Getting Credit

Class Location: The Internet.

Description: This course is designed to help employees deal with employees who steal your work/ideas.

Objective: Learn the proper way to deal with these co-workers, and what not to do.

One problem sometimes faced in an office environment is dealing with someone who tries to take credit for your great ideas or hard work. This is a problem not only for a person's ego, but also for their advancement within an organization.

There are a few things you can do to help maintain the recognition for your efforts though.

1. Keep your mouth shut

Instead of telling people your ideas as soon as they come into your head, bite your tongue. Everyone will immediately notice the value of your idea, if it's a good one, and an unscrupulous person may try to implement it before you can and pretend it was theirs all along. So don't do it, especially in front of a person who has taken your ideas or claimed your work as their own in the past.

2. Have witnesses

When you have your idea fully thought through and you have a plan to implement it, then tell your boss or coworkers that need to know, but take care to have others hear you. That way people will know the idea was yours from the outset and it will make it much more difficult for a credit-stealer to succeed.

3. Use questions to your advantage

If you are dealing with a boss who initially rejects your ideas, but then chooses to implement them later and take the credit, try presenting your idea as a question and in the presence of witnesses. Then when your boss decides to take the project on you will have retained credit for you idea.

Credit-stealers thrive on your boss not knowing what you have accomplished for the company. In order to prevent this, update your boss regularly on how each of your projects are going. You can also include new ideas in this update and make sure the paper or email is dated so that no one can take credit for it down the road.

Above everything else, remember to be professional when a situation arises. Acting like an angry child because someone claims to have done your work will not impress or convince your boss that the work was yours.