Elon Musk’s 6 Rules For Productivity At Tesla And How You Adopt Them
The Tesla CEO sent an E-Mail to every employee with guidelines for productivity; and it got leaked, reportedly.
Reportedly, the Tesla CEO and tech enthusiast Elon Musk sent an E-Mail to his Tesla employees, including 6 rules for productivity.
I want to share them with you as well as provide my opinion on each of them. So here are they:
1) Avoid large meetings
Large meetings waste valuable time and energy.
- They discourage debate
- People are more guarded than open
- There’s not enough time for everyone to contribute
Don’t schedule large meetings unless you’re certain they provide value to everyone.
Large meetings are quite familiar to me. In the working world, there are many long information meetings and big round discussions tending to topic drift aways. They are always questionable and sometimes end up with no conclusions or takeaways at all.
Employees attending long-scheduled meetings also tend to squeeze out every minute being scheduled, even if the actual topics were finished. I agree with this rule and recommend to rather schedule several small meetings for every discussion point to focus on the actual contribution and topics.
2) Leave a meeting if you’re not contributing
If a meeting doesn’t require your:
- Input
- Value
- Decisions
Your presence is useless.
It’s not rude to leave a meeting.
But it’s rude to waste people’s time.
I attended many of these meetings during my work experience and often didn’t contribute at all. That was not because I didn’t want to or had no opinion on the discussed topics. Most of the time, there simply was no room for my contributions.
Also coming back to the information meetings mentioned before: Of course, they are necessary at some points, but in most cases, detailed documentation of the information would substantially provide information and would save the time of the attendees.
I like the idea of leaving meetings if they don’t seem to be important to you. It may sound strange to simply leave in the first place but will increase the project’s productivity in the long run.
However, this rule will be very difficult to implement in your company. Especially if you are the only one that follows the rule, you will quickly have a personal conversation with your supervisor. To avoid such inconvenience, rather investigate the meeting’s importance to you before actually attending. If there is too less information about the meeting notes, kindly ask the invitor(s) to provide the agenda and further information about the meeting topics to you. This will help you with your attendance decision.
3) Forget the chain of command
Communicate with colleagues directly.
Not through supervisors or managers.
Fast communicators make fast decisions.
Fast decisions = competitive advantage.
In many cases, your supervisor may not be as qualified as your colleague to contribute to deep-topic discussions. He/She should guide the team and help them to achieve the defined team goals, but the implementation and, in my opinion, also the decisions on the lower level should be made by the team itself.
To avoid complications with your supervisor, kindly inform him/her of the discussed topics and decisions made with your colleague and coordinate the level of decisions you are allowed to make with him/her. In this conversation, you can point out the benefits of fast decisions and negotiate your responsibilities.
4) Be clear, not clever
Avoid nonsense words and technical jargon.
It slows down communication.
Choose words that are:
- Concise
- To the point
- Easy to understand
Don’t sound smart. Be efficient.
In general, I agree with that rule as well. But the discussion jargon being used is dependent on the listeners. Yes, we all know professional bingo. Some people just use buzzwords and express themselves on a very high discussion level. But technical jargon often is needed to efficiently work on solutions as a team.
Let your articulation level be dependent on your conversational partners and adapt to the individual situation. This will improve general communication.
5) Ditch frequent meetings
There’s no better way to waste everyone’s time.
Use meetings to:
- Collaborate
- Attack issues head-on
- Solve urgent problems
But once you resolve the issue, frequent meetings are no longer necessary.
You can resolve most issues without a meeting.
Instead of meetings:
- Send a text
- Send an email
- Communicate on discord or slack channel
Don’t interrupt your team’s workflow if it’s unnecessary.
Before every frequent meeting, I ask myself:
Must the topic be discussed now and are there open discussion points?
If I answer at least one question with No, I suggest skipping the meeting. If a team wants to collaborate, there must be work to collaborate on in the first place! It’s not disrespectful to suggest the cancellation of a meeting if it’s simply not providing value to the project.
6) Use common sense
If a company rule doesn’t:
- Make sense
- Contribute to progress
- Apply to your specific situation
Avoid following the rule with your eyes closed.
Don’t follow rules. Follow principles.
I like the last rule. It encourages employees to question everything and be open-minded to improvements. This is an efficient work ethic that can be used by anybody in any company. Everybody makes mistakes and not all rules make sense, even if it seems like during their creation. Things may change and improvements may be necessary.
Conclusion
Elon Musk’s alleged productivity rules at Tesla are special, direct, and strive for efficiency. Some of them might be very unusual to general working ethics, like leaving meetings, and others encourage employees to permanently improve their working experience, e.g. by appealing to common sense.
As arbitrary the rule characteristics are, as various their adoption difficulties are. Be aware of possible consequences before blindly taking over the productivity rules, but rather weigh and investigate your opportunities, where and how these rules can most efficiently be implemented.
Discuss, communicate and permanently improve!
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