My manager is sending my work in her name, is this appropriate?

[talentlost]

evilcart is totally correct,

the manager does not own the work of their employees. They manage the department, which means they set policy and procedures, most people on this post are describing supervisors. When a manager forwards information to anyone it is what his.her people have produced. The managers accolades are based on the results of his/her team, it is the leadership of the manager that enables his/her staff to perform well.

The manager should say my team produced the following recommendation, which I concur with their findings. They should not say this is what I have done. A simple analogy would be sports. When a manager gets credit for winning the game it is because of leadership and building a culture to win. He did not play the game. When a manger gets scorned for loosing it was because he could not motivate his team and created a culture of losing. Again it has nothing with actually playing. Manager don't play.

Show me a company culture that endorses the manager getting the credit and I will tell you that company has low moral and terrible company culture. Any manager that implies they did the work is not a real manager only by name. Those type of managers believe management means telling people what to do, those are supervisors.

[Brinson]

Here's my take on it.

It depends on the content. If its pure information (no interpretation, suggestions, ideas, etc) then I think its fine.

If the executive asks the manager, "What's our profit on product x?", and the manager asks you, and you respond with y dollars its not important that she credit that information.

However, if the executive asks what is causing product X to sell worse this year than last year, and your manager asks you, and you say you feel it is because of a redesign that happened in Q1, and that some stores received the new product earlier than others, and the later the new redesigned product arrived at the store the longer sales held-- well, that idea, that analysis, is yours, and should be credited to you.

[HisTime2010]

Originally Posted by sskkc

Personally, it sounds like a slippery slope to me. I don't like unethical people - and where there's smoke, there's fire. I'd look for another job, but not bring this up to anyone. If she's truly presenting your work as her own, upper management will notice the downward slide after you leave.

I agree!

[HisTime2010]

I once knew a diabetic sales rep who worked in a support staff position, so technically she wasn't a sales rep yet. She aided the rep and she established a ton of new business. Well the rep she was supporting always reported everything in her name and never mentioned the support staff or anything. It was horrible. The support staff person finally got fed up so she submitted copies of all her documentation of new business and established relationships to the reps manager and do you know what happened? The rep was fired, the support person was hired and eventually became the territory manager!

[HisTime2010]

So every situation is different.

[be.010]

Totally agree that it comes down to each organization's culture. Apparently in many companies, the line manager has near full authorities over his/her department. S/he can hire, promote, pay-raise, or fire employees. That's not the case here (in my country, in fact). A middle manager here can only nominate, support, warn... etc. So the upper management are the ones that 'butter my bread'.
For several years, I had always worked hard to make my manager look good, got many kinds of recognition, but never promoted or got a respectable pay raise. Turned out, she'd market me to the upper management as a "hard working, ethical, good performer", etc. but she'd never tell them I did management-class reports and analyses because I'd be stepping on her duties (I owe her giving me the chance but that's another story).

Also, of course I'm not complaining about her forwarding or copying regular information that I collected. The cases that I'm talking about, while not so advanced, are not a part of the normal work cycle. In the most recent one, the manager herself should've rejected the payment, but instead, hadn't I argued about it she would've made it anyway. She had no opinion in the matter apart from her initial instructions to make the full payment. Instead, she was just transmitting the massages between the upper management, the supplier, and me, before eventually telling me that the upper management decided to go with my suggestion. In a positive way, my manager used my arguments to convince the upper management. But again, she'll take credit for caring to save the company from exceeding a risk measure (credit limit), I'll get the inner satisfaction that my emails were correct enough to be cut 'n pasted in the correspondence!

Finally, considering the valuable insights I will not escalate the case, simply because my version of the story will probably make the upper management uncomfortable towards considering any future suggestions from me. I'll try to find a way to refer to it but not in a negative way.

Much appreciate all the advices.