Career Planning: In the work-place, is it better to ensure you individually are given credit for your work or that the team benefits from your work?

To answer your general question, I would say you need both - ensure you get credit for your work and that the team benefit from your work.  I don't think it's mutually exclusive.  Often many of us do great work and hope people recognize it.  Well, it often does not work like that in corporate America. http://bemycareercoach.com/23/soft-skills/self-promotion/hard-work-does-not-guarantee-success.html. People are busy and may not know your level of contribution unless you figure out a way to tell them tactfully.  We all need to learn how to self promote subtly to get the credit we deserve.   To answer your detailed question of whether you should raise this with your boss directly, I agree with Ben's answer and say I don't recommend doing it directly as it's awkward and you will come across self-serving or competitive with Junior staff - neither is a good image for you.  However, I do believe you have other options to subtly claim credit and "keep the peace."  Here are some ideas.  You need to decide what works for this situation as I don't know all the details. Reply to the email the Chief Risk Officer sent -  You didn't mention how you knew that the Chief Risk officer sent an email to the Analyst to congratulate him/her.  Assuming you were copied on it and depending on the tone, you can choose to reply all and agree with the CRO that the Analyst did a great job.  You couldn't have done it without him/her.  This may seem counter-intuitive but it's one way to inject yourself into a conversation but only if you are copied on the email.  Indirectly, you remind the CRO and your boss that you led the effort. Send a thank you note copying your boss and their boss - Assuming you were not copied on the email from the CRO,you can choose to initiate your own email with a premise to thank all those that helped you and your team to do this work. I am assuming others in the company have helped in some way with this proposal.  This is a way to acknowledge their help. Under the premise of sharing good news and thanking them you accomplish a few other objectives. 1) Indirectly establish yourself as the lead on the work without saying so 2) Acknowledge others to your boss and their bosses for their help. 3) Use we to include yourself and the analyst so it doesn't appear like you are just talking about yourself. 4) Give those who helped you an update on how their help have resulted in a good proposal. You can copy your CRO as well if it's appropriate. Include this work in your self evaluation - for your promotion. - Don't assume just because your boss said something great to the Analyst means he thought you didn't do the work.  Usually during review, there is a self evaluation portion.  In there, include this as a major accomplishment.  Leave out the part that you did most of it as that doesn't help you.  Instead, you can claim that you managed junior resource to get it done together.  That make you sound like you have management skills and skills to get the work done - both are qualities of someone ready for promotion.  If the boss asks you about this, then you can elaborate, But if he/she doesn't ask then perhaps you were over-worried and he/she already gives you the credit. At the end of the day, your focus is do good work and be proactive in building the right reputation for yourself.  Perception is reality in the work place.  You need to be strategic about shaping the perception of those that can impact your career.  That's why I believe self-promotion is one of the 28 key soft skills (http://bemycareercoach.com/1394/soft-skills/list-soft-skills.html) for your career success. As you work in the future, it would be wise to always include self promotion activities into the regular part of completing your work to get the credit you deserve.  Here are some http://bemycareercoach.com/1280/soft-skills/self-promotion/self-promotion-ideas.html in addition to the ones above. I hope that helped. Let me know if you have additional questions.  Best wishes to your career success. :-) Lei

You don't know why your Chief Risk Officer commended the junior analyst but not you. There could be a variety of reasons. Your CRO could be trying to build up the junior analyst's confidence or might like him for some other unknown reason. The CRO could have just as easily said nothing about your proposal, regardless of how good or bad it was. We're not really sure what the CRO thinks about your contribution to the proposal. He may know that you did most of the work but there may be some underlying political reason that the junior analyst was recognized. If you try to interject somehow that you're the one that did most of the work (or a significant portion of it) it's going to come across as an overtly-obvious power-grab on your part and won't help you out in any way. You'd be contradicting what a higher-up said or insinuating that he's incorrect. That often doesn't turn out well. If you say anything, tow the company line and repeat what the CRO said. "Yes, the analyst did a wonderful job on the proposal! I think it makes our company look really good!" If you wanted to be really nasty - you could wait until the next proposal comes around and have the same analyst do 100% of the work. If he fries himself because he really can't do it at least your name isn't on it, but I'd recommend against this because it really doesn't help you at all - although there are people out there who would do this. That being said, you do need to self-promote and other people need to know what you're capable of. You also need to make sure this is all taken care of before any promotion decisions are made, because whining about it after the fact will be no good. You might try to talk to the CRO in passing and see if he brings anything up about the proposal. If he doesn't, don't bring it up yourself because that will look too obvious. See if you can't talk to him about some other initiative. And perhaps slip in "You know who might be a great person for that? The junior analyst. He does some good work. I can teach him how to do that if you'd like." What that does is it starts off by agreeing with what the CRO has already said - the junior analyst does great work. And it associates you as being the person who mentors him and makes it happen without overtly trying to take credit for the work. The question is - what do you want to be known for? Do you want to be known for doing junior analyst-level work? Or would you rather be known as the guy who trained the junior analyst, which means you should be promoted to a position where you're managing people like him?