31-Year-Old Employee Learns Her 28-Year-Old Coworker Has Been Stealing Credit for Work Is Helping Her With, Stops Helping, Entire Team Demands She Resume: ‘My Manager Complimented Her During a Team Meeting for How Much Her Work Had Improved'

Teamwork is important, and working well together ensures that everything in a workplace flows seamlessly. But dependency can quickly become problematic when members of the team, or the organization as a whole, are relying too much on a superstar team member. That one person is propping everything up, and only the people who are being propped up know about it. This is usually immediate team members and maybe even the manager who doesn't have a clue how to deal with a problem they are well aware or is simply afraid to step in because that would mean having some hard conversations they would rather avoid and drawing the watchful eye of upper management on their team.

It's easy, when you're the one doing this extra work, to think that other people have some idea of the great job you are doing. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. Those people you're helping—you know, the only people who know? Yeah, they're not about to go around telling everyone that they're not capable of doing their own work. 

This is worsened by the fact that people a rung up on the ladder often feel threatened by that star performer on the rung below them. Even if they're not even in the same work group. So they're another mechanism where members of the organization try to distance the star performer from their results too. Or find some way to lessen the visibility their results get, to keep the upstart worker in their place.

Even proper documentation won't net recognition. At the end of the day, it's all about “the narrative,” and “the narrative” is set in management meetings that are disconnected from production, where things that are said, and things that are unsaid and omitted, become an altered reality a “status quo” that everyone pretends to believe. 

Getting upset, or suddenly refusing to help, will also just earn you pushback from people around you. This will maybe even result in words whispered in the ear of upper management about how you're “difficult” or not a “team player.”

From upper management's perspective, everything was in equilibrium. They have no idea that you were the one keeping everything just so. But they are now keenly aware that you're somehow involved in pulling everything out of that neat and even state. So you get associated with the problem even though you have long been the solution. 

It's like when you were a kid sitting in class, and you turned to that one kid, your "friend," with friend being a loose term that kids apply to everyone they talk to, and told them a funny joke that was relevant to the material. And the friend just turns around and raises their hand and verbatim blurts out exactly what you just said. 

Cue laughter from the entire class. Even the teacher joins in. Meanwhile, you're just sitting there with your mouth slightly agape, unbelieving the audacity that you have just witnessed.

Yeah, life's a bit like that. People are a bit like that. Sometimes you can't help but wonder just exactly what is going on inside their head.

You'd hope that people would grow up and mature. But a surprising number of people just get to a level of maturity and just.. decide that that's good enough,gh or something. And remain satisfied to be perpetually stuck at that one level for the rest of their life. 

I don't get that.

But if that wasn't the case, you wouldn't end up with instances like this in the workplace where people are somehow ok with grade school-level ethics.

The employee is now stuck between a rock and a hard place because her coworkers are essentially pressuring her to do another team member's work. The following is the advice they received in their post.