I work at a startup. I come up with ideas on projects and get them approved by the head of my department. Once those projects get traction and show promise, someone else leaves their assigned work and tries to beat me into producing results. It makes me really mad but I dunno how to react. Our business people don’t care about me trying to take the project to its intended goal, they just want results quickly. Once they see shitty results from those people they urge me to cancel the project. And if they manage to get some results, guess who gets the pats on the back? How should I handle this? Please provide advice if you can
your main goal should be to get the startup to survive so you can cash out. Credit won't get you paid, only the company's survival and exit will.
Wouldn’t credit get me a raise?
Good projects systemically going into nowhere does not contribute to survival
Facing similar situation. Talk to that guy and sort it out.
Have you tried that? Any idea for how to open up the conversation when they’re acting as if nothing wrong is happening
Going to try it. You have to face it or lose it.
I'm going to give an assessment from my own experience. The people that I knew who complained about wanting credit for ideas were all underperformers, and I would not work with them again. They tended to overestimate the novelty of their ideas and underestimate the complexity of the execution. That being said they were usually pretty lazy and never involved in the execution. My recommendation is for you to drive it end to end.
set the “me” aside to focus on “us”. In a well functioning company, employees work together to achieve a common goal of driving company success. Yes you might have a great idea, then the idea becomes a part of the business and everyone works together to make it happen. Trust that when review time comes around, you’ll be acknowledged for your good ideas. When you say someone tries to “beat me into producing results” are you saying you work for a completely unstructured company where employees work on whatever they want to? If that is the case, just leave now. The startup has no leadership and will fail. However if what is happening is you have an idea and can start a project, but need help getting it executed quickly, then collaborate with your colleagues and work with them to finish the project together. You’re not in competition with your teammates, you’re in competition with your company’s competitors.
Ideas are cheap, execution is valuable. You should be off-loading as much as possible to the worker-bees. Keep creating value, execs will check in on you
Implementation of our ideas & initiatives are always easy bcoz we have analyzed goal & plan in mind but what impedes any initiative is getting blessings from stakeholders.
Leave the company
Get a new job.
I want to complete 1 year here first so I’ll hold on for a couple more weeks. Is that the only solution you know?
Sounds like people you work with aren’t very nice. Just my two cents