I have a delicate problem at work.
Over the past year or so, I lead a high profile project. The issue was just closed in our favor. The VP who runs the unit I work in wrote this really nice email announcing that the matter was closed and giving me and another person a shout out for our work. He copied all the very senior people.
But, I kind of feel he left someone out who deserves equal billing. This person and I work in different units and he and I are about the same level. Do I:
a) respond to all, giving credit to this person;
b) write a private email to the VP saying that this person deserves a lot of credit; or
c) laugh maniacally while drinking a sifter of brandy and smoking a cigar?
Seriously, what would other people do?
I’d probably start with option b. Option a might come across as a slap at a VP who doesn’t know what’s going on. Option c could be messy since the brandy would drain out of the sifter. I’d recommend a snifter. 
That would explain the stains on my smoking jacket.
"Thank you, VP Mark, for the very kind words. How gratifying to work on such a challenging project and for it to come to a favorable conclusion.
I also want to thank Ben in International Technical Assistance for his invaluable contributions. [Herein describe what Ben did.] A project of this magnitude was made much more feasible by Ben’s expertise and diligence.
For myself, I am greatly pleased to have the assistance of so many able and enthusiastic colleagues as we work on the challenges of international development."
There’s nothing wrong with option a. You can be very gracious in acknowledging the other person’s contribution without insulting the VP. You can also try option b, but it should be done delicately. You don’t know the VP’s reason for not giving equal billing to the other person. If you do know that it’s just an oversight, go ahead with option b. Otherwise it would be ‘making waves’, and your description of the situation as ‘closed in our favor’ doesn’t sound like a booming success. You have to assess what kind of political capital you have to work with.
Thanks for the advice, I went with option b. I’m currently overseas and the VP is in DC. I’m on very good terms with him, so I wrote a fairly casual email to him.
Not to be immodest, but closed in our favor is actually a huge understatement. I don’t want to provide too many details, but had it gone another way it likely would have meant articles in the press, layoffs of staff, loss of business etc., etc. At one point during the process, a VP said to me at the urinals “there’s the guy who just saved us $3m in one day.” So yeah, I got some capital form this one. Basically, I managed a huge document dive to dispute erronious claims against out business. Since these files were in a conflict zone and some of them had destroyed in bombings, we had to reconstruct them from secondary sources. I actually kicked some ass.
My problem is that everytime I build up capital, I want to cash it in immediately. I had told the VP this once and now we have a running joke where if he says good job, I say “I wanna go home early.”
Came back to add that I’m on my second celebratory scotch so the above email is more douchey than I like to roll. I do appreciate the advice. Basically, I wrote the VP and said thanks for the nice email, but actually X did a lot of the heavy lifting.