I'd say that if you have a tight-knit team, you are already doing the very opposite of treating people as tools. There's nothing wrong with having a shared understanding of a goal and then assuming a specific role in the effort to accomplish that goal; people are very good at that.

The problem is when you think of people the same way you think of a hammer when you use it to hit nails: The hammer doesn't matter, only that the nail goes in.