1081: How to Deal with Credit Stealers at Work with Andrew Palmer

How to Be Awesome at Your Job

How to be Awesome at Your Job

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4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Andrew Palmer discusses what to do when others take credit for your ideas.

— YOU’LL LEARN —

1) Why no one benefits from credit stealing—including the stealer

2) The unintentional ways people steal credit

3) Why crediting others makes you more credible

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— ABOUT ANDREW —

Andrew Palmer writes the Bartleby column on the workplace, and is the host of “Boss Class”, The Economist’s limited-season podcast on management. He was formerly Britain editor, executive editor, business-affairs editor, head of the data team, Americas editor, finance editor and banking correspondent, having joined The Economist as management correspondent in February 2007.

• Article: "The Behavior That Annoyed His Colleagues More Than Any Other"

• Podcast: Boss Class

• Website: The Economist

— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW —

• Study: “Hey, Boss, Please Share! An Exploitative Perspective on Supervisor Idea Credit Taking and Employees’ Reactions” by Dan Ni et al.

• Study: “Dual-promotion: Bragging Better by Promoting Peers” by Eric VanEpps, Einav Hart, and Maurice E. Schweitzer

• Study: “When expressing pride makes people seem less competent” by Rebecca Schaumberg

• Study: “How damaging is shouting ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre?” by Joshua S. Gans

• Book: Middlemarch by George Eliot

— THANK YOU SPONSORS! —

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• Plaud.ai. Use the code AWESOME and get a discount on your order

• LinkedIn Jobs. Post your job for free at linkedin.com/beawesome

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Transcript

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0:00.0	How to Be Awesome at your job is sponsored by LinkedIn Jobs.
0:04.0	When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in.
0:07.4	Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash be awesome.
0:11.5	That's LinkedIn.com slash B-E-A-W-E-S-O-M-E. If you can define roles up front, which forces people to acknowledge we are all working together on this thing and we have some kind of role clarity, we all have a contribution to make, that is helpful.
0:37.4	And doing that up front is
0:39.0	particularly helpful. And putting it on all the documentation might seem so stupid, but it's actually
0:43.8	a way of immediately signaling to the world and the people on the team that we're all in this together
0:48.9	in some way. One way to think about this is you hate other people stealing credit for your ideas.
0:55.7	Are you doing it yourself?
0:57.6	And there is a ton of research about something called Cryptonezia,
1:01.2	which basically is credit stealing when you're not aware of it.
1:05.9	Involuntary claiming of credit.
1:19.6	Yeah. claiming of credit. That's Andrew Palmer.
1:20.9	He spent over 18 years at The Economist as a writer and editor.
1:24.3	Currently, he writes the Bartleby column on the workplace and hosts the boss class
1:28.1	podcast. Andrew's written on many workplace topics. And today, we're zeroing in on the one
1:33.0	behavior that I know his colleagues more than any other credit stealing. So you'll learn one,
1:38.1	why no one benefits from credit stealing, including the stealer. Two, the unintentional ways people
1:43.1	steal credit. And three, why crediting
1:45.4	others actually makes you more credible. And if you want to quit summary write up at these
1:49.6	actionable takeaways from Andrew, I recommend you sign up for the free Gold Nugget email newsletter
1:53.3	found at Awesome at Your Job.com. I'm Pete McItis. This is How to Be Awesome at Your Job.
	...

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