Leadership capital is difficult to gain, and easy to lose. If you want your team to produce high quality code you need to avoid wasting it needlessly. Here are 3 ways squander your leadership capital:
Avoid unreasonable adherence to code style. You want code style to be consistent within your codebase. But be certain to police yourself. There is a difference between “that’s not how I would have written it” and “this code does not match our standards.”
Don’t horde ownership of the codebase. You have total ownership of the codebase, but you should encourage your engineers to take ownership of specific areas. Your engineers will remember the implementation details better than you will.
Never speak poorly of a direct report in mixed company. Particularly when in a cross disciplinary meeting with anyone higher up in the organization. This will effectively destroy all leadership capital you have built up with that person.