Employee realizes her boss is taking credit for her work when he repeatedly refuses to promote her—she starts working to her job description, and company sales plummet: 'Took 3 months off and got another job at a 35% salary increase'

Sometimes you have to wonder why, within your organization, you’re constantly getting overlooked or not getting credit for your work. Who is getting credit for those achievements then? Well, probably someone further up the chain.

And that happens on some level in every organization. It's natural for managers to get the immediate recognition from their own superiors for their team's success. Whether it was making the right move at the right time, tweaking a process, making the right judgement call, or simply putting the right person in the right place. 

All the actual groundwork will get overlooked so that the manager can get their pat on the back from the other managers. And it makes sense. Other managers, some of whom are managing managers, are naturally keen to promote the effectiveness of managing. They are, also, managing after all. So, they'll naturally support this idea that managers should share credit and will take credit for their direct reports' managing too. 

Sometimes though, success is had in spite of the manager. Maybe the manager's understanding of the situation was off or misguided, so the orders they gave didn't make a lot of sense. The productive staff knew this and rolled their eyes and went off and did the thing that they knew needed to be done anyway. And, when good results came of that, the manager, not realizing their instructions hadn't been followed, thought they must have done something right. The other managers, naturally, thought so too. 

For some, a share of the credit isn't enough. But in order to get more credit, they need to distance others from the outcome so that there is more of the credit to take. When managers do this, it happens behind closed doors and away from their staff, so the staff is being congratulated on the one hand by the manager in order to encourage them to keep producing more success for the manager to take. Then, the manager is going off and telling everyone else about the great result that they got.

It's kind of difficult, as the team member, to know this is happening. But eventually you start to get a feeling for it that can't be ignored. That, or the manager will slip up in front of you, and/or someone else will congratulate them for something they know very well you did. 

That's what was happening in this story, except the manager pretty much said it themselves. This prompted the employee to “work to rule," following her job description as it had been laid out. 

"Work to rule”  is essentially where employees go back to working to their contracted role, working only scheduled hours, refusing overtime, following written processes, according to written job descriptions.

Employers hate this, and view it as a sleight. But if the scheduled hours accurately reflect the volume of the work, if the processes are sound, and if the job descriptions are accurate and fair… Then what's the big deal?

The following is some of the key thoughts and advice that readers of the original thread offered.