While the World Needs a Mandela, It's Getting Elon Musk
Unlike Nelson Mandela, the South Africa-born Elon Musk does not get the meaning of free speech, nor of authentic leadership. Take a view through a leadership coaching lens.
About two kilometres from where I’m writing this, in Johannesburg, South Africa, is the high school that Elon Musk attended. It served as our voting station during the recent elections. About two kilometres in the other direction is a giant 20-foot statue of the great South African leader, Nelson Mandela. All day, every day, tourists pose beneath the latter to have their photos taken. While Mandela understood to his core the meaning of free speech and embodied leadership—and deserves to be remembered by that statue—the former has a misguided understanding of both and is on the brink of destroying any legacy he might hope to create.
Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist”. After he bought Twitter and rebranded it to the very clunky, untranslatable X, he retrenched some 5,000 staff and, in the process, ran a sword through the levels of content moderation on the platform. He also lifted the restrictions on certain accounts that had previously been suspended for, among other things, hate speech. If Mandela had allowed “free speech” in the way that Musk is doing, South Africa might have experienced a bloodbath, instead of a peaceful transition to democracy.
As a leadership coach, I am often called on to work with the theme of authenticity. Many leaders want to develop that quality. The problem, I’ve found, is that authenticity is mostly misunderstood as a kind of personal free speech, a form of brutal honesty. It’s the mistake that Mr. Musk makes, that Mr Mandela did not.
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Generally, when people define the term authenticity, they offer the phrase “being true to oneself”. An article on the Association for Psychological Science website offers the following: “Authenticity means not only owning one’s actions, but also acting in accordance with one’s thoughts, desires and needs.” The first part of that definition—“owning one’s actions”—would apply, for example, when you’re late. Do you own up, or do you offer an excuse? That’s a subject for another day.
The problem with “free speech”
The second part of that definition relates to free speech: “acting (or speaking) in accordance with one’s thoughts, desires and needs”. As anyone who’s paid attention might have noticed, your “thoughts, desires and needs” can be quite erratic and random. In fact, they can be downright problematic. Imagine if you were true to every single thought and feeling that arose. You might do—and say—some unpleasant, offensive and downright crazy things! So, as you can see, we need to look at this more carefully.
I work with leaders who want to be “genuine” and “authentic”. They believe this means they have to share everything, good and bad; express their emotions and their honest thoughts. They get into trouble. Some because they yell at people; others because they spill their guts and embarrass themselves by oversharing. I point out that as a leader, you step into a role. You become a representative of the company as much as you represent your people to the company. I sometimes joke that it’s like being given a role in a charity play: you get told, you’re playing the bad guy; you’re on in 10 minutes and there’s no script.
In fact, it’s not even a joke. Most of my clients resonate with that statement in the most serious way. Because that’s exactly what leadership is: stepping into a role with no script. And in that role, you’re no longer just John, or Sarah. You can bring John or Sarah to the role, just as Meryl Streep would bring her unique talents to a role. However, nobody wants to see a fake actor, and nor do they want Meryl to suddenly start “just being herself” when she’s supposed to be in character. Similarly, as a leader it’s inappropriate to just blurt out things because you feel like it. People are looking at you. You represent something for them. You need to model the behaviour you want to see from them. Mandela modelled the forgiveness, tolerance and fairness that he wanted to see.
Leaders lose the right to “free speech”
And yes, that means that as a leader—well, one type of leader—you lose some rights. Just like Meryl in her role, you give up the right to spill your (personal) guts on a whim. On the subject of actors, I sometimes offer this analogy too: when a person becomes famous, they get tremendous benefit out of that fame. It gives them a lot of social and commercial clout. However, they are called upon to surrender some of their rights to privacy. You can’t have the benefits of fame and reject the downside of being recognised and having people ask for autographs when you’re out in public. You become a role model, whether you like it or not. You can intentionally embrace the role, which would be authentic, or resist it, which might be true to your thoughts and feelings, but would be inauthentic in terms of the role that you’ve accepted and which you are drawing benefit from.
When you’re authentic to your role, you draw your cues from the role. You step into it wholeheartedly and you leave your moods and prejudices at home. That’s not to say that your thoughts, desires and needs should be suppressed or denied. You should be honest with yourself about them. You might share them honestly with your spouse or a trusted colleague before you go into a meeting. But whether you bring them into the meeting is optional. The measure will be whether they are useful or not.
Elon Musk is a leader in the mould of Dr House. Instead of stepping into the role, he brings his own agenda.
An example of poor leadership is Dr House in the series House. He is often honest, but he’s a terrible leader because he resists the leadership role. He accepts its benefits, but he doesn’t reciprocate by giving up anything of himself as a leader. It would be fine for him to be honest with himself. In fact, I say, that’s compulsory. I would even recommend that he be honest with his friend Dr Wilson, in private. But does he need to be as honest as he sometimes is with his reporting line of doctors? Not always. When the situations calls for it, he could step more authentically into the role of leader and be more supportive, more measured, in how he communicates with them. That would be authentic leadership, authentic to the role that he is drawing benefit from. He would be modelling the kind of leadership that, if he was honest with himself, he would appreciate and respond to. (For more on that topic, see this webinar, where I talk about the three levels of honesty that accompany authentic leadership.)
What Musk does is not leadership
Elon Musk is a leader in the mould of Dr House. Instead of stepping into the role, he brings his own agenda. He lets his worst tendencies spill into the role. We don’t get Elon the leader, we just get Elon, kitchen sink and all. He justifies it with an intellectual-sounding term like “free speech absolutist”. Naturally, he would argue that leadership is exactly what he’s doing, and why he’s a free speech absolutist. He would say that he’s balancing the liberal agenda by bringing the other side of the story. The liberals want to restrict speech, he would say, and he’s opening it up.
But is that leadership? What measure should we apply?
The automatic response would be to point out how he responds—or reacts—when the situation is reversed. His recent court action against Unilever and other advertisers provides a good reference point. When they chose to withhold their advertising and direct it elsewhere, he tried to force them to return to his platform. No free speech absolutism there. But that would be to get into a he-said-she-said kind of argument about who is right, and that’s not the point.
In fact, that not being the point, precisely is the point.
The quality of leadership is measured by its impact, and the impact of Musk’s leadership is to divide.
The quality of one’s leadership is measured not by how much you get to assert your personal point of view, but by its impact, by the response you get. And the impact of Musk’s leadership is to divide. The response he is increasingly getting is division. What should it be? Well, should a leader divide? Or should he or she work to resolve disagreements and get people to pull together, as Mandela did? No team, no organisation, no country, can function effectively when it is divided. If Americans want to make the country great again, they should look to unify, and not divide, and a leader who has that agenda should unify, not divide. And this would be true even if Elon was right about the Twitter files. Every leader should embody the notion that two wrongs don’t make a right.
Musk’s leadership role as one of the richest people in history and owner of a global communication platform is one of unprecedented responsibility. Yet he does not have the picture of what free speech should look like, nor of what his role requires of him. The world is getting Elon, who has not matured emotionally much beyond a geeky teenage boy, when it needs a Mandela.