The Leadership Style of Elon Musk - Coursework Example

A). Introduction

Leaders of modern organizations use different leadership styles in managing their respective organizations. This report is about leadership styles and how leaders use different strategic decision-making tools in the real world. This report will present the leadership style of Elon Musk. It will begin with the background of the Musk and how organization. It will then present analysis of his leadership style as well as two different strategic decision-making tools he uses. It will conclude by explaining in detail what Musk should do to improve or change the way he deals with the employees.

B). Context and background of leader and organization

Elon Reeve Musk is a South African-born American investor, business magnate, inventor and engineer. He is the CEO, founder, and CTO of SpaceX. In addition, he is also a co-founder, CEO, series A investor, and product architect of Tesla Inc. also, he is the CEO and founder of Neuralink and co-chairman of OpenAl (Dobbs, 2016). Musk is also former chairman and co-founder of SolarCity, founder of X.com, and co-founder of Zip2. X.com merged with Confinity and became PayPal. Musk is revolutionizing transportation in space and on earth. Likewise, his car producer, Tesla Motors, is conveying completely electric vehicles to mass market. On the other hand, SpaceX, his rocket company has a current market value of above $20 billion.

Musk was brought up in South Africa but at 17 years old, he migrated to Canada. He then landed in the United States as a transfer student at the University of Pennsylvania. The massive sizes of SpaceX and Tesla imply that Musk is operating large businesses. Since Tesla is an automaker and energy storage organization, Musk is working in energy storage and automotive industry. On the other hand, SpaceX is an aerospace manufacturer as well as space transport services organization implying Musk is also operating in aerospace industry (Dobbs, 2016). Therefore, the products/services that he deals with are dragon capsules, falcon launch vehicles, orbital rocket launch and ASDS landing platform for SpaceX and Tesla energy and electric vehicles for Tesla Motors. SpaceX was founded in May 6, 2002 and is headquartered in Hawthorne, California. Its main goal is to reduce cost of space transportation and enable Mars colonization. Musk is highly educated and experienced. He has Bachelor of Science degree in physics and in economics. Having founded and managed Zip2, X.com and SpaceX in addition to managing Tesla, Hyperloop, SolarCity, OpenAl, and Neuralink, Musk is extremely experienced (Dobbs, 2016).

C). Analysis of the leadership style

It is evident that Musk uses transformational leadership. Transformational leadership refers to the process by which an individual or a leader inspires other people to be more using an optimistic and real approach to challenges, creating change where the change is required, and has the capacity of communicating a vision of success and purpose (Padgett, 2017). Elon has been able to do this in all the organizations that he has worked and the ones he has established.

Firstly, Elon has high level of transparency. For instance, he has been giving interviews and presentations regarding his goals in addition to being clear about his goals as well as what he has hopes to realize within his lifetime. Musk has been over-promising and over-delivering and has the goal of not only building the products but building a future. The second feature of Musk that indicates that he is a transformational leader is being visionary (Padgett, 2017). His vision is highly attractive, beneficial, understandable, simple, and energy creating. Despite the fact that Musk’s visions are neither believable nor realistic, he has made it his mission to make them both. For instance, he has a vision of colonizing Mars, a vision of hyperloop and autopilot electronic cars. In order to achieve that, Musk has been able to convince great people to join the respective companies and then getting them to work as a team in concert towards clear gaols using sensible strategies (Padgett, 2017). According to Health (2015), Musk identified three areas while in college that he thought would greatly affect the humanity’s future, that is, sustainable energy, the Internet, and the extension of human life beyond Earth. It is evident that Musk is a transformational leader because he leads by vision; he sets achievable and realistic vision for the organization. He then, in an effective way, communicates the vision to the followers in addition to inspiring a sense of purpose and commitment in them. He has been able to strongly guide the organizations in the direct way he wants by getting each and every individual within the organization to buy into the common vision (Avolio & Yammarino, 2013).

Thirdly, transformational leadership is highly effective during the time of crises. Therefore, Musk is a change pioneer since he has kept on winning the trust of his employees by being solid and unsurprising even in conditions that are very unverifiable (Padgett, 2017). For instance, when Tesla was struggling through various emergencies of money related trouble, on numerous occasions, Musk kept on financing the firm on his own to the tune of more than $100 million into the electric car company. Therefore, it is not surprising that the transformational leadership strategies of Musk have been more apparent during the uncertain circumstances (Vance, 2012). In addition, Musk has high degree of honesty. He has been extremely open about his past failures. For instance, both Tesla and SpaceX almost went bankrupt in 2008. Also, he has been able to admit that the first idea for the Hyperloop was unfeasible.

On the other hand, Musk has been greatly inspirational. As a transformational leader, he has been able to inspire his followers and has motivated many people within the organization to rise to the occasion. For instance, Musk has been able to not only inspire them using formal acknowledgement for the excellent job done, but also has been treating every employee as a highly valued person (Padgett, 2017). He has been able to take time and understand what motivates each and every employee. Being a social architect, Musk has inspired his employees in many ways.

