How prevalent is it for others to claim credit for your ideas. I’ve been the customer of this and have seen it happen many times to others. Seems to be acceptable for high fliers to claim credit for anything or twist facts to make themselves look better. I know of several cases where the wronged individual made an issue of it and then was punished rather than the person stealing undue credit. Man I really need to leave this place.
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So this is something that not only happens, but at times is actually encouraged by management. To give an example, back in 2012 I received less than positive ranking feedback from my supervisor and was told that the primary reason I was ranked poorly that year was b/c I didn’t take 100% credit for the collaborative work that I did with my colleagues. As you can imagine I was shocked to hear this from my sup and went almost immediately to my PM. Sure enough, he told me the same thing. The reason my ranking was low that year was b/c I wasn’t taking credit for, or otherwise stealing work from, my co-workers.
This is a true story, and while I get that (from the Chevron posters) this issue is somewhat universal, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone from another company explicitly tell me that stealing from your co-workers is part of the path to success at their company.
If you want to learn how a c-ist pool looks like – goto CSR in Clinton, New Jersey. This is one place where you will learn what it means to take credit for others work. The entire organization has survived because of this for the past 20 years. They hire the worst of the worst so there is no internal capability to produce anything useful remains. CSR pays money to intelligent faculty members and take their work and highlight as theirs under the disguise of "collaboration." Few examples of what CSR is capable of: ....
what a single high school student can do in a month is being produced by a group of PhDs over several years in the Life Cycle Assessment area
what was done 30 years ago computationally is getting redeveloped and re-programmed again mindlessly and claimed as cutting edge research in the computational science function.
id–ts and incompetents throwing around and wasting money on buzz word quantum computing. Let other intelligent people develop it. id–ts should stay on the sideline due to lack of intellectual capacity
how to optimize a linear problem that was solved 20 years ago is now being done by the data group
materials group has people with no knowledge and negative intellect – there are guys running around making technicians generate mindless data and calling it research
polymer folks are the worst. They do not know anything about polymer physics
Biofuels program and its coworkers are all fraud – everyone knows about it so nothing needs to be said
Sad really but I have seen it go. Recently a team and individual that needed to show they were winning published an article internally describing a great accomplishment they had made with no mention of the fact that I had pushed for and proved the idea out months before them. In fact they were naysayers until I showed it could be done.
Outright theft of ideas does happen, but what prevails is something different. Employees labeled “leadership material” are given softball assignments where they simply go around and collect the work results of people in their groups, summarize them and then present them to the management. The management simply can’t get enough of this and actually believes this to be the real way value is added. The smartest of these “creamers” have no problem giving some credit to the authors of the work, which avoids accusations of theft, while it makes no difference, since these summaries are considered to be products in themselves. After six months of summarizing results for which others have toiled years, the “creamers” are declared high technical experts in the field.
This is a universal issue and not exclusive to ExxonMobil or corporate socialism.
It's recorded in the bible a few times, and older texts as well.
The problem is Narcissism.
Which is a specific quality recognized for management promotion in ExxonMobil.
Who does that promoting? A narcissist with an itchy behind.
Taking credit? Just ask the BTC, they’re really good at it. Then my boss questions why a low paid cost center is coming up with better ideas than me. eye roll
OP,... though I'm not now, or ever was, an Exxon employee, I did manage to endure 30 long years at Chevron, and can assure you,... what you describe, and as abhorrent as it is,... goes on everywhere. EVERY organization has such rats, whose egos are so fragile that they view any good idea, method, or process from another (mostly from those "below" them, but from "equals" as well) as a threat, and while not much is possible when it's an "equal" involved,... these bahaviorally deficient sub-humans FEAST on the intellectual fruits of their underlings and become frighteningly adept at marketing the work of others, as their own. I could never imagine the psychological games such deceit and treachery required, in order to mask their true nature,... must consume a great deal of emotional and intellectual energy, leaving them little more than a shell of a human being. Sadly, however,... most of them will be so deeply burrowed in to the company culture that they will never by recognized and/or removed. Such rats are at the very heart of corporate cultural rot, and most will likely survive any purge. Hope you "make it" and go on to have a long and prosperous career. Good luck.
You nailed a big problem, but please stop pretending this an Exxon problem. This is rampant in any field, around the planet.
However, with that said, I do wish Exxon had mandatory training on the importance of noting whose work you are using. They preach integrity as "our greatest competitve advantage." There should be swift discipline for anyone caught stealing other work and not giving credit where credit isdue.
My guess is it's rampant. How would you know? You send work to them, they tweak it, send it to their boss, "here you go boss!" without any thought of giving you credit, and you're none the wiser. To me its tantamount to plagiarism (you know, the stuff that results in F's and expulsion from school).
I busted my sup once when MY EXACT WORK showed up on a slide at a meeting where my sup and his boss were sitting in on. I knew I had to say something, so while the slide was up, during a pause I said, "that was a lot of work," half way under my breath, but knowing the big boss would hear. Big boss asked, "what was a lot of work?" and I told him how much work went into gathering the data so on so on. Bam, sup busted. My dumba@$$ sup was shooting eye-daggers at me. He's gone, I'm still here.
Comes down to integrity. ALWAYS cite your sources, its the right thing to do!
It happened to me on a regular basis. Either as part of a team (performing critical work but being left out of stewardship and wrap up meetings) or working directly to support a manager (who again, reported on meetings to which I wasn’t invited).
Unfortunately, it was just the way the game was played at EM. Managers promoting unethical, lying a-holes and ignoring the technical experts who could actually do the work.
Most managers will secretly phone their analyst or advisors to ask on work status. They will then use that as their accomplishments to update the senior management without giving credit to the analyst or advisors.
Such a toxic culture. Chanting the slogans and smiling while they stab you in the back
I have had people take credit for my success 2 times that I found out about. Probably happened many more times.
If you are on site running a successful project 7 days per week, there is someone in the head office reading you weekly progress reports to senior management and trying to take credit for your work.
If you never saw it happen I am amazed because it happens all the time in the multiple groups I have been in. Not everywhere grant you but enough to not be considered an anomaly.
@dwy+184PBHlU
This person must be a PR goon. It happened as much in EMDC as anywhere else.
Can confirm, people in EMIT have made entire careers out of doing this
Worked for EM for years (EMDC) on world-wide exploration & development projects. Never saw that happen. Maybe it's because the EM engineers, rock docs, and operations people I worked with were all straight-up professionals. (I stayed away from the EM lawyers :) Anyway, for me, I nearly always worked on a team. The team generates, executes and matures an idea.
(I think there are a lot of silly trolls on this EM layoff site trying to stir up sh!t. Get a life.)
At CSR (Corporate Strategic Research in Clinton, New Jersey) it is a way of living. Folks here have lack pedigree, talent and knowledge so everyone from the top to bottom is relying on taking credit for other peoples work.
Usually at CSR leeching on high profile people in universities and associating their names with faculty and grad student work by handing out money is the way of survival at CSR.
Run, run, run .. as fast as you can as ExxonMobil promotes people who do nothing and take credit for other peoples work.