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 so-called 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.
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.
