Leading the Elon Musk Way

Being a leader isn't always about milestones and revenue, it's also about mentorship, guidance, and motivating the entire organisation towards a common goal. Sometimes, that means you take one step back to move steps forward.

Elon Musk is right but recruitment is challenging af - the JDs, repetitive interviews, selection process, induction, transition & retaining them. But I think what matters is if you’ve sold the vision of the company & whether they want to get there with you, whatever their personal motivations may be.

For our recent hires, which adds up to form our biggest team yet, I stated that their work hours were from 11 to 5 - I said that I didn’t want them getting caught in peak hour jams to & fro.

I could have had a group of people that came at 11 & left at 5 because that’s what “the contract states” - Was it a risk? It definitely was.

But in the years that I worked before starting my own business, I learnt that you have to love what you do; some parts of your job will be shit & terrible, but it’s the elements you love that will charge you past that & form “your why” - if you drag your feet to the office & hate your job, it will show in your work.

Did I get questions from others about being too slack? Of course I did. But this was a test of my leadership skills & their character, if I had said the right things & if they understood the journey we were on.

I'm a pragmatist & I don’t conform to societal stigmas - just because you're at your desk for 9 hours doesn’t mean you come up with better work than someone who does so for 5.

In the first 2 weeks, I had a bunch of people that worked from 11 to 5.

Just a month later, I earned a team that came early & sometimes left late. They text me at night & sometimes on the weekends. They don’t drag their feet to work; they love what they do & want to do it better.

All this is because we worked hard to help them find their why - they became a team that invested in the vision.

Being a leader isn’t always about fixing problems, or bringing in the rev. It’s about spending time with your people & figuring out how they can be better. It’s about leading them towards a common goal not because they have to, but because they want to. That, to me, is leadership.