[wpietri]

I think the problem isn't with who you put in charge. I think the problem is the notion of "in charge".

One of the best things for me about teams that were working well is that everybody was in charge. Everybody felt responsible for the outcome. Everybody cared. Everybody knew they could make things happen, and that differences of view were resolved through collaboration and experimentation, not power.

You can see that explicitly in the structure of Extreme Programming, a major Agile process. There were developers and there was a product manager (called "customer"), and neither controlled the other. Indeed, people created an XP bill of rights that described the balance of powers:

http://agile.dzone.com/articles/worth-repeating-xp-bills

You can see that working in the large at places like Spotify, where teams are cross-functional. People do have managers, but they aren't on the same team, and technical people report to technical managers, not generic businesspeople. Those managers aren't "in charge" in the typical sense. They mentor and support the people working directly on teams. They only really manage when things go wrong.

And I think that's what the Agile community was going for early on. It's a shame that fell by the wayside.

[watwut]

I had very bad experience with "everybody in charge". We oscillated between nobody makes decisions and war for power and decision making. The project was simultaneously pulled in multiple directions and there was no such thing as shared priorities. Every team member had his own.

It got hell when the company hired very smart and capable guy who turned out to be very lazy. Nobody is in charge in that case means also that it takes too long time until someone in charge finds out about the situation.

[wpietri]

Sure. You can fail either way, and neither is fun.

For a team-oriented approach to work, you really need a team. A team is a group of people that has different skills but the same goal. They're a group of people that win or lose together. They have to have the same purpose, or it won't hold together. If every team member had different priorities, then something was badly screwed up about how the team was managed.

In the case of the smart but lazy guy, that's where external-to-the-team management structures come into play. E.g., if you're using a management structure like spotify, the lazy guy's manager should have noticed issues during their weekly one-on-ones. If not, other team members would be talking to managers about the deadweight.