Why Elon Musk’s Leadership Approach Needs a Serious Rethink

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Stay true to yourself, be you, and lead with gravitas, the hallmark of authentic leadership. Let's dive in.

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Independence, it's not just how you think, but how you act.

Today, I want to share five leadership lessons from—I mean, for—Elon Musk. Elon has been in the news a lot lately, but I wanna talk about his leadership style and how it impacts his companies, his people. How it impacts the industry, with a view to improvement. It's easy for us to slam people because they don't like something that we like, or believe in something that we don't believe in. But I wanna take a careful look at what I think are five crucial leadership lessons for Elon.

Number one: Musk is undeniably mission-driven. He said, and I quote, "The acceleration of sustainable energy is absolutely fundamental because this is the next potential risk for humanity. So obviously that is by far and away the most important thing." End quote.

We have heard many quotes from Musk about how Tesla is a vehicle—literally, a vehicle—towards achieving this mission, this goal of sustainable energy. And he has rallied the world around this mission. His people believe in him. His investors believe in him. All of his employees believe in the mission. It is one of the finest examples of a mission-driven company: Tesla. Nobody could dispute that.

But here's the lesson to be learned: when you have the power to do that, and you've done such a remarkable job of creating this brand—this whole community—do not then align yourself with people who do not support your mission. Publicly talking about your alignment with people who do not share your mission, putting so much of your life, your energy, and your money to support people that do not share your mission causes tremendous confusion.

I'm talking about you as a leader—not about your politics—but as a leader. When you declare a mission and you rally people around that mission, when your actions start to then detract from that mission, it causes confusion, and it starts to create uncertainty and fear. And that's where the problem starts. So yes, stay on task with the mission, but make sure that your actions are aligned with your mission and you do not waiver.

Number two: your relentless drive to solve problems. You get this better than almost anybody on the planet. You see a problem and you go after it, and it doesn't matter what they say, what the industry experts say, the naysayers say. If you believe in something, you will find that pain point and you will find a way to solve it, and you will work day and night, night and day until it happens.

You will inspire people to do more, to drive innovation, but this intense culture, which then becomes a fear-based culture, cannot sustain. It actually restricts creativity. There's a different leadership model during the startup phase of a company and full scale production. If you continue to operate with this fear-based approach, berating people, yelling at people, making people feel bad—yes, I said that would feel bad.

I know that you have trouble with empathy. Yeah, I've read the Isaacson biography. But you have to think about how to continue to keep your people with you as you scale up into production. And that's a different kind of leader. That's a leader that displays all 21 Traits of Authentic Leadership. That's the kind of leader that you need to scale.

When you continue to operate with this fear-based culture, then people will start to disengage. They will either leave or they will shut down, and they'll be too afraid to bring you their best ideas, to put their creativity forward that you so desperately crave.

Number three: leading by example. I love that you love leading by example. And I read a quote that said that you never ask your team to do something that you wouldn't do—and that's admirable. It's a powerful motivator. You have an incredible work ethic, people see that, but you cannot expect that of every other person. You cannot expect people to sleep on the shop floor overnight. You just can't.

Leading by example in the business world also expands out into your behaviors. You have to model the behaviors that you want from the people in your companies. That's what you do as a CEO. I know you don't like the term CEO, but that's what you do as the ultimate leader of a company. It's how you behave, how you act, how you make decisions that permeates through the rest of the company. That's how you create a culture.

And certainly, your actions and behaviors over the past week, I am sure that you would not want your people to behave that way. So please pay attention to closing that gap between the model of leader that you think your companies need and the behavior that you are displaying.

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Number four: micromanagement. Because you are so smart—nobody could dispute that fact—and you can solve problems faster than most, that doesn't mean you've gotta dive into every single problem and fix it yourself. That's micromanagement. You can insert yourself into the process or the problem and provide guidance, but then you have to back off and empower your people to find their own way.

Will it take a little longer? Possibly. But will it help create a culture of people who will thrive, and a more longer term sustainable culture? Absolutely, it will. When you get involved in all the detail, you cut the legs off the people on your team, and again, you start to incite fear in the team. It will undermine trust and autonomy, and before you know it, you'll have to make all the decisions in all of the companies. And that's not the role that you need to be in.

Number five: who and how are you as a leader? This is a question that we don't often ask ourselves and we need to. I ask every leader—it's the opening question on the Automotive Leaders podcast—who are you as a leader? Because if you don't know who you are as a leader of a business, of a company, of a department, of a team, how do you expect people to know how to interact with you, how to support what you need, and what you want.

It's critically important to spend time thinking about who you are as a leader. Use the 21 Traits of Authentic Leadership as a guide. Use the work of Doug Conant in his leadership blueprint. The most important thing is to spend time thinking about who and how you are as a leader, and then making sure that it's in line with your values, with your mission, and that your behaviors follow.

It sounds simple, but very few of us take the time to actually do this. Authenticity and consistency are key, especially when the world is watching. Leaders have a responsibility to bring calm to the chaos—not to create the chaos, but to bring calm to the chaos. That's a leader's role. People need to feel safe in their workplace, and don't take my word for it—Google's Project Aristotle defined the number one trait of a high-performance team: psychological safety.

People need to feel safe so that they can bring their best ideas to the table so that they can bring everything they've got to the problem to solve the problem, to move the company forward. When there's a lot of uncertainty in the air, it causes massive distraction and people don't feel safe.

As we wrap up, I want to acknowledge just how much Elon Musk has done for the auto industry. We need him to be a great leader because he has pushed us all to think and act differently. We scoffed at him in the beginning. When Tesla launched, we said, "He'll never make a car. He's a tech guy outta California. He just doesn't understand." He did it. We said, "He couldn't scale." What happened? Yeah, he went through some pain, but he figured it out.

Elon has a maniacal focus on waste. He can look at an assembly, he can look at a module, he can take five components and reduce it down to one. He'll push his team to make it happen. That's an incredibly powerful leadership trait that we want you to maintain, but we want you to be a more well-rounded leader. We want you to listen to people who are around you. We want you to think about who you are as a leader.

Let's be clear, the real threat to our industry right now is the Chinese OEMs. We don't need the distraction of what's happening on X. What did you say today? What happened yesterday? We don't need all of this. We don't need you holding back your rockets and fighting with the president of this country—whether you agree with him or not.

We don't need this display, this tit-for-tat display, playing out on the global stage. We need you to stay focused on doing what you do so well, which is pushing this industry to think and act differently. The noise and uncertainty coming from these distractions make it harder. This level of uncertainty causes us in the industry to freeze. And it's not all on you, I understand that, the whole tariff situation is driving it too. But all of these things happening at the same time is preventing us from focusing on our real mission.

So, please, Elon, get back to what you're really good at, which is pushing this auto industry to think and act differently. Because the entire industry, indeed, the entire world is watching and we can't afford to lose our edge now.

Thanks for listening. Let's keep the conversation going on what real authentic leadership looks like in today's world.

Thank you for listening to the Automotive Leaders Podcast. Click the listen link in the show notes to subscribe for free on your platform of choice. And don't forget to download the 21 Traits of Authentic Leadership PDF by clicking on the link below. And remember, stay true to yourself, be you, and lead with Gravitas, the hallmark of authentic leadership.