What if the reverse advice (acknowledge only results, not mere effort) were given to parents and teachers instead? Then perhaps the next generation wouldn't need their managers to celebrate effort in addition to results. Edit: And why is this desirable? Because the market itself only rewards results, not effort.
I've seen both play out many times in real life and personally I prefer sticking to celebrating results. Why celebrate hard work just for the sake of work? shudder
Why do hard work at all? My answer would be to risk building something great. I doubt anyone wants to do hard work for the sake of it. Building a culture that rewards honest effort would encourage the same hard work in the future despite risks of failure -- though admittedly it's easy to go overboard in either direction! Use your best judgement here.
I realize it might also be easy to extrapolate this out to always rewarding a team, no matter what, and I don't want to suggest that in all circumstances... you know if your team put forth an honest effort and should be rewarded despite building something that fails. Definitely don't mean for this to be a hard and fast rule, but more of a tip for encouraging a smart, hard-working team to feel safer taking risks.
> Imagine my surprise when I got more constructive feedback from this this one question than I had in my entire first year of managing the engineering team
It feels like a cop-out not sharing the answers he received, since his article is premised on those answers and how constructive they allegedly were. Would have made things less abstract too.
Unfortunately for the me, the reader, I have know way of knowing whether this article is signal (distilled information from an experienced manager) or noise (somebody who isn't good at their job posting opinions because they think blogging builds their online identity).
I'm new to management so I'll be the first to admit that I'm not great at it. I do wish I'd had someone to tell me some of these things when I first started, so you could think of this as advice to my younger self. YMMV.
As for whether asking tough questions makes people feel safe, I'd say, "... maybe?" I can think of hard questions that would certainly make me feel less safe. Two things: 1. Asking the question I lead with got me some great info, so I'm going to continue trying this; 2. I'd want to encourage people on my team to feel able to do the same, so I look at this as leading by example.
