Visibility

Dear Bob …

Your column on who receives credit for success hit home, as it describes how I feel about leadership and management.

I want to bounce a possible “dark side” to this that I believe happens. I have always given all credit for all successful deliveries (software, projects, support crisis solutions) to people who worked for me on the items, and I have generally accepted responsibility when things did not go right (I’ll be honest, a few times I’ve let someone who really messed up take a hit).

While this is (1) truly the way I feel and the honest way I will react; and (2) has helped my effectiveness in managing my groups (managing down), I think it also has had this effect: I am less far along in my career than I could have been, and I have been laid off when I think if I had been more of a grandstander I would have survived (this is pure speculaton on my part, of course, but I feel strongly about it).

I have seen numerous people who market their contributions by taking credit (“I did xxx”) in situations where I would always give credit (“We did xxx”). I find the constant use of “I did xxx” by managers to take credit for their groups’ successes to be unsavory, but I also think it helps your career because much management up the chain doesn’t think about the vernacular, they just say “Oh yes, Joe did xxx – he’s our guy”. I believe that my humility has cost me in my career.

Sad to say, in the future I will be more careful about how I use this language when talking to superiors, even if it means I am ultimately taking credit for work that my subordinates actually did. I will not swing over all the way, but I will be better at promoting myself for “the work that I deliver.”

– Not sure it’s more blessed to give

Dear Not sure …

You make a good point. No strategy works everywhere, and when it comes to marketing yourself the first step is to know your customer (which, when it comes to your career, consists of the person you report to and the people you’d like to report to). If they’re naive enough to be fooled by grandstanding you need to find a way to strike the right balance between giving credit and taking it.

In the specific situation I mentioned, the people in question ran the company, so it would have cost them nothing at all to have given credit all around. As a middle manager you need to find a better balance.

I still think that in a healthy company, especially a largish healthy company, people who aspire to executive positions do better by emphasizing their ability to attract and lead exceptional talent than by emphasizing their skills as an individual contributor.

Of course, not all companies are healthy.

One way of striking the right balance is recognizing the difference between public and private communication. In the public ones, whether from the podium, in the company newsletter or what have you, give away all the credit.

The private ones are more interesting. When the subject is the whole organization, don’t mention any names – yours or the people who work for you. Just talk about what your organization has accomplished. That isn’t grandstanding – it’s talking about what matters. You’ll get the credit because it’s your organization.

When the subject is a specific project, topic, or study, bring the person who took care of whatever it was with you. Introduce whatever it was, taking care to present your role without overstating it (“I asked Lisa to figure out how we could afford to implement a customer data warehouse because there’s been so much interest in the subject in our monthly meetings. I told her to assume we couldn’t spend more than $75,000 on software and 4,000 staff hours to make it happen. She did a great job. I’ve asked her to present her recommendations so you could get the information first-hand.”)

After Lisa leaves, thank the other executives in the room for letting you give Lisa some visibility. If they can’t figure it out from there, they’re pretty much a lost cause.

– Bob

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