Democracy doesn't work

Democracy is an interesting concept, but in the workplace democracy doesn't get the job done.  There needs to be a boss.  There needs to be someone who sets direction.  There needs to be someone to whom people can look to resolve issues.

Many of you are thinking of your Project Managers right now and I would just like to make a moment and say that you are completely … wrong.  I have been on a number of successful projects where the Project Manager, while technically "running the project", was not actually the boss.  He/she was not the person to whom people went to solve problems.  They went to the Project Manager to get roadblocks removed, but the "architect" or the "team lead" or the "senior developer" was the person who had the vision to which everyone was working.  You could call them the"true" leader.

It is not a bad thing to have someone other than the Project Manager as the leader of the project.  For the most part Project Managers are in their role because they organize things well, make small talk with the business clients, can buy lunch for a group without needing to get approval and generally try to make life easier for the project teams.  Many Project Managers, however, are not technically adept enough to discuss the differences/similarities between WCF and RESTful services, much less provide solutions for the successful support of both types with a single code base.  Some Project Managers do not even understand the technology at all, but they can sure whip up a nice Excel spreadsheet demonstrating that they are within 3.2% of their projected expenditures with only a minor (<5%) chance of their exceeding their allotted budget as long as change requests 123, 124 and 141 are approved within the ten day period as agreed to in the original proposal.

Every project is different.  Every project requires a different type of leadership.  Where you have strong technical skills on the team there is a need for someone who can do business client liaising, someone to do the reporting and project plan coordination.  If you are lacking that deep technical knowledge then you need a Project Manager who is more technical and can tell his C# from his F#.  Someone who is able to discuss the relative merits of different types of transactional encapsulation across multiple non-distributed transactions.  Some projects require a Boss while others require someone who can assist the real boss.

Just as an organization must be careful as to how they organize and deploy High Performance Teams, however, there is also a need to understand what sort of Project Manager is required.  Placing a Project Manager who is very "hands on" and very opinionated about the technological decisions being made into a project that already has a de facto boss is going to be a great bone of contention that may never be able to be worked around.  Likewise, a PM that has little technical background will offer very little to a team that is adrift due to the lack of leadership.

You need a boss, but you have to make sure you don't have two.