Madonna King: Elon Musk leads return of the ‘bad boss’
Elon Musk appears to be making a huge bid to take workplace relations back to the dark ages. Photo: Getty/TND
Everyone’s had a good boss, at some point, and I’ve had my share.
Those who nurture and perhaps even grow a tiny talent, provide opportunities for professional and personal growth, and who rejoice in the achievements of those who answer to them.
But we’ve all had bad bosses too.
Those who believe a right to grope was an entitlement that came with the office. Those who believed it downright unhygienic for young female journalists to be sent to cover natural disasters, where showers weren’t plentiful. And those – the most disagreeable of all – who would shout and yell and curse when things didn’t go their way.
Taking a bad boss on, two decades ago, could be career-ending. And few were brave enough to do that.
But here’s the thing.
The past two decades have seen an almighty disruption in workplaces. The gender make-up is growing more balanced. So is the commitment to cultural change and diversity. A better understanding of work-life balance has grown bottom lines across the ASX.
Young workers too want to know how their bosses can advance their interests as much as the other way around; and they don’t see the virtue in working late into the night or on weekends in a bid to get ahead.
We’ve learnt a lesson: that being the boss and a genuinely-decent person is not mutually exclusive. And no-one, of any political party or university research centre or health professional organisation, or union or employer organisation, has argued that’s a bad thing.
Along comes Elon Musk
And then Elon Musk comes along in 2022, with a huge bid to take workplace relations back to the dark ages.
The tag of a “very old-fashioned boss’”, given to him by The Economist this week, is perhaps the year’s understatement.
The management style he’s touted – which could still backfire – comes from the dark ages.
Brutal. Brash. Unfair. Uncaring. Careers ended in a sentence.
Autonomy, under Elon Musk, doesn’t belong in the office. Staff do, however, and remote learning is out, along with every skerrick of the modern management textbook.
It’s economics without empathy. Emotionless economics.
It’s hard to nominate a modern day example to show that this type of new savage management style will work for Musk. And already we are seeing how risky his capricious style is – with the company this weekend fighting threatened mass walkouts, revenue losses and a groundswell of customer dissatisfaction.
Path back to the past
Of course, the real danger, while looking increasingly slim, is that it does work – and that the evidence of that shows up in the company’s bottom line.
That would be a travesty because it would provide a path back to the past, where employers ruled workplaces, and unions fought them, where a working week started on Friday and ended on Monday, and time sheets replaced trust.
It’s unlikely Musk, a billionaire, has any real understanding of how his employees live. That’s become increasingly obvious over the past few days. It’s unlikely he buys his own groceries, or checks if he can afford an uber home after Friday night drinks.
Politics has shown, repeatedly, what happens when those who make the laws don’t understand the impact of those who need to live by them.
Business is no different. You can’t have a good relationship with customers who pay for your product if you don’t value the staff who deal with them. Disengaged staff makes for untrusting customers.
Indeed, trust has become more than fashionable; a string of scandals across banks and churches and politics has made it a lure bigger than it ever has been.
The same applies to loyalty.
And it’s almost impossible to see how Musk’s biting management decisions to cut staff and to reduce the entitlements of others will engender either of those.
Elon Musk might be a billionaire, but this new approach to dealing with staff and customers simply doesn’t add up.
