> According to me anybody who claims to lead a group must be the best among that group, in the job that group performs. I'm sorry, and this is going to sound h

> According to me anybody who claims to lead a group must be the best among that group, in the job that group performs. I'm sorry, and this is going to sound harsh, but this is awful, awful advise. And pitifully shortsighted. So, a manager that leads developers should be the best developer? What about a director that manages developers AND architects? Or developers AND QA? Does the director have to be the best at both those functions? Or some "best of the combination" of the two? What about the VP? Now the VP of engineering likely leads (in a large enough organization) directors of QA, engineering, product, maybe some other roles like IS as well. In turn, they might lead managers or some function directly. Is this VP the uber of all those roles? And then we get to the CEO. No, this is terribly short sighted. Amazingly so. In sports is quite commonly known that the best players usually make terrible managers. There are quite a few theories on why, but the end result is that very few great players have been great managers (oddly enough, MLB has more ex-player managers than the other leagues, and is more immune to the above criticism...again, many theories why). In fact, quite a few of the best managers in some sports are typically borderline players, if they played at all. Using your "best should lead" theory, only the best ex-basketball, ex-football, ex-baseball players should be running teams in the NBA, NFL or MLB. No, the best leaders should lead. Doesn't matter if they are not the best developers And how good a developer one was becomes irrelevant past "team lead" or manager at best.