This is something I’ve struggled with over the years, ever since I started as an engineer. I want the problem solved and when it’s solved we move on to the next one. No chit chat, no feelings, just get the work done. It really helped that at the beginning of my career I was on a brand new team and we were defining how to solve these problems. There was no one more senior or more knowledgeable to ask.

As I became more senior and had junior employees working alongside me, I could see how quickly they would get frustrated when they couldn’t perform at my level. They’d be stuck for days until they ask me for help, and I’d solve the problem in 5 minutes and for a couple of our new guys, that crushed them. Absolutely destroyed their morale.

So I read a few books on emotional intelligence and social interactions and started explicitly saying when someone was doing something right, or calling out where they did their job well while fixing the place where they made a mistake. When someone helps me, I now say “thank you, I appreciate your help”.

It’s night and day. Junior employees wanted to work with me before I did that because they want to learn from me, but now they actually like working with me. I don’t heap on praise and I don’t give praise when it’s not deserved, but when someone legitimately does something right or helps me (no matter how small), I actively tell them with words that I appreciate their help and that they did good work.

It’s the absolute least I can do but it makes a world of difference for people just starting out when a senior staff member compliments their work.

100% agree. I will build on this by saying that it’s almost as important to not go overboard such that you’re “thank you” is meaningless. I had a coworker once who did this constantly and it at least to me ended up coming off as disingenuous and kind of smarmy.

One way to fight this is to push yourself to give TSP: Truthful Specific Positive feedback. Instead of saying “nice job”, say “You did a nice job on that project by making sure to keep stakeholders informed. Especially when the API that was originally scoped got scrapped you made sure to loop people in early.” The former tells them they did a “Nice job” which feels nice but doesn’t tell them what they did right or how to do it well again. Anyone could say "Nice job" without knowing any part of what they contributed.

The latter specifically highlights why you’re saying it’s a nice job. Now they can 1) take that information knowing they can have good results by repeating it and 2) feel better about the thanks/compliment knowing it's based on something they actually did, instead of a just a general pat on the back.

Looping this back to the original post, the more specific your positive feedback is to the manager, the more they can do with it. If I went to my manager and said one of my reports deserves a promotion because "People said they were doing a 'Nice job'", I'd likely be laughed at. But if I go in with "So-and-so did a bang up on job on project X by doing A, B, and C", that's going to be a much more fruitful conversation.

It's more than morale, it's just being a good human.

If a promotion is coming down to how someone got thanked by a peer, if that's the differentiator like some of these poster are suggesting, then it's probably not a great place.

Be a good human, thank people and express gratitude whenever they help you. Our culture has become so jaded in some many ways that it actually sort of disarms some folks. they will help you more in the future. When someone asks for help, help them, stretch to do it, it can be hard to ask for help so make it worth their while to take that risk. Give praise, it costs you nothing. It will pay dividends in the long run, big ones that you probably can't imagine yet. Being someone that people like to work with is huge...