This will never be the case. Never. Engineers can sometimes be slightly more open in technical arguments... senior engineers to much lesser extent - seniors learned that sharing what everyone truly thinks is prohibitively expensive to their career, no matter how much amazing boss you think you are.
Anything more than technical stuff, especially management style -- forget it. No one will share what they think, unless the situation is beyond repair, and at this point junior engineers will rather share to the skip level manager or HR (futile, thus junior engineers), and seniors will just a) check out or b) leave.
> foster a safe place where criticising the manager (me) is also completely fine, and to be celebrated (as it takes courage) and never result in any real or perceived retaliation
Exactly, most of the time engineers already know what managers truly want - say if the manager asks the team about 4 standups per week, then obviously 4 times a week is manager's preference. Most of the time no one will object, and just do the bloody stand ups.
If a manger thinks that that's not the case in their particular team, and the team members always speak their mind, then I have a bridge to sell to that manager.
Or to look at it the other way around: how many times engineers themselves _asked_ their manager to do those stand ups? Yep, wouldn't be that many.
This will never be the case. Never. Engineers can sometimes be slightly more open in technical arguments... senior engineers to much lesser extent - seniors learned that sharing what everyone truly thinks is prohibitively expensive to their career, no matter how much amazing boss you think you are.
Anything more than technical stuff, especially management style -- forget it. No one will share what they think, unless the situation is beyond repair, and at this point junior engineers will rather share to the skip level manager or HR (futile, thus junior engineers), and seniors will just a) check out or b) leave.
> foster a safe place where criticising the manager (me) is also completely fine, and to be celebrated (as it takes courage) and never result in any real or perceived retaliation
Cute.