Elon Musk surely deserves some sort of award for running a company the size of Twitter into the ground in record time. So far, his tenure at the once-great social media giant has been a master class in what not to do as a leader.
Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter has been a master class in what not to do as a leader. (Photo by Jakub ... [+]
Here are the four biggest mistakes he made and why you should avoid repeating them in your own company:
1. Reacting without thinking
One of my personal mantras (and the tagline of my podcast) is: Bad leaders react, good leaders plan, and great leaders think. Musk has done little planning (“Hey, let’s start charging for blue checkmarks! What could possibly go wrong?”) and even less thinking (“Hey, let’s just give anyone who wants one a blue checkmark!”) since taking over Twitter on October 28 – but he has done a whole lot of reacting.
Just look at the cringeworthy sequence of snap decisions that began Wednesday with his ill-conceived ultimatum demanding that all employees not already laid-off agree in writing to accept his “extremely hardcore” vision of a dystopian workplace in which “only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade” (at least the lowest-performing team doesn’t get electrocuted). That missive blew up in Musk’s face like a fumbled hand grenade when the Thursday deadline came and went with most of Twitter’s remaining workers refusing to sign. So, he decided to close Twitter’s offices. Then he realized that wasn’t going to work, so Musk sent out another ultimatum – this time ordering all coders to report in person to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters by 2 p.m. Friday. But what about the many programmers working in other states? Oops! Musk was forced to modify once again.
While Musk’s first decision was a bad one, each of those subsequent reactions made an already bad situation worse. He shouldn’t have issued such a ridiculous ultimatum in the first place, but the fact that so few employees responded to it should have been a clear sign that he needed to stop and rethink. Instead, he reacted. Then he reacted again. And each reaction compounded the original mistake.
2. Ruling by decree
That original mistake was to rule by decree – a leadership modality most associated with autocratic dictators and other insecure types. Maybe that’s why the ultimatum Musk emailed to employees Wednesday sounded a lot like something Vladimir Putin might have written.
This is nothing new for Elon. He’s been infamously issuing ultimatums to his employees for years now. Earlier this month, Musk reportedly ordered some Twitter staffers to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week – with some employees told to “work 24/7” to meet Musk’s aggressive deadlines. Earlier this year, Musk demanded that all Tesla employees return to the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week or “pretend to work somewhere else.” During the early days of the pandemic, Musk defied California’s shelter-in-place rules (and common sense) by ordering factory employees to stay on the assembly line. And back in 2018, Tesla workers were averaging 100-hour weeks as they struggled to launch the Model 3.
While it can sometimes be necessary to ask your employees to do some very heavy lifting, good leaders know that such asks must be couched in humility, issued with empathy, and never allowed to become the default. If they do, workers will inevitably become burned out and alienated. Their performance will suffer as well: just look at the quality problems plaguing the Model 3.
3. Using arbitrary metrics to judge employee performance
When you view your employees as fungible assets, as Musk seems to, it’s tempting to sort them using arbitrary metrics. However, great leaders know that metrics only matter if they are tied to the organization’s strategic goals.
If one of those goals is to improve your NPS, then incentivizing frontline employees to have positive interactions with customers will drive their behavior toward that end, while incentivizing them to sell more aggressively likely will not.
In his decrees Musk often imposes arbitrary metrics that, rather than advancing his companies’ long-term success, actually undermine it. Requiring software engineers to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week does not make for better code, it makes for exhausted, burned-out staff. Measuring performance by the number of lines of code produced simply incentivizes programmers to produce bloated code.
4. Ignoring your employees
Incredulous Twitter employees tried to warn Musk of the perils posed by his recent changes to the company.
For example, on November 1, Twitter’s trust and safety team sent him a detailed memo outlining the many serious risks posed his plan to start selling blue “verified” checkmarks. In it, they warned that “(i)mpersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” could create mayhem on the platform. They also warned that “(m)otivated scammers/bad actors could be willing to pay … to leverage increased amplification to achieve their ends where their upside exceeds the cost.”
Musk dismissed these and other concerns, and things played out just as Twitter staff feared they would.
If Musk had been less arrogant and more willing to listen, he could have learned a lot from his new employees. Great leaders know that. It is why Steven Covey’s fifth rule for highly successful people is: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
