I was scrolling last night and came across a thread about how to stop your manager taking credit for your work. Someone had replied that you should make it explicit with them, split it down the middle: your manager takes the credit for leadership and support, you take the credit for execution. Reading it, the logic didn’t seem right to me, so here’s a different angle.
Ideally the credit isn’t one pie that the two of you halve, it’s a pie you find every way to make bigger together. Don’t let the game between you and your manager turn into a zero-sum one. If you can turn a single-layer pie into a two-layer pie and take a layer each, then there’s no competition to speak of. There’s collaboration, and at the end of it you each get a bigger slice than you’d hoped for. If that’s the frame you’re holding, then throughout the work and the positioning you both face outwards, continually widening and thickening the pie.
The credit you and your manager are claiming sits at different altitudes. If a manager is coming down onto the pitch to compete with their own direct report, it’s worth them asking whether they’re standing in the right place. Where you find your manager competing with you for credit, not always but very often, that manager probably doesn’t have much further to climb either. The better arrangement is one where the credit has distinct layers, all serving one narrative: that both of you already have the range and the capability for your next level. Which comes back to the first point. Make the pie big and thick, so there are layers available for you both to use.
A disclaimer. Both of those points assume your manager is someone you’ve observed and judged to have basic integrity and competence. Not a high bar, not a perfect manager dropped from the sky, but at least someone who is, say, sixty per cent or more your kind of person. My own view is that the relationship with a manager is less hierarchy than collaboration, with each getting what they need and each making the other’s outcome possible. And collaborators deserve careful selection and careful scrutiny. It’s also why I think that when you’re choosing a job, the first thing you’re really choosing is the manager. What you work on can be adjusted over time. Who you work with matters more than what you do.
And if you genuinely can’t get your manager to buy in, meaning you’ve tested it and this isn’t someone capable of a win-win, then the question stops being how to compete for credit. The question becomes when the right moment is to change collaborators. And until you can, keep the relationship transactional, don’t invest your heart in it, and put the weight on building your own strength instead of spending yourself.
To say it plainly: at work, the relationship between a manager and their report is cooperation, mutual advantage. On credit, the best outcome is a bigger and thicker pie with each of you taking what you need. But if you look closely and find your manager isn’t the right collaborator, the place worth your effort isn’t fighting them for a slice. It’s changing who you work with, and staying transactional until you can.