A reader writes:
I was hired by my current employer about two years ago and joined our internal consulting team. Different departments bring us in to help address challenges or figure out what’s going on when they’re facing a problem they can’t figure out. However, we also occasionally get tasked by leadership with addressing larger company-wide initiatives.
I was brought in because I have a pretty unique blend of expertise that involves consulting, law, HR, and LLM engineering. For the last three months, I’ve been working on a big project where I’ve been analyzing our HR team’s workflows to determine what impact AI has had and where we have room to grow. This has involved working closely with the HR team to fully understand their processes as well as a good amount of research on our competitors so that I could effectively benchmark our success.
I’ve been checking in with my supervisor (the VP of our team) periodically and he asked me to put together a presentation that we could share with leadership at the end of the quarter. Per our previous discussions (in person), I emailed him the presentation roughly a week before the meeting so we’d have time to iterate and for me to practice two days before. He confirmed it was good to go and thanked me for the hard work.
Come the day of the meeting, I show up ready to present. However, my boss stands up and begins giving the presentation. He begins by saying that he initially started this study out of curiosity, but it turned out to be pretty revealing and led him to some really deep insights. As he goes on, I realize that he’s changed each slide to have his name, email, and direct line in the footer. He also repeatedly refers to study and research as if it was work he had done himself (“I found X while looking into Y and thus I concluded we should do Z”).
I was crushed. While I’m used to letting the most senior member of the team working on an initiative present, I had expected to present these findings, given the initial comments from my manager. Plus, even when a more senior member presents, they make a point of highlighting that it was a team effort (using “we” rather than “I”, etc.). Afterwards, my boss received significant praise from the leadership team and he sent me a message on Teams thanking me for the support and told me to take the rest of the day off as a reward since I’ve been working so hard.
How should I handle this? I worry that accusing him of stealing credit for my work could make me look bad given his long tenure at the company. But I feel like this was way beyond the bounds of how our team normally handles presentations.
You can read my answer to this letter at New York Magazine.
The post my boss stole my presentation appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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