Your Lazy Co-Worker (Who Gets All The Credit) Does Not Matter

Focus on your own accomplishments and tell others what you do. Forget about the guy who seems not to work and to get all the credit.

(Photo Credit: Sean MacEntee/Flickr)

Don’t get caught up in watching what everybody else is doing, or not doing. Focus on your own accomplishments.

We Overestimate Ourselves

It is surprisingly difficult for us to see ourselves as we really are. It is also clear from a variety of psychological studies that we are more likely to overestimate our own skills, abilities, and performance.

In one study, professionals at the American Psychological Association (APA) discuss the phenomenon that college students with the lowest levels of achievement inflated their own abilities the most. The more a person truly achieved, the less their self-image was inflated. Surprisingly, researchers concluded that this was not due to arrogance.

Another study shed light on how our own values color our self-appraisals. For example, a creative thinker who performs poorly on higher math tasks may overestimate his own value and underestimate the value that mathematicians bring to a team project. And vice versa.

Collaboration

The natural tendency to overestimate ourselves and underestimate others damages our ability to collaborate. Ever heard a workmate sneer that she does all of the work, and nobody else works as hard as she does? Or the guy who feels jealous because other people got too much credit for a project, and he didn’t get enough credit for his part?

These attitudes are detrimental to an employee’s continued success. What co-workers and managers notice is the snarky attitude or sullen jealousy. Nobody wants to collaborate with such a negative person. At the same time, these feelings of being short-changed are real.

Be Transparent

The answer is surprisingly simple: tell others about your accomplishments. iDoneThis reminds employees who want to be noticed, appreciated, and to get ahead to speak up about what they are doing and what they accomplished. It may go against your social training to brag, but if you want to get ahead at work you need to find appropriate ways to let others know what you do well.

Then, instead of seething about the lazy guy who got all the credit, you can simply focus on your own accomplishments and tell your boss, “this is what I did on this project, and this is how it worked out. Let me know if I can be of further help.”

Tell Us What You Think

How do you react when others get all the credit? We want to hear from you! Leave a comment or join the discussion on Twitter.