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

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.