Should you correct someone when they give the wrong person credit for something?
My mother died in August 1991, a few days after she turned 61. She was living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, at the time where she had moved a couple of years earlier with my father so they could be in the same town as my sister, her husband and their three young children. The woman I’d eat bees for and I had traveled to Grand Forks from Boston for the funeral. We stayed on for a bit to try to help my father sort things out.
Nancy and I noticed there was a large turkey in my father’s freezer and we decided to prepare it along with other dishes that are more traditional to Thanksgiving than to a 99-degree day in Grand Forks. Nevertheless, we persisted and the eight of us ate dinner around my father’s dining room table. Among the items we prepared was the stuffing I had made each Thanksgiving for our family and friends back in Boston.
As my sister was eating a fork full of stuffing, she commented how much she always liked this stuffing from my mother’s recipe. As playfully as I could, I told her it was my recipe and she had never eaten it before. She laughed and ate on.
Did I need to correct her? No. I gained little by having it known the recipe was mine. It didn’t strike me, however, that offering the correction would diminish my mother’s memory since it was after all my mother’s frozen turkey that had inspired the dinner.
Often, when someone is being given credit for something they didn’t do, it might feel awkward to set the record straight. If, for example, in a work setting a manager is heralding the efforts of a worker on a particular project when it was actually the work of someone else, it might feel petty for the person actually responsible for the work to speak up.
In such cases, the right thing for anyone receiving credit for something they didn’t do is to be the one to set the record straight. When a group of employees contribute equally to an accomplishment and only one gets singled out, that one person should name the other members of the team. Getting recognition feels great. But accepting it for something you didn’t do is dishonest.
Before my sister died in October 2020, it became something of a tradition for her to call me around Thanksgiving and ask for our mother’s stuffing recipe. I’d moan, remind her that it wasn’t mom’s recipe, and then send it on to her.
On that note, I should point out that my stuffing recipe borrows liberally from both the Joy of Cooking and from the recipe on the plastic packaging of unsliced white bread sold in grocery stores around Thanksgiving time. When the recipe appeared in a holiday cookbook compiled by my employer, I gave credit to each because that’s the right thing to do. If you’d like a copy of the recipe, email me and I’d be glad to send it to you.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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