rotating owner, because it gives some of her applications to others, and she may see the internal deadline as a sign that she is not trusted. The proposal should be presented to her first and privately, with the evidence from the five cases.

The newer grant writer is likely to welcome rotating ownership as a chance to lead larger applications.

The finance office is the most likely to resist. A ten-day budget timeline means earlier work for a two-person office that also closes the books monthly. The development director should negotiate this directly with the finance director and offer to share the calendar so finance can plan.

The development director may resist the coaching element, since her time is already stretched. A monthly thirty-minute review of the past month's applications, led by the coordinator, would ask less of her.

Why Not Replace or Coach the Senior Writer

The simplest response to the office's explanation would be to coach the senior writer on organization, or to move her off lead applications. Either would likely fail. The structural problems, late budgets, no reviewer, private calendars, would remain, and whoever took over her applications would hit the same walls. Replacing her would also lose nine years of relationships with program officers, which the coordinator's review found had saved two renewals when reports were late. The proposal treats her as one of the team's strengths that its design has been wasting.

Sequencing the Change

The changes should not all start at once. The shared calendar and the budget timeline come first, in the next month, because they fix the information problems that caused all five failures. The internal deadline and the rotating owner follow a month later, once the calendar is in use. The monthly review begins after the first full cycle of applications under the new structure, so it has something to review.

Measures

After six months, the team will compare the share of applications completed by the internal deadline, the number of submissions with budget errors and the number of missed deadlines with the previous twelve months.

References

Forsyth, D. R. (2019). Group dynamics (7th ed.). Cengage.

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.

Wageman, R., Hackman, J. R., & Lehman, E. (2005). Team diagnostic survey: Development of an instrument. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 41(4), 373-398. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886305281984