If you think assigning work is leadership, then I think you should step away. Leadership is about inspiring people to follow you. The best leaders let people self-organize. They coach them but not `assign' them work.
That's a nice theory but sometimes people don't actually organize themselves, and wait for someone to tell them what to do. GP as much as said that they naturally agree with your perspective but it wasn't working out in practice.
When there is a pool of work items and a team responsible for completing those work items, someone must be responsible for assigning the work to specific team members. Self-organizing works fine when there is a perfect match of task to individual skill to time, but when there are more tasks than people, people with wide skill sets, people who prefer one type of work over another, differences in priorities, or any other random situation that comes up a thousand times a day, then, I'm sorry, but work is going to have to be assigned. Assigning it appropriately and delivering the instruction is what makes that particular aspect of leadership good or bad.
Inspiring people and letting them self-organise is all well and good in a vacuum, but at some point shit's gotta get done. Leadership is about all of the above and more.
