Elon Musk's Leadership

As you know, Musk derangement syndrome has overtaken the minds of people who are not the best and are certainly not the brightest. Speaking ill of Elon Musk, for reasons that escape rationality, has become fashionable in many circles. 

Funnily enough, it has even gotten to the mind of famed business professor Adam Grant. One understands that, however correct his analysis-- and it is not very correct-- Grant has a vested interest in talking trash about Musk. If he wants to maintain his position among the salaried intelligentsia, speaking ill of Musk is de rigueur.

Writing in the New York Times on Sunday Grant takes Musk to task for bad management techniques. One understands, and it needs to be said, that he is presenting a caricature of Musk, one that may or may not seize the essence of his leadership.

Among the other high crimes that Grant has discovered is this: apparently, Musk has been known to scream at his staff, to throw fits and to be less than conciliatory. To which one is tempted to say: so what? 

One recalls that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, while leading the allied forces in Western Europe during World War II was known to lose his temper and to yell at his subordinates. Truth be told, no one today is saying that Ike was a less-than-effective commanding officer. Generalizing from one incident does not make you look very bright or very balanced.

Anecdotal evidence is just that-- anecdotal. Being yelled out for having done something stupid might have happened. But it was certainly not the reason why Musk has enjoyed outsized success in numerous industries.

In the world of business, as Grant should know well, the bottom line is the bottom line. If the car runs well and if the rocket returns the astronauts to earth and if the neurolink helps the paralyzed to function… then we are more than likely to consider that anecdotal evidence cannot count as part of his executive leadership style.

Allow Grant to speak for himself:

They are not speaking metaphorically. Mr. Musk has been known to shout and swear at employees who deliver work he considered subpar. He goes out of his way to smear people, as when he publicly accused a former Twitter executive of “arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services.” 

In his new role overseeing the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, he expresses contempt for the work that many federal employees do and champions haphazard mass firings. Current and future business leaders are watching the world’s richest man in action, and many of them are learning the wrong lesson about leadership.

But, are they learning the wrong lesson from those who caricature Elon Musk? The general freak-out over Musk’s somewhat heavy handed ways of dealing with the federal bureaucracy might have more to do with the fact that the media and Trump’s detractors are constantly presenting a slanderous picture of Musk’s work. Surely, this makes bureaucrats less likely to respect him.

Besides, Musk is an outsider. He did not grow up within the bureaucracy. People who are losing their jobs have no incentive to speak well of him or to laud his leadership style. He is a consultant, with no prior experience in government. 

Managing people when you have been brought in from the outside is hardly an easy task. It’s worse when you are threatening their livelihood, or when you are exposing their incompetence.

Clearly, the experiment of bringing in Musk was not going to go smoothly. That it does not correspond to the studies cited by Wharton professors should hardly be a surprise.

Grant is correct to say that disrespect is not a good leadership quality:

But the way he deals with people would fail the leadership class I teach at his alma mater. For more than a century, my field has studied how leaders achieve great things. The evidence is clear: Leadership by intimidation and insult is a bad strategy. Belittling people doesn’t boost their productivity; it diminishes it.

Disrespect doesn’t just demotivate. It also disrupts focus, causing costly mistakes. In a medical simulation, professionals in neonatal intensive care teams had to diagnose a potentially life-threatening condition and then respond rapidly with the correct procedures. Right beforehand, some of them were randomly assigned to hear a visiting expert disparage their work, saying they wouldn’t last a week in his department. Briefly insulting physicians and nurses was enough to reduce the accuracy of their diagnoses by nearly 17 percent and the effectiveness of their procedures by 15 percent.

Given the circumstances, one should not be too surprised that Musk is not functioning like any old leader. But then again, the proof is in the way his companies have functioned, in their bottom line. And there, despite what Grant says, the outcomes suggest that Musk knows more about leadership than he lets on:

How then do you explain Mr. Musk’s success? With Tesla and SpaceX, he’s built two wildly prosperous companies, disrupting one industry and supercharging another. But those results have come in spite of the way he treats people, not because of it.

Again, Grant wants above all else to diminish, demean and disparage Musk:

Psychologists call it idiosyncrasy credit: As people accumulate status, we grant them more permission to deviate from social norms. So when we see leaders being uncivil, we often get cause and effect backward. We assume that being unkind makes them successful. In truth, however, success can give them a license to be unkind. Engineers at Tesla and SpaceX tolerate abuse from Mr. Hyde because they admire the vision of Dr. Jekyll.

One might say that there must be more to it than abuse. The people who are running Musk’s companies are not doing it because they are willing to accept abuse.

When I first met him years ago, I asked him how he makes it safe for SpaceX employees to speak up about problems with rockets. He said, “I try to make it unsafe to not do that.” That is an admirable statement.

So, this defective executive has an admirable approach to criticism. And he is also the most successful executive in the American business world. Perhaps Adam Grant should show more self-awareness before he tries to enhance his status by disparaging Musk.