Ever had one of those moments where your team is stuck in an endless loop, like a piece of code that keeps running but doesn’t accomplish anything? Last week, I watched a senior engineering leader spend three hours in a meeting that felt exactly like debugging a recursive function gone wrong – it kept circling back to the start without making progress. That’s when it hit me – I’ve been approaching leadership challenges all wrong.
It made me think back to my hardware engineering days. It was 6pm the night before the first time we were going to go install some circuit boards at our first customer site. But the boards were still unpredictable. They worked, but some took longer than others and had strange results. Mind you, this is back in the 90s so we are talking about circuits with discrete gates.
At about 3 am, after hours of tracing with an oscilloscope and logic analyzer and lots of coffee, I found that there was a race condition (two signals going to the same circuit). Depending which signal arrived first, the circuit would either work or re-trigger itself and start over again.
Now that I understood, I spent the next few hours hand soldering some capacitors on one leg of the circuit to make the right signal would always arrive first. We left for the customer site at 6am as planned and the customer was happy with what we did! And it was a long drive, so I took a well deserved and much needed nap in the car on the way!
Much like my logic analyzer and oscilloscope, you can arm yourself with the right debugging framework for your meetings and decision making to prevent endless loops and race conditions – and hopefully avoid the need for all night stressing out sessions!
The Leadership Debug Framework
1. Set Up Your Development Environment
Just like you wouldn’t debug without proper tools, you need the right leadership environment:
- Create psychological safety (your error-logging system). You have to create an environment where your team members are willing to surface problems, including things they don’t know or even problems with your directions.
- Establish feedback loops (your monitoring tools). You should be connecting with team members, formally and informally. It shouldn’t be a big deal if you visit people, come to meetings or show up in working session. You need to be constantly connected and gathering feedback.
- Build trust through transparency (your documentation). I built my career on Agile (well, Lean and Agile) and I cringe when people say Agile means we don’t document. I was in the medical device space for many years and trust me, we document everything. Documenting your processes and your system gives you a basis for improvement. It’s nearly impossible to make improvements and changes without first making sure the knowledge is shared and everyone is using it.
2. Identify the Symptoms
Create your leadership “error log” based on the symptoms you are seeing. It’s important to come up with a metric, even if it’s a made up 1 to 5 scale. Then, before you dive into action, take time to track the metrics. Are there things that impact it? This is like hooking up the logic analyzer and watching the circuit run for a bit.
Depending on the problem you’re trying so solve, some possible metrics may be:
- Track team energy levels in meetings – Make your own 1 to 5 scale and at each meeting jot down what you think the energy is (or even better, ask the team). This simple relative method will help you keep track and give you insights when things are impacting the team.
- Monitor project velocity – How planned work is getting done on time? How much interrupt work comes in? How much hast to be re-worked? Here again, a simple made-up scale of small, medium and large is good enough if you don’t have another system. Just start tracking it and you can improve the system over time.
- Measure decision-making speed – How many days from the time the request is made till a decision is made? Also look at how often are decisions revisited.
3. Isolate the Root Cause
When you find some things in the above data collection that could be improved, it’s time to dig in. Just like debugging, avoid the temptation to fix the symptoms. Let’s pull a few tools from Lean for root cause analysis.
- Use the “5 Whys” technique (our leadership stack trace)
- Create process flow diagrams
- Map decision trees
- Document dependencies
4. Create Your Test Environment
Here’s where most leaders fail – they push straight to production by declaring some sweeping change or mandating a new process or initiative. We need to pull in some change management process here to make sure our fix is good and that the change will stick when we roll it out.
- Start with “unit tests” – one-on-one conversations to trail the idea, start to get some buy in and even find some champions to help support your cause.
- Move to “integration tests” – small group implementations, broadening the circle by including more people. If you found some champions maybe they can lead discussions or pilot groups.
- Run “load tests” – stress-test your solution- when an emergency come (an urgent request, a customer problem, a technical challenge) if the teams go back to the old ways ‘just for now’ then that means the change isn’t made yet. When a change is fully implemented, teams won’t to back old methods, even when put under stress. Keep reinforcing the change.
5. Implementation and Monitoring
Deploy your leadership fixes with the same care you’d use for a critical system update:
- Set up monitoring dashboards – this may be as sophisticated as a web page, or as simply as a tally on a piece of paper. But no matter what, you have to measure whatever you are trying to change. If it’s an intangible like team energy, make up a 5-point scale.
- Define success metrics – Once you figure out how to measure, its easy to create a baseline and then define what success looks like. What is the new number you are striving for?
- Schedule regular reviews – Setup regular times to review the metric with stakeholders and team members.
The Debug Mindset Toolkit
I’ve created a simple brainstorming framework my clients use called “TRACE”. In this simple 2-page PDF I step you through 5 steps much like the ones above to help you think through the leadership challenge you are facing. TRACE gives us the five steps of:
- Track the issue
- Root cause analysis
- Action plan
- Controlled implementation
- Evaluate results
-> Grab a copy of the TRACE tool
Since launching my independent coaching practice, I’ve been passionate about helping technical leaders build their leadership skills. If you’d like to explore how to strengthen your leadership, let’s schedule a free strategy session. And don’t forget to grab the Leadership Pitfalls Navigator to jumpstart your development. Sometimes the best debugging tool is a good conversation 🙂
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