my boss takes credit for my work, I work at the same church I attend services at, and more

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. My boss takes credit for my work

I am in a middle manager role at a fairly small-sized company. My boss was recently placed in charge of our team following a recent re-org and has been getting up to speed on our work and ways to improve processes. She has been at the company for a few years but in a different department. I have noticed that she is constantly taking credit for my work and my ideas. For example, she will ping me individually via Slack or bring up topics during our 1:1 to ask for my opinions, review ideas she has, or generally brainstorm with her. On more than one occasion, I have noticed her taking my ideas and repurposing as her own without giving me any credit (either in written format or on wider calls). And these are just the instances where I have noticed, I am sure there are more scenarios where she is doing this and I’m unaware.

I work best in collaborative environments so I like brainstorming together and I want to be a team player in helping her get up to speed, but it’s been 6+ months of her in this role now. We are also in a remote environment with colleagues all over the globe and I want to ensure I am getting recognized for my contributions and not falling victim to the “visibility beats effort” trope. Any ideas?

Sometimes there might be opportunity to diplomatically claim the credit if you’re there when the idea is brought up — for example, by saying, “When I suggested this to Jane, my thinking was…” You might also just give broad ideas and leave out some of the background info or key pieces, which then you can step in to offer once it’s getting discussed (which also gives you an easy opening to include the kind of language above).

Also, if your boss seems more oblivious than deliberately stepping on you for her own gain, you might consider talking to her about it and saying something like, “It’s important to me for my career growth here to get credit for my work and ideas. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional to leave my name out, but going forward when there’s discussion of ideas I came up with like X or Y, I’d like to make sure my contributions are visible to the team.” Plus, if it’s a project you’ve already done most of the work on, in many cases it would be reasonable to ask to be the one to present it.

Related:
I’m not getting credit for my ideas … but my coworkers are

2. I work at a church — and now I go to services there too

I am an office manager for a small church. When I was first hired, I started attending services on Sunday so I could get to know the congregation better. While I love attending, I’m worried that I’m blurring the line between church member and employee. I go to church community events, volunteer my time, and have started an outreach program that I help with during office hours. My boss/pastor seems more concerned about me burning out than me overstepping, but I’m worried that I’ve made my relationship with the church overly familiar. Am I overthinking this? What steps should I take to stay professional?

It’s extremely common in churches, but it does open up the potential for various sorts of problems — from you feeling like your job is also your community in a way that makes it hard to leave or advocate for yourself and/or makes you more likely to accept being mistreated or underpaid, to it becoming harder for your manager to give you critical feedback because you’re not just an employee but also a parishioner, to feeling like you can never get a real break from work.

That doesn’t mean that people don’t look at those drawbacks and decide it’s worth it to them anyway; they absolutely do. But it might be an interesting conversation to have with your boss (particularly to make sure her concern is really just about burn-out and not any of the rest of it).

3. My company wants me to use AI for work totally outside my skillset

Like many people, my profession is in the midst of figuring out where using AI is useful. My personal opinion is that AI is an environmental nightmare and has ramifications that the folks who created it recognized but didn’t solve before they set it loose on us. Professionally, I have tried to keep up and think it has some usefulness in analyzing large bodies of information quickly, if it is used judiciously and carefully. I have used it for one or two use cases that are relatively simple and don’t require much AI proficiency.

My employer is all in, though, and now they are asking us to use AI for everything. This includes skilled tasks (these are tasks that people spend years getting certifications or degrees in) that are well outside of my wheelhouse (I was hired for a different skill set.) Their attitude is that I should be willing to take on these skilled tasks because I can just use AI to do it, but doing them is going to require me to learn a lot more about using AI. I really don’t want to participate in this – I think my employer should continue to hire actual people to do these skilled tasks and I don’t want to contribute to this thing that, in the big picture, is killing off jobs and destroying the environment. I can’t be the only one in this position. I assume your answer is that I should look for a different job (and hope it is more cautious about AI).

You can try pointing out that the tasks they want you to oversee are far enough outside your skillset that you won’t be equipped to judge AI’s output; if it gets something wrong, they need someone who will have the expertise to catch it, which means one of those people with certifications and degrees in whatever that area is. If you can give an example of a particularly bad outcome that could result (ideally one with significant cost or regulatory implications), all the better.

But ultimately, yes, if it’s something they won’t budge on and you don’t want to be part of it, you’d need to decide how uncomfortable you’ll be staying there or whether you want to look elsewhere.

Related:
can I be fired for refusing to use AI?