Find out who quietly fixed the thing
Something broke, then it didn't. Somebody did that, usually out of hours, and nobody has said anything to them.
The BeingKind editorsPublished How this is written
Why it lands
Invisible work is invisible precisely when it succeeds. A migration that goes badly is a company-wide incident; one that goes well is a normal Tuesday, and the person who spent their Saturday on it gets the same silence as if they had done nothing. Over time that teaches people that the only way to be noticed is to let something fail first, which is a terrible thing to teach.
How
Find out who actually did it — ask, rather than thanking the team lead by default. Say what would have happened if they hadn't: “I know you did the failover on Saturday. Monday would have been a nightmare and it wasn't.”
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