At colleague taking credit?

[uptheauntie]

A director asked my colleague, who reports to me, to do some work for her. My colleague then came to me as she was struggling to work it out. I suggested an alternative way of doing it.

Lo and behold I see an email to day from my colleague, to the director, and several other staff, attaching the work and explaining how she had come up with an alternative way of doing it. And getting lots of praise.

She has not acknowledged it was my suggestion. It is not a major piece of work but it just pisses me off a bit. I'm not in the office until next week but am tempted to thank her for getting it done and say I'm glad my suggestion worked. AIBU?

Do you need the credit that much? If you are her superior let her have her moment. Trying to take credit away now will look petty. Karma works.

And praise on this project might give her confidence in herself to work out an alternative herself on the next problem she needs to deal with.

Erm as a Director I would think that you were both petty and undermining of your staff member, and would have expected her to talk to you about it in any case. An email as suggested upthread makes you look pretty immature. Let it go.

I actually think it's your job to do this. She did the work - an if she's in an admin role, she isn't being paid to be strategic. I bounce ideas off my manager all the time - and am highly paid strategic role. He gets more money partly because his job involves helping me to be more strategic. On the other hand, at his performance review, I will probably say x was great - I got to learn y and z and I talked through abcdefg with him.
Get used to management - your biggest success is from your team outperforming everyone else ( and I've been on one of those teams where my manager gave us the credit but took bigger credit for developing the team that outperformed everyone else in every metric possible)

Being unprofessional wouldn't benefit you OP, let her have her moment but quietly let her know a little than you would have been nice..

I've been in the situation where my supervisor took credit for an idea I suggested. I was pleased he saw value in my suggestion. Although he had praise for "his" idea from the hierarchy, we both knew it was my idea. I didn't care. Nobody died.

So how did she explain how she came up with an alternative way of doing the job? Did she tell an outright lie and she thought of it?
Otherwise you came up withvthe ideas but she did the work.

Fairy, basically she said she realised that the way originally envisaged by the director wasn't going to work for x and y reasons, so she did it another way which she thought would work much better for a and b reasons. All of which I came up with.

I'm not going to lose sleep over it, it is just irritating and disappointing

I really don't see this as an issue- I agree with bookish - you look good if your team performs well. I wouldn't expect any of my direct reports to give me credit for helping them with their projects.

I like Nomama's approach. The 'that looks fabulous, you've done a great job. Let me know if there's anything else I can help with. '

I have a colleague who does this - it's bloody annoying. I have yet to find a non-petty way of pulling him up on it. Still trying....

Well, I think it is odd of her not to acknowledge it even to you. Of course it's not the end of the world but it would make me wary of someone, she could still have received praise for the project but acknowledged your contribution in some way. It's dissapointing when people behave towards you in a way that you would not behave towards them.

That's happened to me several times so now I don't help and I keep my bright ideas to myself at team meetings.

I'd just let it go. Everyone should pull together and you don't always need individual recognition all the time. People will still see your good work too.