Getting Credit at Work

“Ben got promoted because he takes the boss fishing,”

The remark stunned me. I had been in the organization several months and noticed that Ben was smart and the hardest worker in our group. Did he really get ahead because he did our branch chief off-duty favors?

I heard gripes similar to Freddie’s many times throughout my career. The woman who applied for and completed a management course got a supervisor’s position but her peers said she was just lucky to have taken that course at the right time. The person who worked hard to help the boss achieve his goals was said to be brown-nosing. With few exceptions, those promotions were actually the result of diligence and preparation, not favoritism.

The psychology of comparing our efforts to others’ is well known – we humans see our own hard work and ability as key to the good things we achieve, but tend to see others’ achievements as the product of luck or favoritism. Our own failures we see as bad luck or adversity, but we see others’ failures as their own fault. It’s a natural human instinct that we have to overcome in ourselves and learn to manage in others.

A twinge of jealousy at a co-worker’s success is natural. Don’t worry about it but don’t let it contaminate your comments or your work. Saying out loud that someone else’s success is undeserved damages you, not them. Let it go.

Credit for good ideas and good work is a tricky subject. We want and deserve credit for our contributions, but seldom are we good judges of our own contributions. Memory is selective – everyone remembers offering a good idea if it succeeds but no one remembers even endorsing it if it fails. Even if it was your idea originally, pointing out that fact doesn’t endear you to anyone but does makes you seem insecure. I found that people who are most concerned about getting credit are usually the least deserving of it and often wind up harming, rather than helping their careers.

Your boss will often claim credit for your contributions. Let her. First, as your supervisor she is responsible for both your successes and your screw-ups, so get used to that. She may chew on you in private, but a good supervisor will defend you to others when you fail. A great one will shoulder the blame in public. Sometimes it’s politically important that a boss get more credit for an accomplishment in order to give it the significance it needs for wider acceptance. Sometimes she needs the credit in order to advance you and your organization.

People generally know who did the good work. If you get an insecure supervisor or co-worker who consistently claims credit for success but puts blame for failure on you, observe what happens. Do others in the organization recognize your contributions? If you are in an organization or with a supervisor that consistently undervalues your true contributions, you are in the wrong place. Leave it. If it happens everywhere you work, you may have a distorted view of yourself.

Who Needs Math?

After 22 years working as an engineer I went back to school to try for a PhD. My wife and colleagues, fearing that I was too domineering to act like a student, reminded me to be humble around the professors. I figured that humility could be faked. It was relearning math that terrified me.

Engineering students take lots of math courses – geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and differential equations. Those who find math easy romp through those courses. I plodded through them, proving that persistence can often make up for smartness deficiencies.

As most graduating engineers do, I soon discovered that few workplaces actually use advanced math. Many of us never use calculus after graduation. So why did we study calculus? Is it a waste of time?

I didn’t have a good answer to that question until I taught engineering classes. Students without a good grasp of calculus floundered when I taught open channel flow, sediment transport, and numerical modeling. Even if the equations were simple, the concept of representing a continuum by discrete parts baffled them. The instantaneous slope of a curved line (a derivative) drove some students crazy. “There’s not a real line there, it’s just a point!”

Recent research has shown that the brain actually rewires itself in response to studying math and physics, laying down new neural connections that facilitate mathematical understanding. That helps explain what I saw in the classroom and partly explains why engineers tend to see some things differently from non-engineers. (Differently, not necessarily better.)

A knowledge of geometry, algebra, and calculus, and perhaps the brain rewiring, is essential to many concepts in engineering analysis. Open channel flows, foundation design, and stresses on bridge members all require that understanding in order to properly comprehend the physical processes and the equations we use for analysis and design.  

One of my professors said that using an equation you don’t understand is like playing Russian roulette. He was right, I’ve seen too many people blindly apply the wrong equation to a problem because they didn’t understand the math or the physics behind that equation. Grabbing an equation out of a handbook without understanding it can destroy a career.

Math, science, language, and humanities classes can seem like an utter waste of time when we’re trying to get through engineering school, but they are not. They form the underlying structure of ideas and thought processes that we need to be successful in the workplace. So bear down and learn them to be a good engineer.