When someone else gets credit for work you did, it can feel uncomfortable to raise it. You tell yourself, “My work should speak for itself. I shouldn’t care so much about how I’m perceived.”
Except that, in this case, somebody else is speaking for it.
This is where conversations about credit become muddled. Asking for credit can sound like asking for praise, validation or attention. You may worry that raising the issue will make you look petty. The word missing from this conversation is attribution.
Attribution is about accurately representing who contributed to the work. If you developed a proposal and someone else presented it, the question is not only who received praise in the meeting. It is what the people in that meeting now understand about your contribution.
That matters because the people making decisions about your performance, promotion and future opportunities may never see your work firsthand. What they know depends, in part, on how that work is represented to them.
Caring about this does not mean you expect applause every time you do your job. It means you want the people making decisions about your future to have an accurate picture of the work you have done.
The full guide, You Did the Work. Someone Else Got the Credit. What Now?, looks at how to understand what happened and choose a response.