Somewhere across the string of team projects I led as a teenager, I settled on a rule that's shaped everything since: never let the team get stuck. Not "fix it fast" — actually unblock people, in a way that prevents the same block from happening again.
Fixing the Bug Isn't Enough
It's tempting, especially as a lead, to just take over a broken piece of code and hand back a working version. It's faster in the moment. But it teaches the teammate nothing except that they can hand you their problems. I made it a habit to sit with whoever was stuck, walk through the actual reasoning, and make sure they understood the fix well enough to have found it themselves next time.
Why This Scales Better Than Heroics
A team where only the lead can unblock anyone is a team with a ceiling equal to the lead's available hours. A team where everyone's been taught to debug well doesn't have that ceiling. Every time I coached someone through a bug instead of just patching it, the team got a little more self-sufficient, and I got a little more time back to work on the parts only I could do.
What This Looks Like in Practice Now
I still default to this instinct: when something breaks, my first move is diagnosis out loud, not silent fixing. It slows down any single fix by a few minutes. It speeds up every project after it, because the team that finished this one is more capable than the team that started it.