Last December, I asked my students at Wharton to nominate and vote on topics for our final class. The runaway top choice was leadership lessons from Elon Musk. It’s become a hot topic among the corporate elite, too. At a recent leadership conference, the founder of a lucrative start-up said in passing that Mr. Musk was making dictators cool again. The chief executive of a large company said Mr. Musk was giving people like him their power back. A major investor concluded that Mr. Musk’s success is proof that it’s better to be feared than loved.
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.
As an organizational psychologist, I’ve long admired the boldness of Mr. Musk’s vision, the intensity of his drive and the impact of his innovations in cars and rockets. 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.
You can see it with elite athletes. In a study of nearly 700 N.B.A. players, those who had an abusive coach performed worse for the rest of their careers. Six years later, after changing teams, they were still adding less value on the court. They were also more likely to lash out and get charged with technical fouls.
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.
Take it from a review of over 400 studies across 36 countries with nearly 150,000 people: In the face of workplace aggression, people are less productive, less collaborative and more inclined to shirk their responsibilities. Abusive bosses break confidence and breed resentment. And ruthless, haphazard downsizing can cause the highest performers — the ones who have the best opportunities elsewhere — to jump ship. Denigrating people is not a path to accomplishing meaningful goals. It reflects a lack of self-control and a shortage of emotional intelligence.
Now comes the inevitable question: 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.
Why is it so easy to miss that point? The answer gets at a bigger truth about the way human beings think. 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.
A common excuse for Mr. Musk’s harshness is that he’s in demon mode. But there’s a big difference between demonizing people and demanding a lot from them.
Treating people with consideration actually makes them more open to tough feedback. Students are more receptive to constructive criticism if their teacher prefaces it with, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” Work and sports teams respond better to negative emotions from leaders if they establish respect first.
Mr. Musk is aware of the impression that he makes. He once tweeted, “If I am a narcissist (which might be true), at least I am a useful one.” He also recognizes that his intense emotions can create a climate of fear. 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.
Promising to cut at least $1 trillion from the federal budget, Mr. Musk has used the same tool kit that he’s applied in the corporate sector: rapidly taking a chain saw to systems he believes are broken and firing a great many people at once, sometimes without any stated reason. Is it working?
If he’s trying to build a more efficient, more transparent federal government, not so much. His team has done much of its work in secrecy, with little accountability and few dissenters around him to challenge his ideas — let alone rivals from the opposing party like the ones Lincoln assembled in his cabinet to promote diversity of thought and earn the public’s trust. Mr. Musk has made too many mistakes, from unwittingly eliminating Ebola prevention programs to firing employees doing critical work on nuclear weapons and scientists working to prevent a bird flu pandemic. And it’s hard to see how firing the folks who collect revenue is a good strategy for taming the budget or how eliminating oversight could help fight budgetary waste. But if his goal is to discredit government and demoralize workers, then his strategy may be working.
Before Mr. Musk came along, the patron saint of demeaning leadership was Steve Jobs. Jony Ive, who worked with him for decades, said that when Mr. Jobs got frustrated, “his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that.”
After being forced out of his own company in 1985, Mr. Jobs discovered that he was burning too many idiosyncrasy credits. Thanks to some brutally honest feedback, he came to see that by showing a little compassion, he would gain a lot of loyalty. “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it,” he later said. The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple a dozen years later was a more decent person, and it made him a better leader. Mr. Jobs “went through a fairly dramatic change, and he became kinder and more empathetic,” his longtime Pixar collaborator Ed Catmull told me. “It was the changed person who had those abilities to make this amazing impact in the world.”
It’s a pattern I’ve seen time and again in my research: Givers add more value than takers. Studies show that tech companies are more profitable when servant leaders are at the helm. The competitive advantage comes from treating people better than they expect and earning their trust, which makes it easier to attract, motivate and retain talent. That doesn’t mean being soft on people. Servant leaders aren’t shy about dishing out tough love. But they put their mission above their ego, and they care about people as much as performance.
As Mr. Musk makes waves, I often think of the fact that he once studied where I now teach. I want my students to learn from his healthy disrespect for the status quo. But I hope they reject his unhealthy habit of showing disrespect for people. The purpose of studying role models is not to idolize them. It’s to emulate their strengths and transcend their weaknesses.
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