Consider these 2 facts:

a) Oppenheimer is regarded as father of the Atomic Bomb. He led the Manhattan project, which included several hundreds of scientists.

b) Demis Hannabis, the founder and CEO of Deepmind, was knighted for his services to Artificial intelligence

I used to think it was unfair that our society gives a disproportionate amount of credit to the leaders. However, recent events in my life have made me realise that the leader’s presence or absence makes all the difference.

I believe that for a team to be successful, a leader must possess two skills. These are not sufficient but necessary. Of course, there are other personal traits like charisma and empathy, but I am mainly interested on the technical side.

1. Choosing the Problems

Firstly, the leader is responsible for deciding what problems the team should work on. If the problem is well defined, it is the leader’s responsibility to break it into appropriate sub-problems. This requires one to a have the ability to see the big picture and how individual sub-problems fit together.

2. Choosing the people

Once the problems are well-defined, you need to hire the right people to get details right. A leader must be good at either attracting the top talent or identifying hidden gems.

Deepmind’s success can be attributed to the interesting choice of problems that Demis decided to invest his company’s capital and workforce on, like protein folding, making the best go playing machine. For the Manhattan project, Oppenheimer was able to convince the best scientists.

I developed these views in context of a lab or a startup environment. Doing only one of them is as bad as doing neither of them. A lack of right problems will cause the talented individuals to loose interest and quit. Choosing the right problems and hiring bunch of uninterested people will only waste time and money.