Principles of Teamwork and Project Management

I agree, however some teams have project managers/scrum masters/team leads that just coordinate or facilitate the decision making process without making any kind of decision. Usually these people do not make decisions because they lack the required subject matter expertise.

The job of facilitating, coordinating and reporting is important especially in large cross-functional teams but in my opinion this is not true leadership.

For me a leader is someone that makes decisions that others must follow or asks others to come up with solutions and then he decides which is the best solution. Only SMEs can be real leaders but their leadership is limited to their relevant line of work.

People leadership is strictly related to the actual work being performed, nobody is going to follow you as leader if you don't come from the same line of work as your team members.

I think it is always important to make the distinction between the facilitator and the true leader, they are completely different roles in my opinion.

In Utopia the team does all that. I would provide mentoring and be in charge of coffee.Which I suppose has been my function for the last ten years. They just let me think I was in charge. :-)

Based on your argument the corporate president, being top dog and most likely highest paid. is the SME of all matters that the company is involved with. This is rarely the case. The leader is the person who brings (leads) the team to the most effective deliverable. In a building project the leader may well be the structural engineer but just as likely will be the architect. or an individual specializing in project delivery (such as myself). In a military context, the most accurate shooter typically is not the leader, the tactician (General) is.