You don't need to be a leader in a fission-fusion society to wander off and dig up some roots, as long as you return to the tribe at the end of the day.
But you do need to be a leader to wander off if you're a soldier in an army. And military settings have much stronger selection pressures than any of the other settings humans evolved in. I think this is something that most talk of human evolutionary psychology misses; there are lots of selection effects, but some are much stronger than others, and the strong selection effects are found in extreme circumstances, not in daily life.
Interesting; it seemed to me that combat in the ancestral environment would be the main case where the tribe would shut up about status for five seconds and allow fighters to get stuff done.
During a discussion today about the bizarre "can't get crap done" phenomenon that afflicts large fractions of our community, the suggestion came up that most people can't do anything where there is a perceived choice that includes the null option / "do nothing" as an option. Of which Michael Vassar made the following observation:
And if you're not the leader, it is not good for your reproductive fitness to act like one. In modern times the penalties for standing up are much lower, but our instincts haven't updated.
Interesting to reconsider the events of "To lead, you must stand up" in this light. It makes more sense if you read it as "None of those people had instincts saying it was a good idea to declare themselves the leader of the monkey tribe, in order to solve this particular coordination problem where 'do nothing' felt like a viable option" instead of "nobody had the initiative".