Dear Kate & Dale: I work for management that keeps saying it wants us to be “innovative” and “entrepreneurial.” Yet every time one of us “worker bees” makes a suggestion, we get ignored or get no credit. – Keith

Dale: You’d think that “I have an idea!” would be the most welcomed sentence in organizational life, but no-o-o-o. Why? Two reasons.

One, an idea is a seed, and there’s a big difference between some seeds and harvest. Naturally, the one who grows the garden doesn’t want to give all the credit to the one who came in with the seeds.

Second, when you announce your idea, you are, in effect, saying, “I thought of a solution and you didn’t,” thus risking the touching off of competitiveness. You overcome the latter with a simple twist of language. Instead of saying, “I have an idea,” you say, “I wonder if this would help.” That little change gets management thinking of helpfulness, which is a higher state of mind than thinking about effort or credit.

Kate: And you overcome the this-means-extra-work issue by bringing not just seeds, but the garden. For instance, say your idea is that your company needs to turn all the books scattered around the offices into a library. You could say to your boss, “I have an idea – let’s have a library.” Doing so, you have dropped a lot of work on her.

But what if you say this: “I wonder if a library would be helpful to the staff. We have space in the second conference room, and we could get some shelves at Ikea, and I’d volunteer to get it organized.”

Dale: Now the boss just has to make a decision – an easy decision – and you get the credit because you deserve it.

¢ Dear Kate & Dale: I planned for weeks to take two days off from work to visit my parents for a long weekend. Prior to the trip, I worked overtime. Then, when I got back, I came in for four hours on Sunday afternoon to make sure I wasn’t swamped on Monday. This was on my own initiative – I love my job. I can’t understand how some people can take two weeks off. Am I weird? – Janet

Dale: Not weird, just a workaholic. What’s the official definition of a workaholic? Well, if you’re an employer, it’s “a great employee.” And there’s the overwork conundrum: If you have lousy bosses, they make you work long hours. If you have great bosses, you want to work long hours.

Kate: During the recession, companies downsized, and the remaining employees took up the workload of those who were laid off. In addition, remaining workers were afraid of losing their jobs, so they responded by putting in extra hours.

One of the casualties of these economic forces is vacation time. In a 2004 study, at least 30 percent of employed adults said they’d given up vacation time they’d earned, resulting in a year where 415 million vacation days went unused. The job market is improving, so perhaps there’s some hope that pressure will lessen.

Dale: It doesn’t seem likely, though, does it? We are still in the middle of The Time of No Time, where international competition means squeezing workers like an old tube of Crest.

Kate: A better job market doesn’t necessarily mean that all companies will treat workers better; it just means it’s easier to find an employer that cares about its employees. That means, Janet, that you’ll have to do a lot of research, finding companies that can afford to treat employees well. You don’t just need a lighter workload; you need a jewel of an employer. And then you need to be a good boss to yourself, and give yourself permission to create work-life balance.

Dale: Which takes us back to the conundrum of either having to work long hours or wanting to. No one is going to balance your life for you. However, if you’re both lucky and good, you’ll find that that jewel of a workplace is staffed with people who’ll inspire you to do better work, and take better vacations.