Finally, Musk is highly adaptable and proactive. He has possessed the capacity to continually adjust to the consistently changing economic situations to continue advancing. Musk is regularly ready to adjust to new circumstances as well as seeking creative ways for responding to the dynamic business environment (Vance, 2012). Musk has been taking risks as well as taking an active role in establishing and growing the organizations (Padgett, 2017). For instance, he has established four different companies such as SpaceX, X.com, Zip2 and PayPal and is currently a company leader for two firms, Tesla and SpaceX. Musk has high positive self-regard and tends to put accentuation on his qualities as opposed to harping on his shortcomings. For example, he is known for not being short of his capacities as he generally talks straightforwardly in regards to his capacity to learn complex subjects, for example, advanced science by simply perusing books. In pay for the territories of shortcomings, Musk sources specialists as he enrols top experts.

D). Analysis of two different strategic decision-making tools

There are several different strategic decision-making tools; however, the two that are used by this leader are the option matrix tool and feasibility study. With regards to decision matrix, Musk has been evaluating all the options of the decision by creating a table will all the options as well as the factors affecting them (Northouse, 2013). The option matric tool refers to a spreadsheet decision making tool that helps managers in applying a set of decision criteria to a wide variety of strategic options or alternatives. This tool has been highly effective in helping Musk make decisions requiring substantial judgement as well as in situations that numbers are not available (Avolio & Yammarino, 2013). Musk has been able to work through a series of decision-making steps thereby being able to establish the criteria for assessing and comparing the different possible alternatives and then effectively comparing the choices. In addition, the tool has allowed him to list and weight a wide variety of decision criteria that are deemed vital for particular problem alternative or given business situation.

The tool effectively identifies the most desirable option in the final spreadsheet in addition to an evaluation or assessment of each option. In addition, the decision-making tool ensures a systematic process is utilized thus resulting in making the most effective judgement-based decisions (Northouse, 2013).

With regards to feasibility study, Musk has been able to assess whether some goals or projects can actually be achieved or created and whether the project have the capacity to make substantial profits in the future. In doing so, Musk uses an ancient critical-thinking strategy, which has helped him in outsmarting everybody else. According to Avolio & Yammarino (2013), Musk uses the first principle thinking and not reasoning by analogy in strategic decision making. While carrying out the feasibility studies, Musk boils things down to the most fundamental truths thus reasoning up from there. According to Musk, arguing from first principles takes lots of mental energy but results in novel or ground-breaking results (Avolio & Yammarino, 2013). For instance, rather looking at the products on the market when attempting to estimate the cost of SpaceX rockets, Musk and his team figured out the necessary parts of the rocket and then found out the cost of the raw materials of such parts. Feasibility study has been effective in helping Musk decide which opportunity to follow and which not to at the beginning planning stages of launching firms.

E) Conclusion

Musk is a South African-born American investor, business magnate, inventor and engineer. Musk is revolutionizing transportation in space and on earth and Tesla Motors is bringing fully-electric vehicles to mass market. It is evident that Musk uses transformational leadership as he has high level of transparency, he is a visionary leader. Also, has continued to earn the trust of employees by being reliable and predictable even in circumstances that are highly indeterminate. Musk is greatly inspirational, highly adaptable and proactive. He uses the option matrix tool and feasibility study as strategic decision-making tools, which has been highly effective in arriving at informed decisions.

D) Recommendations.

In order to improve or change the way Musk deal with his employees, he should respect their boundaries. In spite of the fact that it is normal to show new difficulties and push the workers to grasp new encounters, Musk ought not to push them so far out of the safe place that it turns into a negative affair (Northouse, 2013). He should stop asking employees to take on tasks that are outside the realms of their role as this makes the employees feel that they are being tossed out to the lions. This not only reduces their productivity but also affects their level of performance, efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, Musk should set realistic tasks and deadline for achieving them. He should stop putting the employees under a lot of pressure to accomplish complex and sophisticated tasks under a short duration of time. He should learn to adjust the schedules so that the brightest and hardest working employees would feel defeated (Northouse, 2013).

In addition, Musk should learn to give employees flexibility. Instead of gripping the steering wheel extremely tight when directing the team, he should let the employees drive as this will increase their creativity and innovativeness as well as motivation. He should just give the employees the parameters to work with for them not to be overwhelmed with options (Vance, 2012). Finally, Musk should encourage in-the-moment feedback by conducting employee surveys to found out the workflow concerns and hence arriving at the most effective ways to deal with them. The employees should provide respectful and constructive feedbacks. This will ensure that the team trusts him thereby delivering helpful and honest praise and criticisms. This is useful in identifying most effective ways to deal with problems affecting the organization. Therefore, his employees will respect him instead of fearing him (Vance, 2012).