Colleagues not pulling their weight in grants writing

[Marasme]

Is anyone else experiencing this?

Very enthusiastic colleagues who want to join big consortia grants, make promises, but eventually barely do any writing and instead contribute through "feedback"?

Yes, all the time. Very few people actually contribute much! The best approach is to try to delegate sections with a deadline - this can help. Don't leave it open ended or you will write everything!

my contribution to a big consortium grant depends on what I'll get out of it. if the grant will pay a % of my salary and get me a postdoc / phd student, I'll expect to be writing at least my chunk of it so that i know what is going on in the part that is relevant to me. if I am one of lots of people in a big consortium who might contribute to 2-3 meetings per year as an advisor, then I'd only be contributing 'feedback' at the writing stage.

I'd certainly give your collaborators a clear instruction on what you want them to write - For example, I might ask each person to write a 300 word 'subproject' and then i cut / re-order those to fit the overall agenda.

fair enough for grants which i lead, but we re talking about consortia where we re all equal partners and experts, except for the fact i have an extra management role.

They are all getting the same %time as mine, the same number of personmonth RAs, the same budgets. There have been deadlines, reminders, etc.

Yes, in my experience this is very common. It usually ends up with a couple of people doing the writing and the others just comment and add the odd sentence. I only apply for projects I am really enthusiastic about now as I can't be bothered putting in all the work for someone else's project idea.

Oh yes. And in my experience, if they don't contribute much at grant writing stage, they don't contribute much to delivery of objectives either. Like wading through endless treacle. And is exceptionally depressing as they then all get equal plaudits.

i just want to blacklist them all.
users, the lot of them.

Whats worse is if their feedback is entirely unhelpful, adversarial, counter-productive....

Think post-docs and well qualified phds are a better use of project budget personally.

to be fair, there comes a point when, in every big proposal, you can feel whether it s doomed - if not at review, then at interview, or worst, if granted, during the actual project.

Because success means years of torture working with these people

Having this now. Me - junior ish woman, writing every single fucking word. Three senior men being costed onto it but not contributing at all. Raaaage