💼 Stuck with a boss who takes credit for everything, thinking about finally quitting

Three years in, and the job itself is still fine, decent team, fair pay for the role, and until last year I would have called it a good place to work. Then something started repeating itself. In a Tuesday planning meeting I suggested we split the onboarding email into three shorter ones instead of one long PDF nobody reads. Ten days later, in the leadership review I was not even invited to, my manager presented that same three-email idea to the regional director as his own thinking, down to the subject lines I had typed out on a sticky note. The first time it happened I let it go, people absorb things without meaning to. But this has now happened four times in fourteen months, always timed just before a promotion cycle or a quarterly review, and always followed by him getting the credit in the room that matters while I get a nod afterward in private, in the corridor, where it counts for nothing on paper. I brought it up once, carefully, asking to be looped into those reviews directly instead of routing everything through him. He agreed on the spot, thanked me for flagging it, and nothing changed the following month or the one after that. A former teammate who left the team last year told me over coffee, almost as an aside, that this was part of why she quit too, though she never said a word about it while she still worked there. I have started quietly updating my resume some evenings after my daughter goes to sleep, not out of anger exactly, more a slow realization that staying politely does not fix what he keeps doing every single cycle. Three years suddenly feels like a very small number to have spent building something someone else keeps signing his name to in rooms I am never asked into.

Three emails instead of one PDF, I can see why that one hurt, it was your idea down to the subject lines. I started sending a short summary email after each meeting with my name on the ideas, like a follow up on the points I raised. It took 5 minutes and my manager noticed. Have you thought about talking to someone above him, or is that not possible?

Had a manager who did almost the exact same thing for over a year straight, presenting my work in meetings I was not even invited to attend myself. Started copying a few relevant people directly on emails as a quiet paper trail after that, which did not fix the manager but at least meant the right people eventually noticed the pattern on their own.