Once upon a time our team was starting a new project and there were several Senior Engineers including myself working with an offshore team. One of the other Se

Once upon a time our team was starting a new project and there were several Senior Engineers including myself working with an offshore team. One of the other Senior Engineers took a very assertive stance as the project got started and was suddenly telling people what to do, assigning work, and generally acting bossy. I asked him to come into a conference room to talk and I told him that I felt frustrated by his sudden assumption that he was in charge of the technical work when the team's previous pattern had been to share technical decisions and apportion work collaboratively. He responded by saying that our management had actually told him that he was being tapped to serve as the Tech Lead for the project. Our craven management had somehow neglected to inform the other members of the team of the decision. I was so shocked by the dysfunction of that decision that I could only sputter something along the lines of "they should have told us that" and then the conversation ended. Oh the joys of corporate culture!