Be as unlikable as Elon Musk*

*Only if you are a generational genius like him

“This side of what it's like to work with Elon shows that no one likes working with Elon. You can always tell when someone's left an Elon meeting: they're defeated. These are some of the hardest working and brightest people in the world, mind you. And they are universally defeated”

So goes a Quora post by a SpaceX engineer. Stories of Elon’s tough management style or how Steve Jobs threw the first iPod prototype into an aquarium on a temper tantrum, only make them more legendary and admired in people’s minds.

I’m in that camp too, so I don’t necessarily have any problems with that. But, what if the lesson people takeaway is that being a powerful leader requires acting like Musk or Jobs? What if they believed that being abhorred by those who work for you is just the price you pay for being a visionary leader? What if people assume that likability is a liability?

Is likability an asset or a liability?

Political consultants have always understood that likability (A candidate you can have a beer with) is an asset. Yet when it comes to business, most books talk about likability as a weakness. “Never let being liked get in the way of being respected,” goes the saying.

Why such a discrepancy on this topic when it comes to leading a country vs. leading a company?

At the outset, I will make one thing clear. If you are a generational genius like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, there’s a lot you can get away with. Most people know that they aren’t one, but let’s say you are suspicious that you may secretly be one and would like to act like them. Here’s a quick way to confirm your suspicions.

If smoking weed in public, or tweeting “funding secured,” seem too radical, send a quick tweet with three dots in it, (make it four if three seems too low) and see if you get 125,000 people to like the tweet within 24 hours. If this doesn’t pan out, chances are you aren’t a generational genius like Elon and may want to read on.

Why is this an important topic to discuss?

The general perception is that leaders who are liked often shy away from making hard but necessary decisions, and therefore drive the business down the slope. While understandable, the danger is that, it’s easy to flip the equation and presume that a leader who is liked among her peers is not making enough “hard decisions”. This is a canard that needs to be carefully undone.

Liked by whom?

For this post, we are talking about being liked by people in your peer group, the team you manage, or the coworkers you collaborate with on a daily basis to negotiate, discuss, and make difficult decisions. (Keep in mind that it’s relatively easy to be liked by people not in your direct chain of command. I wrote about this grandparent-effect when it comes to curse of front-line management here)

Let’s say that you have a difficult business decision to make ? something unpopular but necessary. Let’s also assume that your key execs disagree with you.

This is the situation where a leader likes to assume the role of the sad, misunderstood character of a Shakespearean play who sings the sonnet of solitude and believes that it’s her job to make the hard decisions even if no one understands the reasons at the present moment. She bears the scars, only to be eventually proven right and earns the naysayers’ respect. Let’s call this, the LW mode (Lone Warrior mode).

LW mode is the is the easy path, where being respected and liked is a zero-sum game. A leader can always make a decision and overrule her team. She can tolerate or even enjoy being disliked for a while knowing she will be vindicated in the future. The much harder, but more creative path produces an outcome where her team both respects and likes her.

Here you (as leader) still make the decision you deem appropriate, but you also consider your responsibility to explain the entire context, constraints, and decisions-points in all its gory details to everyone who wants to hear it. Do it in exec meetings, then in an all-hands meeting, and then pull aside non-believers in 1-1s and do it all over again.

You use the same slides, charts, data, and talking points in all meetings. Doing that may seem scary, but more often than not, the real reason a leader holds back accurate and relevant information in its entirety is because she:

• Equates information to power and wants to hold on to it
• Is incapable of taking complex subjects and breaking them into simple metaphors and stories to stimulate peoples’ associative learning instincts
• Is not humble enough to acknowledge that she may learn something new in the conversations, irrespective of the title or experience of the person with whom she is conversing
• Is afraid to truly own the decision in front of large groups

Goes without saying that all of those need to be remedied.

This level of radical information transparency only works if you (as leader):

• Understand that you’ve assembled a capable team that genuinely cares to provide valuable input into the decision-making process
• Acknowledge that you aren’t a generational genius and that at least a few people in your team could arrive at the same or better decision provided they have access to *all* the information, context, and constraints to which you have been been privy
• You realize that knowledge economy is not a command-and-control military. People are the ones who elevate their leaders to inspire them.
• When you hold back critical information, particularly around financial or personnel matters, most people will assume the worst possible scenario anyway.
• You know most people are innately curious about all-aspects of the business. Yes, a seller cares not just about sales, she will be interested in the release management process. An engineer would like to know revenue-recognition issues, a support person wants to learn more about the office furniture decision, and the receptionist gets a thrill out of hearing the latest competitive win from the field.

Leaders who take the harder path of carefully explaining and justifying their decisions know that being liked is the not the reward they seek.

They want to build a team that works completely together in good times and bad; a team that wholeheartedly celebrates the success of the leader’s decision, or when the decision proves wrong, a team that will have their leader’s back ? and help pull the company out of the mess faster than any single person can.

In either case, decision-making is never driven, or influenced by the desire to be liked. Rather, in the more difficult path of radical information transparency, being liked becomes just an after-effect, which is not bad because every human being wants to be liked by others; sometimes leaders more than others.

Follow me on Twitter --@sudheenair

<A quick note of Thanks to Steve, for his help>