Leaderless models work very well in cases where tasks are stable, tasks can be assigned 1:1 to team members, team members more-or-less understand which tasks ar

Leaderless models work very well in cases where tasks are stable, tasks can be assigned 1:1 to team members, team members more-or-less understand which tasks are for them, and any major changes to tasks can be coordinated on timeframes of months or years. The classic example is the traditional academic department at a non-research university. 1. The main deliverable are courses. 2. Each professor has some assigned courses. Once assigned, the professor can teach the course mostly in isolation. Additionally, the department tends to hire faculty in a way that makes sense for their curriculum; ie, the one Systems professor in a small CS department is probably going to be teaching the Systems electives. 3. The courses offered are mostly stable. When the curriculum changes, the changes can be managed in a distributed fashion because the change will take at least 6 months to 18 months before rollout. Therefore, a traditional academic department can run in a mostly leaderless fashion, with a department chair who plays a supporting role and perhaps a bit of a coaching role for newer hires. This doesn't work as well when tasks require close collaboration or when tasks evolve rapidly. It's not impossible. Just much harder. In those cases you tend to end up with a recognizable leadership vacuum, leading to sub-optimal outcomes mentioned in other comments. Anyways, that's all a bit of an aside and not directly germane to the article. But I do wonder if selecting leaders via leaderless teams exercises selects for leaders who work well in well-defined tasks with teams that are already partitioned into quite specific roles, but flail in environments with more dynamic tasks/goals.