As a leader with an engineering background, you may have a skill in pattern recognition that helps you troubleshoot and resolve technical problems. When you see a certain failure mode, you know that it’s generally triggered by a small handful of possible causes.
If we’re not careful, though, that pattern recognition that was once a skill can turn into confirmation bias, and we’ll imagine additional symptoms of our assumed failure mode.
I recall working in one organization where slow application performance would predictably have one group assume bandwidth problems, another group would assume disk I/O bottlenecks, while a third would assume application memory leaks. Notably, each group assumed the problem lay somewhere outside of their own responsibility.
When you move into management, the same tendency can trip you up, only now you’re diagnosing human processes instead of technical or mechanical ones.
When it seems like your team is stuck and just not making the kind of progress you’d like to see, here are five different levers you may need to adjust, which may not be the ones you’re used to thinking about.
1️⃣ Clarity – Are you solving the right problem? When you see frequent rework, conflicting interpretations, or even architectural debates, it may be time to either tighten the problem definition or be more specific with success criteria.
2️⃣ Scope – Is the work sized correctly? Long-running tickets that remain “almost done” often hide complexity and delay feedback. It may be helpful to divide the work into smaller increments or adjust the sequence of delivery to untangle dependencies.
3️⃣ Process – Are handoffs smooth and few? Work-in-progress backlogs, cumbersome approvals, and long delays between steps suggest that the workflow process may welcome some scrutiny and simplification.
4️⃣ Quality – Is rework slowing you down? If you’re certain that clarity and scope are not at issue, then you can look at other quality issues. But don’t focus only on quality of current workmanship, also consider the quality of the existing body of work.
5️⃣ People – Do you have the right number of the right kind of people in the right places? Over- or under-staffing of specific skills can contribute to process friction. Geniuses and heroes can become single points of failure and burned out bottlenecks.
My guess is that one of these levers is your personal default go-to when work slows down. Let me encourage you to deliberately consider the other four first next time. And if you’d like a confidential thinking partner to look at your situation with you, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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