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Did you miss the part where Musk announced that employees are to disregard hierarchy and go directly up the chain if it solves problems faster, including all th

Did you miss the part where Musk announced that employees are to disregard hierarchy and go directly up the chain if it solves problems faster, including all the way to the top? Weeks earlier, in a companywide email, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk had dumped on the concept of corporate hierarchy. Find “the fastest way to solve a problem to the benefit of the whole company” and don’t worry about your boss, he told them. Go straight to the top, if need be. Balan took him up on it.

giantg2 6y ago
Typical CEO double speak. Senior management at my company says similar things. Then if you look at the HR policy you find the fine print that greatly restricts what was said. I had a department head tell us his door is always open and to contact him about stuff (company policy supports the open door policy). I took him up on it. When I showed up, he had another manager there in addition to himself (it was supposed to be a scheduled meeting with just me and him). I was later rated poorly, both in an interview and at year end, for a lack of leadership (following the hierarchy).
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Except when it's not. Often being cynical will give you accurate expectations, but sometimes not being cynical pays off. https://thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inventor/ https://thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inventor/ > In the video, Enrico encouraged every worker at the company to “act like an owner.” Most employees brushed it off as a management cliché; Montañez took it to heart. > “Here’s my invitation… here’s the CEO telling me, the janitor, that I can act like an owner,” he later recalled. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. Didn’t need to. But I knew I was going to act like an owner.” (Predictably, his manager was pissed.)
- endymi0n 6y ago
  To give you an executive's perspective on this one: I'm saying the same to my employees (and I mean it). But there are two types of ways this happens in reality: Case 1: An actual smart and caring employee bypasses the chain to give me evidence of a manager not acting in the companys interest. Usually that's not the first indication of such a thing and listening around reaffirms the conclusion quickly. The manager is approached as quickly as possible and since at this paygrade it's in no-one's best interest to burn bridges, they suddenly decide to spend more time with their family, a sweet severance package changes hands, employees are happy again and you don't read about this in the news. It's exactly why I said this in the first place (and meant it). Case 2: An employee with issues not bringing the company further (usually one or more of paranoia, toxicity, not-seeing-the-big-picture, searching for problems instead of solutions or emotional health issues) bypasses the chain of command with "evidence", but listening around almost nobody shares this employees' opinion. You fire them. Suddenly all problems disappear, employees are happy and then you read about this in the news, because the only person left unhappy did really not get the memo. Judging from the type of problems here (something something starship about floor mats at a time when Model 3 just wasn't ramping up production and cashflow almost ruined the company), I do have my opinion about the type of "privilege escalation" in this case but I obviously won't share it.
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    Most cases, sure. But did you see the evidence in the article about her reputation at work? She was quite obviously an appreciated employee all around.
    - endymi0n 6y ago
      You may be right, this case looks less than clear. I'm mostly playing devils' advocate here, as newspapers, lawyers and shortsellers usually have their own axe to grind and are continually searching for good David against Goliath stories. Just dropping in that having a toxic effect on the company and being respected / appreciated by peers are absolutely not mutually exclusive. Often times they rather go hand in hand and you've got such people rallying up others over non-issues (in the big picture of things). As others already said in the comments, cohesion and alignment are far more important to a high risk / high growth company than "solving all the problems".
      - giantg2 6y ago
        If you are an executive, are you really playing devil's advocate?
  - giantg2 6y ago
    My specific instance was that I was the application security champion for a critical application application that had a SQL injection vulnerability (with full schema owner privileges!), but lower-level management wasn't making it a priority and didn't even assign any resources to remediate the issue. So I went to explain the issue to the department head because he was the owner of the application. As an ASC I answer to, and represent, the security division so I can talk to the owners of apps that I support regardless of the hierarchy. I think he didn't understand that dynamic, as I typically see managers breaking company policy and not caring (I'm smart enough to keep my mouth shut on those issues). I didn't go to complain. I went to explain the problem and give him options and my recommendation. He told me that we have a real-time backup system so he didn't think it was worth fixing. I then asked if we ever ran tests of that system and if we had documentation on how to restore from it. We don't. This is for financial trading application handling billions of dollars. Being down for even a few hours could be catastrophic. The big man spoke. I don't agree with the outcome, but I'm not the boss. So that was the end of it (except for in discussions like this on here). I left for another team because there's no way I'm going to be the security champion for a system with that level of risk. And thank God you weren't my manager or I would have been fired under your #2 scenario. On a side note, just because a small number of people are complaining doesn't mean their opinions are invalid. Minorities are often disenfranchised due to this thinking. Also, managers may not know all the policies for the company and may be violating them. For a real life example combining these, company policy states that a person be evaluated against the standard and recieve a rating that way. Some departments mandate that if a manager pick a higher than average rating for someone, then they must pick someone else to balance it out with a lower rating. This would only affect 10% of the population and the number unjustly affected would be lower than that. So the other 90% recieved good rating, so why would they complain? The objective way I know that I was unjustly rated was because I had a manager friend who told me what happened in the meeting and said it was wrong.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Reminds me of the old Dilbert cartoon where the boss tells his employees to do something, then grabs the binoculars thinking "This will be the easiest round of layoffs ever" [1]. Sometimes, suggestions from upper management that employees should let their guard down and do something they normally wouldn't are just clever tactics to encourage "undesirables" to out themselves. 1: https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-08-18 https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-08-18
bko 6y ago
Most CEOs and senior managers say this. This isn't carte blanche to undermine your superiors or break protocol. I'm sure there's more to the story.

