My Manager Stole Credit for My Team’s Work

Here’s What I did

A few years ago, I got a message from a tech lead — let’s call him Alex.

Alex was furious.

His team had spent 3 months rebuilding the payment processing pipeline. Late nights. Weekend deploys. The kind of project where you age a year in a quarter.

Then his engineering director presented the results to the C-suite.

No mention of Alex. No mention of the team. Just “we” and “I led the initiative” and a slide deck that made it look like the director personally rewrote every line of code.

Alex wanted to know: What do I do?

His first instinct was to confront his manager. Call him out. Maybe even escalate to the CTO.

He didn’t do any of that.

Here’s what he did instead — and why it worked.

Step 1: He separated emotion from strategy

Alex was angry. Rightfully so. But angry people make terrible moves.

He gave himself 48 hours before doing anything. Not because he was weak. Because he knew that reacting in anger would make HIM look like the problem.

This is the first thing most engineers get wrong. They think being right is enough. It’s not. How you handle it matters more than the fact that it happened.

Step 2: He started documenting everything

Not in a passive-aggressive way. Not building a legal case.

He started sending short weekly updates to his skip-level manager. Simple stuff:

“Quick update — the team shipped the new retry logic this week. Cut failed transactions by 34%. Maria led the implementation, and Yuri designed the fallback architecture.”

Three sentences. Names included. Results attached.

He did this every week for two months.

Step 3: He made his team visible without asking for permission

Alex started volunteering his team members for cross-team demos. He encouraged Maria to present at the engineering all-hands. He made sure Yuri’s architecture doc was shared in the engineering Slack channel.

He didn’t need his manager’s approval to make his people visible. He just did it.

Within weeks, people outside his team knew exactly who built what.

Step 4: He had THE conversation — but not the one you’d expect

After a month of doing steps 2 and 3, Alex had a 1:1 with his manager.

He didn’t say “you stole credit.”

He said: “I want to make sure the team gets more visibility for the work they’re doing. It matters a lot for their growth and retention. Can we find ways to highlight their contributions in leadership updates?”

That’s it. No accusation. No drama.

He framed it as a team retention problem, not a “you’re a credit thief” problem.

His manager agreed. Because saying no to that would make HIM look bad.

The result?

Within 3 months, Alex’s team was one of the most recognized in the org. Two of his engineers got promoted. And his manager? He actually started including team names in his updates — not because he became a better person, but because Alex made it impossible not to.

Here’s what most people get wrong about this situation:

They think it’s about justice. About making sure the bad guy gets caught.

It’s not.

It’s about building a system where credit flows to the right people BY DEFAULT — so you never depend on one person’s honesty again.

Three things to remember:

Document publicly. Weekly updates with names and results. Send them to your skip-level. Make it a habit, not a reaction.

Make your people visible. Demos, presentations, shared docs. Don’t wait for your manager to showcase your team. That’s YOUR job.

Frame it as a business problem. “Credit theft” is emotional. “Team visibility for retention and growth” is strategic. Leaders listen to strategy.

Alex didn’t get revenge. He got something better.

He made himself the kind of leader people actually want to work for.