I love your take on how incentives don't line up with the behaviors needed from the team. However, I think a good lead can sketch things out into chunks shaped like the team members. For example, I've inherited a codebase where we just fired the contractors who mostly made it. This leaves us with me, a CTO whose technical expertise is more on the back end, and a QA person who went to coding bootcamp and wants to transition to coding, until we can make some hires. So I use storybook to stub out components and the shape of the data and methods that will be injected, that anyone could build regardless of skillset. I also stubbed in the shape of the logic that will plug into, and in the short term I'll also be writing that until we have someone who's ready to be able to fill that in (and more well-built code to look at). We're in the early stages, so I may yet turn out not to be a good leader, but the hope is that this will give us a repeatable process for growing my replacement (and their replacement), so I am not tied down and can grow out of my role, and someone coming onto the team knows what their progression will look like.