Look at my great idea…

It’s really frustrating when someone steals your ideas or work.

1. You say something in a meeting, no one reacts, but then later someone else repeats the exact same thing and suddenly gets all the credit.

2. You achieve a breakthrough or invent something, share it with others, then find that someone else is presenting the idea as their own.

3. You deliver a bunch of great work to your boss, the he puts his name on it and doesn’t mention you when presenting it to others.

It’s at a minimum super-annoying, if not downright unethical.

So what do you do about it?

I am an advocate of staying on the high ground. I have done this in my career when someone else absorbs my work with no credit to me.

1. Take advantage of the difference between talking and doing

When someone re-packages your idea and gets all the glory, it is my experience that they are now out of moves. People who have to steal good ideas don’t typically have the capacity to do anything about them — they max out at recognizing and repeating a good idea.

It can be fun to ask them, OK, so what will you do next to make this happen? While they are giving a shallow, hand-waving, “we’ll need more input, or put it to committee” kind of answer, just take control of the next step.

You be the one to develop the idea to the next level and take decisive action on it. Create a communication plan around the action and the outcomes.

You will get known for the important part – doing something. And the moment in the meeting when he stole your idea will fade into the background. Also take some comfort in the fact that others recognize this idea-parroting behavior too.

2. You are supposed to make your boss look good

I remember the first time my boss absorbed a big project of mine. He put his name on it and the CEO thanked him for the amazing job. I was invisible. I was crushed. This was early in my career.

Later I recognized that you are supposed to make your boss look good.

But you need to make sure that between you and your boss, it’s clear the work was yours.

Write up a case study of what you did to be included in your next review. Document how things were when you started, what you did, and what the outcomes were. Document the benefit your boss received.

If it’s all true you are not doing anything controversial. You are just letting your boss know you are happy for him to have the glory publicly, but expect him to acknowledge your work, and not walk all over you.

Sometimes this is inadvertent, and your boss is actually happy to give you the credit publicly. Ask your boss if you can join him and do part of the presentation. Ask your boss to keep you visible. Tell him that this visibility with his peers will help you deliver the next set of outcomes that he needs (that will also make him look good).

3. Don’t confront in public

Whether it’s your boss or your peer that stole your work, don’t do the confrontation in public. If it’s a peer have a private meeting where you say something like:

I am pleased that you were able to run with my idea. I have documented my work for my boss and his peers in other organizations, so that they may also benefit from this idea.

Let them know that you have let other people know behind the scenes where the work really comes from. They will be less likely to continue to advertise their ownership of it, when they realize that lots of people other than you know the real story.

4. You can’t stay invisible. You need to talk about it.

One big reason I see that people get their ideas stolen is that they are not comfortable talking about them.

I know one person who was repeatedly given opportunities to share an invention, and because he did not enjoy public speaking, he didn’t do it. Someone else stepped in to do the presentations and ultimately the idea became credited to the person doing the talking.

Communicate about your work

You need to stand up for your ideas, your work and your team. When you do something good, you need to make sure that you create positive visibility for that work with the people who care about it.

By staying invisible you are just inviting your ideas and your deserved recognition to be stolen by others.

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90% of people asked will say they are an above-average driver!

When working really hard and doing excellent work, many people tend to feel that they are above-average.  I have had discussions with many talented people who are surprised to learn that consistently doing excellent work and flawlessly delivering on their job description does not make them a top ranked employee.

As I mentioned in the last post, Be More Relevant:

Deliver excellent results — that is a must.  But don’t expect that alone to make you relevant.  Doing your job keeps you from getting fired.  What makes you stand out, and makes you highly relevant is finding additional ways to add value to the business over and above what is in your job description. 

So in this post I want to talk about some ways you can this: 

1. Generate Revenue
2. Reduce Cost
3. Improve Productivity
4. Develop Talent
5. Communicate
6. Innovate

1. Generate Revenue

Nothing will make you stand out more than having a direct impact on revenue.  For an executive, taking on a troubled sales region and turning it around, or shoring up a struggling product line so it becomes profitable and growing are the shortest paths to big career gains.

Not everyone is in a position to do this, but don’t be too fast to assume you are not in a position to impact revenue.  Here are just a few ideas:

• Going on a customer visit and realizing that you could make small change to an existing product and have a new product and revenue stream for a new segment.
• Doing customer support and finding a recurring new service opportunity
• Being the one to search twitter for discussions of your company’s products and turning unhappy customers into loyal purchasers.
• Implementing a system that helps sales reps close more business

2. Reduce Cost

So many times we set our sights on getting the biggest budget possible so that we can deliver the most value with it.  Sometimes it is important to step back and understand what is going on across the business and give some money back.  Get famous internally for being business minded, and personally helping with brilliant and createive cost management, that doesn’t sacrifice value.

