my employee takes credit for the whole team’s work
A reader writes:
I’m a fairly experienced manager, but I’ve only been managing my current team for a few months.
I’ve been in a couple meetings with one of my team members that I’ve asked her to take the lead on, and she reports out at every meeting. Twice now, as she’s reporting I’ve heard her change her sentence from “we’re doing…” to “I’m doing…” But she’s not! The whole team is pitching in ideas and support, and sometimes they or I am actually doing the things she’s talking about. It seems like a really low-stakes thing, but we’ve had to have a couple of other conversations about working on a team, like making sure she’s not getting out ahead of my direction and being aware of how she talks about workload around her teammates. It’s been a lot, so I also don’t want to be focus unnecessarily on something that could really be minor. But she’s taking credit for other people’s work, and that’s not fair to them, and I don’t know if it makes her look particularly good, either. Should I bring it up or let it slide?
I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
Other questions I’m answering there today include:
- Can I ask my colleagues not to mime shooting themselves?
- Do we have to offer the job to the only applicant?
