How to Partner With HR to Advocate for Your Team

Funding organizations can encounter a number of pitfalls in attracting and retaining talent. Beyond looking for dynamic, values-aligned roles with opportunities for mentorship and professional growth, prospective employees are going to take a hard look at salary and pay practices. Often, grants management teams face unique problems as they recruit individuals for roles and functions that are not widely understood, and, as PEAK’s forthcoming grants management salary report points out, compensation inequities abound for grants management professionals. 

However, a PEAK2024 panel discussion “Advocating for Yourself and Your Department” made clear that there are strategies grants managers can employ to help them build teams who are invested in the work and in driving practice change because they, too, know they are invested in. Here, speakers from the Heising-Simons Foundation—Director of Grants Management Kelly Hayashi and Director of Human Resources Karina Rivera—joined PEAK Chief Operating Officer Dolores Estrada and Knowledge and Learning Director Lita Ugarte Pardi to discuss how grants managers can better understand their institution’s context to position themselves as departmental leaders who can advocate for themselves and their team.

Partner with HR

In the session, Rivera advised that the human resources (HR) department in your organization can be an invaluable ally in helping you understand how and why your organization approaches compensation and professional advancement in the ways that it does. In addition, HR can help you identify solutions that align with your organization’s goals and future trajectory. However, your sense of timing in engaging with HR could be critical in how well they can support you. For example, if your organization reviews salary ranges in the fall so that adjustments can be made in January of the following year, partnering with your HR team in the first or second quarter of the year to have exploratory conversations around pay practices and potential pay increases might yield more fruitful results. 

Understand the approach to salaries

Rivera also suggested to start by getting curious about your organization’s compensation philosophy, which will provide insight into how your organization looks at salary data across the field and through which you will learn what compensation data sources your organization consults. However, not all data sources are created equal. Although you may find a source with favorable data for your role or department, keep in mind that decision-makers value the quality and comparability of data sources. Some data sources are limited by small sample sizes, while others do not capture the full profile of your organization for factors such as asset size, payout, headcount, and foundation type, peers, or competitors, , so you might be met with resistance when using them to advocate for change. Here, HR can help you advocate for improvements to data sources by starting conversations with organizations like PEAK to dig deeper and help ensure that grants-management-specific data is being used to set the organization’s compensation strategy.

Understand the approach to promotions

Another area where HR can be an ally in advocacy is by helping you to understand the formal structures around how job bands are set. Specifically, ask about the job-matching data sources they use, i.e., the data that communicates how certain jobs and job titles are valued across the sector. With the right job-match data, you can better understand how your responsibilities track to common titles within your function and may help make the case for revising your title. This is another area where knowing the cadence of your HR department’s work is critical. For example, if budgeting and promotions are evaluated in the fall so that changes are effective come January, it might be better to start bringing your curiosities, suggestions, and solutions to HR earlier in the year.

Understand the approach to staffing

The long-term vision for your organization is set by the board. Work with HR to understand how your organization’s current staffing strategy supports that vision. Then, think about how you can align the solutions you want for your team with the institution’s overall goals so that you can best partner with HR and make right-sized asks. Here, Hayashi shared an example of when Heising-Simons was in a growth phase—their annual grantmaking was increasing significantly and the complexity of grantmaking was evolving—but there wasn’t a staffing plan for the grants management team that would support this growth. In response, leveraging data from PEAK’s 2016 Grants Management Salary Survey she recommended hiring two additional grants management staff and growing the team over a period of 18–24 months. Hayashi’s partnership with Heising-Simons Foundation leadership, combined with leveraging peer data to make her case and ensuring her recommendation was aligned with the organization’s risk appetite, led to successful advocacy efforts around staffing the grants management team at the Foundation.

Leverage partners for support

Your partnership with HR and your enriched understanding of how the organization approaches staffing can provide a solid foundation on which to build allyships throughout your organization and can bolster your ability to advocate for yourself and your team. Beyond bringing diverse perspectives that can enrich your approach, allies can provide mentorship, offer strategies, help to increase your visibility within the organization, and vouch for your abilities and accomplishments. In addition, connecting with partners outside of your organization can be a gateway to knowledge and resources. Combined, creating genuine connections that promote mutual growth are powerful assets in achieving career and organizational goals.

One way in which PEAK has worked to provide advocacy tools is through our salary survey work. Since 2011, PEAK has helped to create a broader understanding of organizations and their budgets—and to observe how salaries grow as organizations grow. Administered periodically, our survey collects data directly from individuals in grants management roles—as opposed to us surveying organizations—to help us create a clear image of the specific jobs, work, benefits, salary, and compensation of this group of professionals. As we prepare to release the 2023 Grants Management Salary Report in the coming weeks, we’re excited to share insights from our largest data sample to date—1,078 respondents representing approximately 12 percent of the PEAK membership from a cross-section of organization types and sizes from across the US and beyond. We hope that our findings will help you to strategically advocate for yourself and your team.

Photo Credit: Julie Harmsen Photography