It is critical for any leader to reduce the cost of doing the same things year over year.  If you ask for the same budget as last year to do all the steady state stuff and incremental budget to do new stuff every year, your credibility will degrade.  You need to self-fund some of the new stuff by reducing cost of maintaining current programs.  No one should need to tell you do to this.

3.  Improve Productivity

Every year, you should have one explicit agenda to improve productivity in your team.  Your team should be more capable next year than this year.  Some ideas: have better meetings, make project review processes more efficient, build a process for handling chaotic ad-hoc work, implement a better measurement and accountability framework, use the web for better employee communication…  the list is endless.  You should always be working on at least one productivity improvement for yourself and in your team. 

4. Develop Talent

One of the things that makes people stand out from their peers is to be the one who is mentoring and coaching others.  Anyone in any position can be a mentor.  It is critical for managers to be on the look out for talent, and develop leaders below them in the organization, but it is also important to think about developing talent as a personal agenda.  Share your knowledge.  Help others learn and grow.  I have interviewed hundreds of people for management and executive positions.  The ones who talk about developing people without being asked was about 5.  They stood out.

5. Communicate

Most organizations (any organization bigger than 1 person!) suffer from ineffective communication.  Be the one to organize information and share it with others.  I have been amazed throughout my career about how stepping up to be the one who consistently communicates scores huge leadership points, and is a stand-out trait.  I started this in the days of voice mail!  I gave weekly updates to my team, I copied my peers.  A following developed.  It evolved to email and web based communications over time,  but the important part is to share useful information consistently.  (Hint: I always found that the consistency was even more important than the content.  Set a regular schedule and communicate.)

6.  Innovate

Sometimes we tend to think of innovation as only inventing a new product, or getting a patent on a new idea (that can be turned into a product).  Why limit innovation?  For starters it absolutely applies to the above: generating revenue, reducing cost, improving productivity, developing talent and communicating. 

Innovation should occur in all aspects of the business.  Here are some places I think businesses have opportunities to innovate: How your phone is answered, how you manage business processes with partners, how you deal with IT issues, how you evaluate the competition, how you use social media, how you bundle and price, how you re-use information…  Don’t leave innovation to “the lab”.  Understand your business at the grass roots level, and look for ways to make an impact. 

Getting it done.

Don’t try do all of these things at once.  Pick one.  Schedule some time to do it.  Involve your team.

One of the reasons I talk so much about making room, and making more time is that you can’t do “bigger” stuff, at the expense of your current job.  You need to find a way to master your current job and do really well it in less time, so that you make room for other things. 

If you stay consumed doing an excellent job at your job you will not be seen as above-average.  That requires doing more.

Related Articles:

Better with Less
Make More Time

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Many things set highly successful people apart,
but the one I want to talk about here is
where they get their good ideas.

Short answer: everywhere and from anyone!

One of the most critical factors in creating
big success is Imagination.

What if the thing that will create your biggest success is something you haven’t thought of yet?

What if the best solution to the problem you are
working on is something you are not likely to think of?

How will you think of it?

Highly successful people are always ready to learn from anyone.

They seek out good ideas everywhere, all the time, and when they find one it doesn’t matter if it comes from a highly paid consultant, a board member, or the person that comes in to clean up the catering after lunch.

They recognize good ideas, they adopt them, and they thank people for them.

This generosity, appreciation and acknowledgment makes people want to help them.

So, they have a bigger and much steadier source of good ideas than people who either don’t think they can learn from others, or refuse to acknowledge when they do.

I have worked with many people whose ego prevents them from every saying, “Wow, that’s a good idea, I never thought of that, thank you”.  These are not the people whose careers are soaring.

How are you building your pipeline of good ideas?

Here are some things you can do:

1. Create a habit of talking to people before you get to the end of the process of what you are doing, or before you feel like know all the answers.
2. Start conversations assuming you know LESS than the other person. Even if you are certain that you know more, take some time to listen anyway.
3. Catch yourself from saying, “We tried that already” or “We already thought of that” – that shuts off the flow.  Instead ask, “In that case, how would you deal with this complication?”
4. Talk to people you don’t ordinarily talk to.  Ask them them what they think about – you’ll be surprised how many new ideas this will generate.
5. Ask around for people who do similar work and seek out best practices – this is a great way to ask for help without looking like you don’t know what you are doing!
6. Specifically seek out people who think very differently from you and meet with them regularly to discuss your work, your plans and your goals.

My most inspiring successes have almost all started from the ideas and encouragement of others.

They were things that were not in my imagination before someone else helped put them there.

It doesn’t matter where a good idea comes from.  Just be sure to put yourself in the stream and recognize them when they come along!

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