I think they now know that YOU did!
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My current boss regularly puts his name on my presentations/reports and presents the work as his own. What am I going to do, call him on it? Report it to his boss? That will cause more problems than its worth.
One colleague at Ford routinely took credit for my work. It got so bad that he would look on shared drives for presentations I was about to make to the director. He would steal them and present them before I had an opportunity. I grew weary of this and planted two fake presentations claiming multi-million dollar saves. Yup he stole them and presented them as his own ideas. One proposal the directors recognized as a non-starter. The other they regrettably did not and many millions have been wasted on software, hardware, purchased services and blue dollar hours all to make this proposal work. They keep pouring money in and the thief keeps claiming false savings. Everyone on the ground level keeps asking why Ford keeps pouring money into this losing technology. Even the vendor reps admitted this was a losing technology for Ford. The credit thief keeps blaming everyone for not properly implementing his idea. I feel bad that Ford is wasting so much money, but I never thought the IT directors were so gullible.
Usually the Ford “rule” is... whoever claims or blames first wins. In one situation I did successfully call someone on it. I completed something significant and, as is usual at Ford, the most difficult aspect was getting two teams to stop bickering and cooperate on a shared goal. A people leader from another team took credit for it and while I thought it best not to call them on it in a group setting I did discuss it with my people leader. I’m not sure what happened behind the scenes but the person who tried to steal credit was asked to give a detailed presentation explaining how the end result was accomplished and they had to admit that I was actually the person who led the team.
It’s not my nature to run around crowing about my accomplishments but I quickly learned that at Ford if you don’t take credit for your work someone else will.
When I started, I recall the managers giving full credit to the people doing the work during presentations, terrific managers. Then at some point it all changed. In a different group, the manager would put up a powerpoint with his name on it, and all this work done. Not even a small shout-out to the people toiling away. I was shocked. Dude, you couldn't have done that stuff if your life depended on it. Talk about a reality check: "Welcome to the real world, son, now go back to your desk."
okay