Elon Musk Leadership Analysis Essay

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This paper will discuss the leadership style of Elon Musk, and make an assessment of the pros and cons of this leadership style.

Introduction

The leader that I will analyze is Elon Musk, who runs a number of different companies. Musk makes an interesting case study for leadership principles in part because of the number of different companies he is trying to lead a the same time, but also because his companies are aiming to be innovation leaders, have tight frameworks for a large amount of work, and generally are subject to Musk’s hard-driving style. Yet, he must maintain the ability for his managers and his investors to buy into his vision, or his companies (most of which aren’t profitable) will have difficulty obtaining the financing that they need.

Foundations of Individual and Group Behavior

This chapter lays the foundation for understanding behavior. Most of leadership is about motivation, and taking charge over group behavior, the components of attitudes, personality types and emotional intelligence. Musk actually strikes as the type of leader who has relatively low emotional intelligence. His reputation is someone who thinks that everybody will work as hard as he does on his projects, which is not all that reasonable since most people don’t have the upside that comes with ownership. Tesla, for example, appears to have fairly high rate of turnover at the high levels – even some of the senior people don’t have the same buy-in that Musk has, which creates significant challenges for the company to grow.

One has to think that juggling several different companies also provides too much for Musk to learn about his employees. He is passionate about his own ideas – probably an INTJ – but that can create problems if he never works with people long enough to get to know their personalities. Or worse, just simply does not care, despite the known fact that different types of people are motivated in different ways. A low level of emotional intelligence does not make one a bad leader inherently, but it definitely does not help. The value of Musk’s ideas seems to be where a lot of his leadership power come from, and without those ideas he might be challenged to extract the same high level of motivation from people that he demands.

Another element of Musk’s leadership style is his orientation towards ethical leadership; Musk is often cited among the ethical leaders of the early 21st century (Marques, 2017).

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In this, he presents himself as a leader for more than just his companies – someone with a vision of the future that he feels everybody should buy into. One example would be making Tesla technology open source, out of a belief that this technology was important for the world (Muhlberg, 2014). This vision has a different ethical framework than the norm – emphasis on renewable energy and caution against artificial intelligence. He seeks to set the ethical framework for his companies (Paterson, Luthans & Milosevic, 2014), and often does so by taking strong positions on different issues – one almost has to buy into the total package in order to work for his companies.

Work Teams

There are several work teams at Musk’s company. The products are fairly complex, and that requires teams to work closely together. For the most part, these teams are structured as cross-functional problem solving teams. There is always a problem – an objective – something that must be solved, and quickly. But usually for the technical work that Musk’s companies do there are different engineers and other personnel involved. As such, the use of these types of teams is common. Musk will typically set the team objective himself, and then from there the team will assemble and begin to tackle the problem. There are situations where Musk himself take leadership of a team, which is the case now at the Tesla factory to try to solve some of the challenges with respect to ramping up production to meet demand. That hands-on approach leads to a different sort of team dynamic.

His companies are entrepreneurial, and there are specific types of teams that are common in the entrepreneurial context. Musk generally uses the cross-functional team. They may not have that much self-direction, though these do generally have the autonomy to solve problems. When one juxtaposes this against the traits of high performance work teams, it would be expected that Musk’s companies often have high-performance teams. They definitely have some of the elements, such as a clear goal and unified commitment. In most cases, there is also trust, good leadership at different levels, and enough support to succeed. So most of the elements for a high-performing team are in place.

Motivating and Rewarding Employees

This can be tricky for entrepreneurs. Motivation typically requires buying into….....

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