Report from America: The Cantankerous Billionaire!

No wonder democracy is in trouble in America and the western world. Many of our leaders attended the Dictatorship University! It is not a real University, but a kind of corrupt environment that can be seen in some places – not only in the corridors of political power, but anywhere where a hierarchy is in place, including in the world of business and commerce. The most famous graduate of that University is Donald Trump, a person who has done profound damage to our political system, but the problem is much wider than one person. There is another graduate in the news recently, who bought the company 'Twitter', and it is unbelievable the mess he has made so far while acting as a dictator!

The Cantankerous Billionaiire

Although Elon Musk is richer than anyone else on earth, it is obvious that he is not a very happy person. More importantly, to put it bluntly, he is a terrible bully and an arrogant person, who has no respect for others, especially his own employees. One need look no further than Twitter to confirm that. Here are four principles he didn't follow after buying Twitter. This is a master class, showing what an industrial leader should not do.

The first thing Musk did was fire half his workforce via email on November 4th! Then, on November 16, he gave a final warning to the remaining employees. “Going forward, to build Twitter 2.0 and to succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will have to fight. This will mean long hours of hard work. I will not accept anything less than exceptional performance,” Musk wrote. The message asked staff to click a link if they want to be "part of the new Twitter" by 5pm New York time (10pm GMT) on Thursday.

Anyone who did not declare their commitment by that deadline, Musk said, will receive three months of severance pay. Most employees didn't sign up to that, and they were right! Then, Musk called the coders to appear at the company's headquarters in San Francisco at 2PM on Friday. But he forgot the people who were not near San Francisco, and then he had to make other arrangements. Musk looked like a fool as he staggered from crisis to crisis.

When a leader uses threats to control employees, he or she is acting as a dictator, and intimidating them. Even if that strategy works in the short term, it does long-term damage, because it's not a good way to treat people. The employees do not work out of their own desire, so they do not put their hearts and souls into the work.

Although performance metrics are convenient for machines, they are of limited use for employees. Musk required his engineers to work 12 hours every week and write a certain amount of code every day. But that doesn't get you better code (quite the opposite), and you'll have bored, burned-out engineers before long. They will find jobs in other companies as soon as they can!

Your employees know a lot about the business - listen to them and you'll learn a thing or two! But Musk thinks he knows more about Twitter than the company's own employees, some of whom have been there for years! For example, Twitter's trust and safety team sent him a detailed memo outlining the many serious risks of his plan to start selling "verified" blue ticks. Unfortunately, Musk blatantly ignored them, and things turned out exactly as they predicted.

Conclusion

Many exceptional leaders know the above mentioned points. That's why business guru Steven Covey has a rule for leaders: "Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood." The point here is to first understand, and to achieve that, you have to practice 'empathetic listening'. Then, you will be able to develop a solution working hand in hand together. If Elon Musk doesn't learn to practice 'empathetice listening' soon, Twitter will die an untimely death!

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