The real reason your ideas get stolen at work—and how to stop it

Usually the epitome of good humor, my friend was seething. She had devised a zany and creative marketing idea for her firm. Securing the budget, designing a content strategy, hiring a creative agency, and then doing all the related work had consumed Alex and her team for a full six months. This was on top of their already demanding jobs.

And then the unthinkable happened.

“Before the idea was announced, one of my coworkers, a PR guy, shared the idea—my idea—with the CEO and CMO.” I watched her pace around my kitchen, her face getting redder and redder. “While he didn’t exactly say he’d done the work himself, how he talked about it made it seem like it was all his.”

“Did you tell anyone, go to your manager?” I asked.

Alex stopped her pacing. “I did, and he said, ‘When you’re creative, people will steal your ideas—you should just get used to that fact.’”

As we talked, I could hear that under Alex’s anger was something else—curiosity. About what this all meant. About what she could have, or should have, done differently.

Was she the problem? Did she need to figure out how to play the game better?

Was the PR guy the issue?

Or her boss? And if it was her boss, did she need to quit?

Those were the wrong questions.

It’s not you or them. The problem lies in the norm of tolerating bad behavior. When workplaces say, “Creative ideas get stolen,” harm becomes a given, not a choice.

Ideas get stolen because there’s no accountability.

To be clear, sometimes an idea is just in the air, and two or more people come to it around the same time. And oftentimes, we create ideas together. I’m not talking about those moments.

I’m talking about when it’s fully apparent what is happening—idea theft, where one party takes credit for the work of others—and how that theft is tolerated. Research shows that knowledge workers are keenly aware of idea theft; nearly one-third report having had it happen to them.

Work often treats idea theft as no big deal.

But the cost is real.

• Integrity is lost when ideas are disconnected from their source. The depth of the concept or the completeness of the thinking is lost. Downstream decisions are made without the rootedness of the original inspiration.

• Theft demotivates the next idea. When ideas are stolen regularly, idea generation shuts down because no one volunteers to be violated.

And Alex’s boss was right about one thing: Alex will certainly create more ideas. People create when they feel safe enough to imagine something new. That—by definition—is why regulating bad behavior matters.

The idea that was stolen? It became one of the firm’s most successful efforts that year. It inspired the company’s next ad campaign and even a Super Bowl spot.

But they didn’t have any follow-up to this one-off success.

Why?

Because they no longer had Alex.

The Counterintuitive Insight: We Can Take Care of Our Commons

Most of us are taught to stay quiet. Don’t make a scene. Go along to get along.

And when someone crosses a line—steals credit, dominates meetings, dismisses ideas—we assume someone in authority will fix it. But that assumption hides a deeper truth: the rules of our workplaces are not enforced by leaders alone. They are enforced by what we tolerate together.

In 2009, political economist Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for proving something that ran against decades of economic orthodoxy.

Before her work, economists widely believed in the “tragedy of the commons”—the idea that when a resource is shared, individuals will inevitably overuse it and destroy it. The only solution, it was thought, was top-down control: private ownership or government regulation.

Ostrom proved otherwise.

She showed that communities, left to their own devices, often devise highly sophisticated systems of shared management—systems where consequences don’t come from a distant authority but from the group itself.

The people who depend on each other can also hold each other accountable.

Her work wasn’t about office politics. But it applies.

Every team shares something. It might not be water or grazing land.

But trust. Energy. Credit. Voice.

And just like natural resources, these intangible goods are depleted when people act only in their own interests at the expense of shared interests.

When a manager takes all the credit. When someone interrupts constantly. When emotional labor always falls on the same shoulders.

What Ostrom teaches us is that we don’t have to live inside that dynamic.

We can protect shared goods—not with permission from the top, but through practices we design ourselves. Through consequences we create and apply together.

Shared spaces survive when the people inside them protect them.

Change the Norm

When something harmful happens at work, our instincts split: ignore it or wait for someone in charge to handle it.

But silence has a cost.

It makes us complicit in what we ache to change.

Monica Lewinsky—dragged through the mud of a scandal she didn’t create alone—calls on us to be upstanders: people who don’t just stand by, but stand up. Who see cruelty and choose courage. Who see harm and refuse to treat it as normal.

Research shows that when bystanders step in, bullying stops within seconds—proving that empowering peers to act can cut bad behavior in half.

What we allow becomes the rule of the room.

When someone steals an idea, and no one says anything, the norm survives.

When someone names it—calmly, clearly—the rule changes. But let’s be clear: This isn’t work any of us do alone.

If bad behavior is tolerated, it grows. When it meets consequences, it stops. Bad behavior isn’t mysterious—it’s simply a crime of opportunity, repeated when no one intervenes. This is not a personal problem. It’s a social problem. It’s up to those who see it to act—to create the consequences. Not just to protect the harmed, but to stop the harm from spreading.

Behavior doesn’t change because people suddenly become better.

It changes because someone names what’s happening and refuses to treat it as normal. When you do, you won’t do it alone. Another person will join in. And then another. Until teams decide, we can be clear, fair, and firm with each other. That our shared space is worth defending, protecting.

Let yourself run toward that danger, not away from it.

Adapted from the book Our Best Work: Break Free from the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us, by Nilofer Merchant. Copyright © 2026 by Nilofer Merchant. Reprinted by permission of Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.