There are some, who in ambition to lead (or work on highly visible projects), will step up and take on new things – meanwhile skimping on their core responsibilities and deliverables.
Are these the people we want to promote into leadership roles?
Are these the people we want to promote into leadership roles?
Seems reasonable for an internal tool or process to help the team - not a necessity, so if nobody wants to do it, no big deal. If people are excited about it, it'll get done along with their core responsibilities.
The other case is giving people the opportunity to hand off their normal load (that may be uninteresting to them) to head up some project or initiative that would have to be assigned to someone anyway. In the latter case, isn't it better to have someone who's interested doing it than have that person doing uninteresting work while an uninterested person heads up the project?
I don't have a problem with people working on new things. The question of leadership - I think it's a little fuzzy. OS kernel decides what process gets to run and what not, but it's not like you can call it a "leader". He just does it on basis of processes' priorities, which may well be set by individual processes themselves or something else entirely. (And I am actually fan of direct democracy - where the leader designation is pointless, but that doesn't mean - in such system - you can't have project manager telling you what you should work on, as is obvious from the OS analogy.)