Celebrate the Overcoming, Not the Outcome
I heard the familiar Outlook chime. Owen had put time on my calendar.
He’d spent three months navigating open water toward an R&D island no one could promise was there. Every day was a dogged act of navigation in the dark, reading signs most people can’t see, toward a shore only he could picture. It consumes the person doing it. Our check-ins had settled into a pattern: show up, say something technically interesting, and fade. He was present, but the way people are when they’re waiting to get back to something.
But today was different. Today, Owen was excited.
I had work to do.
Eighteen-hour days obsessing over an innovation I understood only from the outside, and I hadn’t been in the room for any of it. There’s a version of this moment that’s easy to execute: you let the excitement wash over you, mirror it, say something affirming, and send the person back feeling like the celebration happened. I’ve executed that version, I’ve seen it executed, and I’ve had it executed on me. I have no interest in it.
Owen didn’t need someone to hear his news. He needed someone to recognize what it had cost.
That’s a different thing. You have to earn it. Experts know when you haven’t.
Peers can share in your wins. They’ve run their own gauntlets: eighteen-hour days, months lost inside a problem, the moment it finally cracks open. That human-to-human recognition matters. But that’s not the company-to-human kind. Only a leader who has done the invisible, hard, thankless work of understanding the true costs can deliver when it counts.
These moments arrive unannounced, at times you’d never pick, and they’re gone in a blink. But if you know how to look, you can see it in their eyes: someone who just did something hard, waiting to find out whether it mattered. A few seconds to find out whether you’re a leader, or just another manager.
The moment moves fast. Thinking moves slow. Authentic reaction is the only play. And it runs on instinct, built through intention and reps. Reacting is easy, once you’ve done the hard part: becoming the kind of person who recognizes what things cost. Anyone can celebrate a result, so without this work, praise reads as performative. Your title doesn’t make the praise land harder; it just makes it more obvious that it’s hollow.
So I asked.
“Hell yes! Now… tell me how this works.”
Engineers love that sentence. Owen lit up, and I started learning. I didn’t need to become an expert, I needed to stop being a layperson. I picked a detail that seemed loaded and asked about it. Then another. Not three. Not five. Two questions showed I was tracking, and that I cared enough to try to understand the hard parts. The conversation went long. It should.
That conversation taught me what Owen believed he had achieved. Not the outcome. The overcoming. So that’s what I celebrated: the crossing, not the shore.
The harder version of this is when you’re not expected to know anything about the domain at all.
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Dana leads Marketing. Her job is structurally difficult in ways that can’t show up on a title. We don’t just need customers. We need our customers’ customers. That means marketing for organizations that don’t market. They don’t have marketing departments. Most of them think marketing is fluff. Geography, capabilities, and incumbency do their marketing for them, to the point where even the sales team mostly answers incoming calls or emails. Dana has to solve that, and nobody knew enough to ask her to.
She’d been working on posters for customer events, designed to pull our customers’ customers toward doing business through our platform. When I first saw them, the conversation in the room was about the design. Which made sense. They looked great.
But I was only seeing what everyone else saw.
I asked Dana what it had taken. Not the design question. The real one: what does it take to get a company in this industry to consider using marketing materials at all? How do you get them to the point where they’ll put something like this in front of their customers? Her sigh said a lot.
The work was longer, more layered, and more resistant than I could have imagined. Her answer became the story I tell about her work. Not “Dana made great posters,” but the hours and hours she spent getting an industry to think differently, long before any of it turns into a poster.
The mechanism in both cases is the same. Ask what it took. Praise the hardest part, and make that the story you carry.
I’ve been in the room when this went wrong.
A Principal Engineer had invented a new approach to a technology fundamental to our business. Not improved. Invented. He built and supported an open-source project around it, then spent two years with attorneys and accountants to land the company’s first (and so far, only) patent.
The CTO flew in to celebrate. I arranged drinks, snacks, and hoodies with the project name embroidered on them. When it came time to speak, he gave an eloquent few words on the significance of “getting a patent.”
The team received it in the spirit it was intended. But the moment the CTO excused himself, another Principal Engineer said: “OK. Now we can talk about the fact that you invented a new way to do this stuff. And you dealt with all the lawyers. That’s insane!”
The real celebration happened after the CTO left.
He didn’t fail to show up. He didn’t fail to say something kind. He failed to understand what was being celebrated, so he celebrated the wrong thing. He talked about the outcome, because the outcome was all he could see. The overcoming was invisible to him, because he never asked. And he never knew what he’d missed.
That is performative praise. Not someone who doesn’t care. Someone who performs caring without understanding the cost.
None of this is a leadership trick. It’s how anyone learns anything worth learning. Find someone great at what you’re not, get curious, and press their geek button. They stop explaining and start revealing. You might pick up some expertise. What you’ll get for certain is a relationship with no ceiling.
We know this. We prove it everywhere we actually relate to each other. Then we walk into work and act like we’ve never met a human before. We praise the outcome, thank people for the deliverable, and call it recognition, because that’s how it’s done. Everyone accepts it. Nobody expects better.
You may never get a breakthrough or a patent. You will get a hundred quiet chances, on ordinary Tuesdays, to find out whether you’re a leader or just another manager. Every expert around you is carrying something they had to overcome, and they are waiting for someone to ask. Ask what it took. Then listen. Now you’re creating coherence. Carry it forward. Celebrate the overcoming.
