Elon Musk’s Transformational Leadership and Entrepreneurial Success

Topic: Leadership
Words: 558 Pages: 2

Introduction

More often, almost every leader has unique behaviors, beliefs, and other aspects that inspire their leadership style. The leadership style is mostly the leader’s unique methodologies used to motivate, manage, and direct the subordinates to achieve an array of goals, and inspire others and other objectives. (Manning & Curtis, 2019). This paper examines Elon Musk’s impressive leadership, style, challenges, weaknesses, and strengths in the business environment.

Elon Musk and Transformational Leadership

I admire Elon Musk’s leadership style and have majorly known his efforts’ influences through his impressive accomplishments at Tesla and SpaceX in less than two decades. Musk is the current CEO at Tesla Inc. and SpaceX founder that are well-known institutions whose success has made him among the world’s most admirable entrepreneurs (Khan, 2021). Similarly, I know Musk’s accomplishments through his success and progressive presence on social networking platforms like Twitter. Elon has been Tesla’s CEO or product architect since 2008 and has proved to be an excessively innovative leader in this industry.

Generally, Musk’s leadership style or patterns may be classified under the relationship or transformation theory. Transformation theory hypothesizes that effective leadership results from establishing a positive team members-leader relationship. Such a relationship may be fostered by inspiring, motivating, and supporting the subordinates through innovation, their interests, passion, and enthusiasm to enhance success. Elon’s strengths and leadership patterns may include impressive inventiveness and analysis. Also, he is good at planning, problem-solving, and strategic execution.

Elon Musk’s Major Challenges, Strengths, and Weaknesses

Arguably, Elon Musk’s greatest challenge is setting large-scale goals and working within two of the most complex industrial domains in the business environment, which include space and electric vehicles (EVs) production. However, Musk does not fear failure, which he often tweets about, an ideal trait he acquired after losing his CEO position in the other two tech institutions. Such brave leadership and decision-making continue to lead effectively, empower the workers, and achieve the unattainable in most of his large-scale production goals (Khan, 2021).

Elon’s key strength is his work ethic and openness to new ideas. While Musk has had an admirable passion for science since childhood, he has invested heavily in understanding the basic principles of most of his impressive inventions and often sees past most of the global trends in these industries (Khan, 2021). Also, he has a strong work ethic and often works long hours every week to finalize various projects and collaborate with workers at the individual level.

However, Musk’s main weaknesses include some of his publicly-admitted issues with timelines. Thus, he may often underestimate problems that could be associated with various unclear timelines directly. He also arguably fails to ensure an admirable work-life balance for workers. Also, such transformational leaders may often expect the subordinates to share the brand’s vision or strong work ethic, which can hinder personal or career development due to burnout.

Conclusion

Elon Musk is an admirable leader for being action-oriented and fearless. Musk is an ideal leader due to their aggressiveness and strong work ethic to achieve impressive business goals and get things done. Thus, I would similarly integrate his methods at work by not allowing fear to motivate my creativity, inspiring others to be efficient at problem-solving skills, and developing a desire for knowledge past the fundamental principles. These principles and leadership changes can be beneficial to maintaining a culture of learning and inventiveness.

References

Khan, M. (2021). A critical analysis of Elon Musk’s leadership in Tesla motors. Journal of Global Entrepreneurship Research, 1-10.

Manning, G., & Curtis, K. (2019). The Art of Leadership. McGraw Hill.