Last time we learned about cognitive biases as mental shortcuts that can trick leaders. Now let's get practical: which biases are YOUR biggest blind spots?
We'll walk through common leadership biases and help you identify your top three patterns in your engineering leadership decisions.
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Ready to discover your hidden decision-making patterns?
First, let's add three more biases to your toolkit. Recency bias means you overweight what happened most recently when making decisions.
A recent production incident erases months of solid system performance. A recent successful deploy overshadows consistent technical debt accumulation.
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Do you find recent engineering events heavily influencing your team evaluations?
Anchoring bias happens when you rely too heavily on the first piece of information you receive. That initial impression or estimate becomes your reference point for everything else.
First candidate seems great? Everyone after looks worse by comparison.
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Do you notice first impressions strongly shaping your later judgments?
Attribution bias is when you explain your failures differently than others' failures. Your code broke because of legacy constraints (bad timing, technical debt). Their code broke because of character (careless, rushed).
This bias destroys trust and psychological safety fast.
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Do you tend to give yourself more benefit of the doubt than your team?
Now let's identify YOUR top biases. Think about recent technical decisions where you later realized you might have been wrong or hasty.
From confirmation bias, halo effect, horns effect, recency bias, anchoring bias, and attribution bias - which ones feel familiar?
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