I recently started reading Peter Westwick's 2007 book, Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004. I've only gotten up into the 1980s so far and I find it a good read. Leadership? Sausage making. Per Westwick, there have always been contentious relations between NASA headquarters, the different NASA centers, JPL, and Caltech. (JPL is a NASA center, but staffed by Caltech employees, and relations between JPL and Caltech themselves are often strained.) At JPL, there were frequent shufflings of people in leadership roles. Add in the politics of the whole thing and trying to get funding from the government. If the Reagan administration had fully had their way, there wouldn't have been Voyager 2 flybys of Uranus and Neptune. Fortunately, many politicians (like Newt Gingrich, of all people!) supported NASA. (Westwick discusses all of this in his book.)

So my impression is that we were incredibly lucky that Voyager worked out so well in spite of its chaotic existence from its earliest developmental stages to now. I suppose there are some leadership lessons, but survivorship bias must be accounted for as many projects didn't make it off the drawing board.