I feel like my team isn't credited properly sometimes for its support.
My team will often collaborate with other teams, often times working with them extensively to provide the proper help. However, when those teams achieve their big wins with our support, I sometimes feel like we aren't getting enough credit for our contribution, getting just a sentence or two instead of deeper attribution.
I like these other teams, so I don't think it's bad intent on their part. However, my team goes the extra mile thanking others, and it would be nice to see that same behavior in all our partners. What can we do to better facilitate this?
Discussion
(2 comments)- 22 years agoMeta, Pinterest, Kosei
Instead of relying on the partner teams, can you own the narrative through your own updates and big wins? Obviously having other people vouch for your team's contributions will mean more, but:
- I've found that having a reliable stream of updates actually makes it easier for others to acknowledge your work. You're basically giving them a perma-link that they can reference in their updates.
- Further, your own updates can be (should be) read by leadership, so they start to draw their own understanding of your work and what it is enabling.
- 22 years agoRobinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
I'm glad to hear that you're assuming good intent here, and I really hope you're correct in that regard. If this is the case, this situation should be fairly solvable. Here are my thoughts:
- Leave a paper trail
- Examples: Having a formal meeting on the calendar if you're pair programming with someone, having a fleshed out bug report or ticket with comments from you if you're working with them on an issue.
- Paper trails will help you make your case (covered more below) and are just good in general for helping you remember what you did and the impact you had (crucial for performance review).
- Can you produce some sort of artifact whenever you spend a substantial amount of time (>15 minutes) helping another team?
- Talk to your manager
- Team collaboration is definitely a "people" issue that your manager should help resolve.
- Let your manager know that you feel like your efforts aren't being properly appreciated. Come from a position of empathy - You can say something like: "I really enjoy working with Team X and I know that they're working on hard problems and are extremely busy. However, I feel like in the midst of all their execution, they forget about the full depth of our support for them. Sometimes we'll spend many cycles helping them, but in their launch posts, we only get a 1-liner at the bottom acknowledging us. What do you think?"
- Show the artifacts from the "paper trail" before to back up your case. And if your manager agrees, ask them if they can talk to the manager of the other team to share this sentiment.
This is a tricky (but very important) exercise in communication. For more resources on how to conduct this gracefully, I highly recommend checking out Taro's other resources on communication.
- Leave a paper trail
