Do not steal from your colleagues

One day when we needed to go to Barcelona from our village, there wasn’t a bus within the next two hours. We needed to take a taxi. There were three taxis in front of the train station. The first two taxi drivers were not there in the cars. We went to the 3rd taxi driver and signaled to go to Barcelona. He didn’t take us immediately. There were rules. He shouldn’t steal his colleagues’ customers. He called the first guy’s number. No one answered. Then he called the second guy’s number, but no one answered. Then he took us.

I was impressed by his ethic. He could have just taken us. It was a one-hour trip and 100 EUR+ business, and no one was watching.

It made me think. These guys have better rules for allocating work. They don’t steal from each other. It’s not the same but I saw too many stealing in the corporate world. Most of the time, it was not even about customers, but people stole each other’s work and ideas without crediting the person who did the work or came up with the idea.

This is particularly common in corporations (aka big companies). Managers take the work from his or her direct reports, presenting it like it’s theirs, taking it for granted.

This is demotivating for the people who did the work. At the very least, they will not work as hard in the future, and at the very worst, they will leave.

Corporate managers have the wrong assumption that people in their team, work for them. Ergo, they can just take their work as if it’s theirs.

This is a very wrong premise:

1, employees are employed by the company and paid by the company, not by any particular manager.

2, The intellectual right of their work is the company’s not any particular manager’s.

In addition, morally speaking, when it’s somebody’s work, it’s the right thing to let them present their work. If you have to present it because of hierarchical demand, at least, you should give the credit to the person.

In the academic world, it’s a cardinal sin to steal others’ work. Last Harvard’s president was fired because of that.

In the business world, if we want to encourage people to keep doing their best work, we must not steal from them.