There is nothing whatsoever wrong with doing side projects, extending your skills and doing extra work that benefits your company. In fact those things are to be encouraged. If the company - or even the team - is trying to dissuade you from doing that, then they are going to hurt themselves. However what I think is happening is that there is a problem with the team's *perception* of what you have done. How they perceive it probably depends to a great extent on *exactly* whaat happened with your scheduled presentation. Let me start by assuming your team is trying to solve a specific problem of how to use elastic search to dump logs, and that your side project is directly relevant to that. If it isn't then this won't be relevant either. let's consider what they see happening: they are working on using elastic for dump logs. They are presumably making progress towards a solution. Then suddenly they see you booking a meeting with a higher manager to tell him about your project, which solves the same problem. You haven't told them anything about it. What it *looks like* is that you are trying to put yourself ahead of the team, making them look bad, and hog the limelight for yourself. They may feel that if you had contributed your ideas back to the team, then together the team could have arrived at a better solution than the one you did on your own. They may also feel they have wasted time working on a problem that you have already solved. I'm not saying you were trying to do those things, but it may look like it to them. It would explain why they were upset. Now lets imagine you had still done your side project, got your results; but now instead of inviting senior managers you had presented your results to your team first. I believe they would be much less upset. You might also have found that their input made the results even better. Then you could have gone to senior managers and presented the results. If your immediate manager is a decent person you will still get the credit for doing the majority of the work. If the team thinks you are being rewarded for working alone, then they may think that's the way to go from now on: i.e. instead of the team working together to solve a problem, everyone may try to do work on their own and get it presented to higher management. Now you don't have a team working together to solve a problem - you have a number of individuals working to solve it and not communicating their ideas. From the company's point of view that is certainly worse than having a team working together. It's a fairly subtle thing, and the fact that your manager approved the meeting means you are not entirely to blame. However the perceptions of your teammates are important in the workplace. I would strongly recommend talking to your immediate manager. he/she may have an entirely different take on this (and knows the situation much better than I do). It may be a good idea to reassure your team that you are not trying to make them look bad, and that you will talk things over with them in the future.