How to deal with colleague claiming credits for work he wasn’t involved in?

Question

Hi everyone,

So a few days ago I was assigned to design the architecture for a small feature, which I presented to the team on a meeting. During that meeting, a colleague of mine implied that he was directly involved with crafting the design which wasn’t the case indeed. How would you guys handle this? Personally, I believe just for a single case it doesn’t make it a reason to address it, but if it gets repeated it might need some careful consideration.

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

First, I would assume good intent:

Is there some genuine contribution they made that you forgot about? Like a comment on your design spec or maybe there's some resource they made which you built off of.
Did they imply that they played a role in your design or did you misinterpret?
Maybe they just forgot, and it turns out that they actually helped someone else with their design?

If you're very sure none of these ring true and there's some bad intent there, you could bring it up with your manager. Otherwise, you could do the "wait and see" approach to see if it's repeated - I'm personally leaning towards this one as a confrontation here would be very awkward.

I hope these other threads help as well:

How to deal with colleague claiming credits for work he wasn’t involved in?

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