People Who are Recognized as Outstanding Business Leaders.

Many people have been well recognized for being distinguished business leaders. These names include people such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Welch, and Steve Jobs. These leaders and many others have forged the way in their industries and have been identified for their particular methods of approaching management in the workplace. The leader chosen to evaluate in this paper is Elon Musk. Elon Musk is a top-class businessman who is CEO and founder of many companies and establishments. Most notably his businesses SpaceX and Tesla.

SpaceX is a company that designs, manufactures, and launches rockets and spacecraft and Tesla is the top leading electric auto-mobile manufacturing company. SpaceX was founded on May 6, 2002, while Tesla was founded a year later in 2003. Elon Musk is a highly respected and renowned entrepreneur who seeks to change the world and humanity.

When analyzing the leadership approach of Elon Musk, one can apply Burn’s transformational approach. James MacGregor Burns began to analyze transformational leadership in 1978. Transformational leaders create deep connections between followers and that of co-leaders.

Creating followers and empowering them to become a leader themselves, focusing on the increase of morals. Creating an ethical normative, a transformational leader is able to engage everyone in a common goal. A unique attribute that makes Elon Musk a successful leader is the amount of interaction he places between the consumers and management. In many occasions, Musk demonstrates a clear open system in how he runs a business. Taking feedback from the customers and acknowledging that he has noted their comments creates trust.

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Trust creates loyalty and returning customers. In addition, he is able to make the corrections needed to maximize customer satisfaction and work productivity. Viewing the customers as followers and feedback as a form of leadership, Musk acts upon the findings of Burns, transformational leadership.

It is important to distinguish between transformational and power wielders. The way Musk leads in creating goals, feelings, and considerations the power of a leader is being used adequately. Power wielders utilize the position of power to advance in their own objectives. Elon Musk demonstrates no characteristics of a power wielder. Elon Musk has had to deal with very different situations in his career as a manager, this is mainly because he has been the CEO of a lot of organizations. He was able to bring most of these organizations to success by using fundamental characteristics as a manager and as a leader. Musk has taken part in multiple projects and he has been really successful in his career, which makes it difficult to decide what is his greatest career achievement. One of his greatest achievements might be the installation of solar panels to give power to a children’s hospital in Puerto Rico. In fact, Puerto Rico was left with no power after Hurricane Maria, and most of the island had no energy to implement any system whatsoever. Musk decided to help the people of Puerto Rico by talking with the local government, which allowed Musk to use tools and systems that were usually used by Tesla, in order to restore power for a hospital.

Therefore, he was able to install solar panels that gave power to a children’s hospital of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital city. Elon Musk did not gain any type of benefit from this project, but this shows his capabilities and the characteristics that make him both a good leader and manager for his companies. Elon Musk is not a leader to shy away from adversity. Furthermore, he runs two companies in an extremely expensive market, with rigorous competition, and is dominated by enormous corporations. Throughout Elon’s career, between SpaceX and Tesla, there has been no shortage of challenges. However, the 2008 recession with Tesla was undoubtedly his most significant career challenge. During this time Tesla was hanging by needles to keep afloat. Elon made the decision to bankrupt himself and sunk the remainder of his personal wealth (35 mil-lion) into Tesla. In which saved the company from going under. Although Elon saved the company from collapsing, he continued to struggle financially for years after making the decision to invest all his personal money into the company.

As reported in 2010, Elon ran out of money from a recent divorce and was surviving from personal loans from friends. However, things were heading in the right direction during this time and were able to get a federal loan of 465 million dollars to help manufacture their cars. Tesla was able to meet their goal of producing 400 cars a week and today the company still thrives. “The common thread in Musk’s leadership that has brought both companies to these tentative levels of success is his willingness to take risks, his tenacity, and the fervent confidence that gets others on board with his seemingly crazy ideas.” With that being said, Elon’s selfless act to save the company was him displaying his role as a leader. He showed all his employees his belief that Tesla could be successful by risking his entire net worth in hopes of making his company profitable. Elon Musk used his referent power base in resolving his challenge.

Referent power is the “power of charismatic leaders who attract and inspire loyal admiring followers”. In the previous paragraph, Elon Musk went through the challenge of his business, Tesla, going bankrupt. He invested all of his personal wealth to save his company but continued to see his finances struggling. He then thought to use his referent power and turned to his friends for personal loans. He knew he had relationships with people that trusted and respected him. He used that to his advantage to keep his company alive. Since then, his business has been thriving and he probably has more referent power now than he did before. Recently, Elon Musk has had to step down from his leadership role as chairman at Tesla as ordered by the Securities Exchange Commission due to fraud allegations after tweeting that he was going to take the company private. As mandated by the SEC, a new chairwoman by the name of Robyn Denholm has been appointed to the position as of November 2018. Robyn Denholm was already part of the board and her work experience is in the technology and automotive sector which has made it an easier transition. Since her new role as chairwoman is very recent, it is hard to describe her leadership style within Tesla.

However, using her prior work experience in her other roles, compared to Elon Musk’s transformative leadership style, Robyn Denholm can be described as having an empowering leadership style. She has self-described her leadership views in an interview by the Diversity Journal, Robyn once said: “it is imperative that we practice global partnering by building organizations reflective of the diversity of our business landscape.” This is evidence that Robyn seeks input from a diverse team when leading a company. Since an empowering leadership style gives power-sharing with employees by expressing the significance of the work and providing autonomy, another key evidence that she is an empowering leader was when she also said, “ I believe a key focus of my role is to encourage everyone to grow beyond their expectations.”.

Although there is a difference between Elon’s trans-formative leadership style and Robyn’s empowerment, they both seek to engage their employees and stakeholders by creating deep connections to believe in Tesla’s vision. Although Elon’s removal as chairman of Tesla is recent, his transformational leadership style was required to gain the confidence of the stakeholders and investors to believe in his vision early on and across his different changes and ventures to its present day. Robyn’s role as chairman has barely started and is still in the transition while she resigns from her current job, however with her experience in the automotive industry, she marks the beginning of a new chapter for Tesla which will empower the company to reach new horizons and bring untapped talent to the table. Elon Musk is a really successful leader because he was able to allow Tesla to become a publicly-traded company, which is highly valued in the stock market; in addition, to allowing other companies, such as SpaceX and PayPal, to impact the technological and business world.

One of the attributes that anyone who wants to be an effective leader needs to emulate is the persistence that Elon Musk applies to all of his projects. In fact, when working with SpaceX, Musk had to deal with multiple failed projects and take-offs of his constructions. Regardless, he persisted, achieving great results. Another admirable characteristic of this entrepreneur is his innovative and visionary ideas. In fact, Musk is a forward thinker, who aims to disrupt the way people think of businesses. By implementing some of his ideas, for example, PayPal, he was able to change the way in which financial transactions are thought of. Finally, another of the characteristics that caused Elon Musk to be successful is his work ethic. He works extremely hard on all of his projects and always tries to improve the current state of things; in addition to looking for original and creative solutions that are practically helpful to people. Every notable person or leader out there has experienced mass amounts of trials and tribulations. How one tackle these adversities is where a real leader is born. The road to greatness is steep and being able to lead your employees and be an effective manager at the same time is a fete in and of itself. Elon Musk is a pioneer in many industries and is respected globally for his constant pursuits in changing the world for the better.