Elon Musk's Leadership Style - Case Study Example

Change often impacts the leader and their subordinates in one way or the other. In their book titled “Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience,” Richard, Robert, & Gordy (2018) point out that excellent leaders recognize the situational and follower factors that hinder change, come up with a compelling vision for the company’s future, and compose and implement a plan that actualizes this vision into reality.Elon Musk, the Chief Executive Officer of Tesla Motors uses a leadership style that goes against the traditions.

For instance, management experts opine that great leaders and managers ought to delegate duties for the efficient and effective running of the organization. However, Mr. Musk takes pride in sleeping in the factory to help fine-tune the production process (Higgins, 2018). Mr. Musk’s leadership strategy involves him leading his team from the front and the back, that is a transformative leadership style. In essence, he is a visionary genius who believes in his vision, persistence, and passion, dispelling any hindrances that he may encounter in his path.

One of his followers and an auto industry analyst named Rebecca Lindland comments that she likes the fact that Mr. Musk is not tied to tradition and this is what makes him a brilliant leader (Higgins, 2018). However, despite having such a compliment, there exists hindrance in this leadership and follower scenario because much of the projects that they are pursuing now are likened to that of a startup company. The change that is desired is that they ought to step out of the startup characteristic and move into an industrial leader status such as that of General Motors GM). Mr. Musk is unpredictable.

He is also not tied to traditional management practices. Therefore, new and young staff may find it hard to flow with his leadership style. There is evidence to suggest that Tesla is trying to prove itself that it can mass-produce electric cars despite facing hurdles from agencies such as the National Transport and Safety Board (NTSB) (Higgins, 2018). Moreover, there are cases of a team of engineers working on a project for over 100 hours per week for over nine months only for Mr. Musk to scrap it off (Blazek, 2016).

Situations such as these are likely to result in discord between the management and the staff as the firm tries to accomplish its vision of mass production – a vision that will change Tesla for the better. Mr. Musk disregards traditional leadership and only applies a few concepts of transformational leadership. However, he ought to borrow more ideas from the transformational and charismatic leadership concept if at all Tesla Motors is to move into an industrial leader status. Mr. Musk uses personalized management that heavily borrows from transformative leadership.

There is a need for him to further concentrate on three essential components of personalized leadership. According to Richard, Robert, & Gordy (2018), the key components of personalized leadership include the empowerment of their followers, understanding their emotional state, and the leader has the ability to be emotionally expressive. In this regard, Mr. Musk ought to include these essential concepts together with the unpredictable leadership style that he uses at Tesla Motors. In so doing, Tesla will attain its vision of becoming a leader in the mass production of electric cars.