It’s Christmas and of course The Grant also serves you a Christmas Special. The season is wonderful – most people will agree - but for grants consultants and anyone forced to deal with proposals with deadlines in January it is a time with mixed feelings. And for many the focus on the celebrations and lovely time with the family and friends is lost in proposal anxiety and overwhelming amounts of work.

Back in autumn I invited founder and managing director of the Cypriotic boutique grants consultancy company GrantXpert Celia Hadjichristodoulou to have a Christmas Specia. She is Orthodox Christian and so is my wife – hence there is a basis for a lovely talk about Christmas, but also the difficult elements as grants consultant. We share anecdotes of horrible past proposal processes we experienced during Christmas and how it has formed our view on avoiding exactly this.

It became a talk about the vital importance of managers and their understanding of their employees and the importance of managers to be courages enough to turn down assignments that will damage the employees.

So, the episode offers grants consultancy managers reflections on how to make sure the team is ok even though the employees are under heavy pressure.