Adam Grant writes:

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 but diminishes it. [Continue reading…]