Musk making it safe
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mage of Starship explosions tweeted by Musk"
Elon Musk has an unusually high appetite for risk compared to most entrepreneurs. There have been many times over his many business ventures when he has risked an ‘all-in’ bet on something that was far from certain. On some of those occasions, Musk himself has stated that the most likely outcome will be a company ending failure. He’s also known to be demanding, setting very high expectations and seemingly impossible timeframes. He’s not shy when it comes to firing people. So how does he create psychological safety, which is an important ingredient for success in a high performance environment:
Clear vision - for all of his companies there is a single line summary of purpose (except Twitter now X perhaps). SpaceX is “Make humanity a multiplanetary species to ensure the survival of consciousness.” While this is lofty, it also drives real world-decisions. Musk moves fast, because the goal is not just a moon shot, or orbit, but a Mars colony. Whatever you think of the vision, there’s no ambiguity in it.
Delete, Delete, Delete - Musk is on a relentless drive to delete anything unnecessary from his companies and the rules governing them. That would normally lead to people feeling at threat, but Musk’s mantra “if we don’t end up adding back at least 10% of what we deleted, we didn’t go hard enough” sets the stage. There’s an inherent understanding that some of the deletion experiments will fail. That’s both expected and encouraged.
Accountability - If someone says “It's an engineering requirement”, Musk will ask, “who from engineering said so?”. There’s a name attached to everything. It stops people hiding behind departments or processes, and gets people to own their decisions. It also means things can be discussed. Much harder to have a conversation with ‘engineering’ than with Steve from engineering. That this is framed as an expectation so that deletion conversations can be had faster, rather than as a blame point for failure makes it safer. Steve would still be sweating when the spotlight turns to him, but it’s very different from a blame game or witch hunt. Steve will be prepared to answer challenges on the calls he made.
There’s no doubt Musk drives himself, his people and companies harder than I think is ideal; however these and other clear elements make it very obvious what people are signing up for. As a result he attracts, driven, focussed people who want to change the world we live in. There’s no denying the incredible list of achievements.
Next time we’ll look at some of the ways Musk damages psychological safety and what we can learn from that.
If you want some insight into one of the most controversial and significant “movers and shakers” of our time, I’d highly recommend “Elon Musk”, by Walter Isaccson. It’s current up to 2023. The book was the catalyst for this series.