Does the title ring a bell? Have you experienced anyone in the corporate world taking credit from your efforts? It’s a nightmare working with credit grabbers, and worst when they get recognition or even promotion off your brilliance, it could mean a long and difficult career progression for you.
How do you spot credit grabbers?
There are lots of medium that a co-worker could grab credit from you which include presentations, emails, meetings, etc. where credit grabbers could end up with a better image and possibly get progressed faster. It’s not difficult to identify these kinds of people and one simple indication could be when the person quotes something brilliant you have said or told him in a casual conversation without telling people listening to the person the origin of the brilliant ideas.
Experience in Point
We experienced working with someone who took credit by re-sending emails of brilliant recommendations to the top management changing only the first sentence which usually goes like this:
Original Email:
After reviewing the document, I recommend the following changes:
Re-sent message:
After our review, we recommend the following changes:
It doesn’t look anything big but when top management started to acknowledge our co-workers’ work and leadership including getting promoted for something our co-worker did no more than re-send emails then something is wrong.
The impression our co-worker built made people remember that person was on top of things and due to her leadership our project was a success leaving the performance ratings of everyone else behind.
What should you do to prevent this from happening?
You need to keep everyone else especially the top management in the loop for important and significant work or ideas you did to make sure the credit goes to you. Is it Simple? You don’t want to look like politicking your way to success, but keeping top management in the loop is important and essential to your success. You need not keep them in the flow of things all the time, but this is a matter of judgment on our part. Assess the need to keep management inform, and ask yourself the repercussions if the idea or work you were supposed to be credited for went to someone else, then I would suggest to always keep management informed. If its small based on your judgment then I would suggest keeping it out from them so you would not look like a kiss ass individual or teacher’s pet.
[tags]Management, Success, Career[/tags]