giantg2 6y ago

Typical CEO double speak. Senior management at my company says similar things. Then if you look at the HR policy you find the fine print that greatly restricts what was said. I had a department head tell us his door is always open and to contact him about stuff (company policy supports the open door policy). I took him up on it. When I showed up, he had another manager there in addition to himself (it was supposed to be a scheduled meeting with just me and him). I was later rated poorly, both in an interview and at year end, for a lack of leadership (following the hierarchy).

bigbubba 6y ago
Except when it's not. Often being cynical will give you accurate expectations, but sometimes not being cynical pays off. https://thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inventor/ https://thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inventor/ > In the video, Enrico encouraged every worker at the company to “act like an owner.” Most employees brushed it off as a management cliché; Montañez took it to heart. > “Here’s my invitation… here’s the CEO telling me, the janitor, that I can act like an owner,” he later recalled. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. Didn’t need to. But I knew I was going to act like an owner.” (Predictably, his manager was pissed.)
endymi0n 6y ago
To give you an executive's perspective on this one: I'm saying the same to my employees (and I mean it). But there are two types of ways this happens in reality: Case 1: An actual smart and caring employee bypasses the chain to give me evidence of a manager not acting in the companys interest. Usually that's not the first indication of such a thing and listening around reaffirms the conclusion quickly. The manager is approached as quickly as possible and since at this paygrade it's in no-one's best interest to burn bridges, they suddenly decide to spend more time with their family, a sweet severance package changes hands, employees are happy again and you don't read about this in the news. It's exactly why I said this in the first place (and meant it). Case 2: An employee with issues not bringing the company further (usually one or more of paranoia, toxicity, not-seeing-the-big-picture, searching for problems instead of solutions or emotional health issues) bypasses the chain of command with "evidence", but listening around almost nobody shares this employees' opinion. You fire them. Suddenly all problems disappear, employees are happy and then you read about this in the news, because the only person left unhappy did really not get the memo. Judging from the type of problems here (something something starship about floor mats at a time when Model 3 just wasn't ramping up production and cashflow almost ruined the company), I do have my opinion about the type of "privilege escalation" in this case but I obviously won't share it.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  Most cases, sure. But did you see the evidence in the article about her reputation at work? She was quite obviously an appreciated employee all around.
  - endymi0n 6y ago
    You may be right, this case looks less than clear. I'm mostly playing devils' advocate here, as newspapers, lawyers and shortsellers usually have their own axe to grind and are continually searching for good David against Goliath stories. Just dropping in that having a toxic effect on the company and being respected / appreciated by peers are absolutely not mutually exclusive. Often times they rather go hand in hand and you've got such people rallying up others over non-issues (in the big picture of things). As others already said in the comments, cohesion and alignment are far more important to a high risk / high growth company than "solving all the problems".
    - giantg2 6y ago
      If you are an executive, are you really playing devil's advocate?
- giantg2 6y ago
  My specific instance was that I was the application security champion for a critical application application that had a SQL injection vulnerability (with full schema owner privileges!), but lower-level management wasn't making it a priority and didn't even assign any resources to remediate the issue. So I went to explain the issue to the department head because he was the owner of the application. As an ASC I answer to, and represent, the security division so I can talk to the owners of apps that I support regardless of the hierarchy. I think he didn't understand that dynamic, as I typically see managers breaking company policy and not caring (I'm smart enough to keep my mouth shut on those issues). I didn't go to complain. I went to explain the problem and give him options and my recommendation. He told me that we have a real-time backup system so he didn't think it was worth fixing. I then asked if we ever ran tests of that system and if we had documentation on how to restore from it. We don't. This is for financial trading application handling billions of dollars. Being down for even a few hours could be catastrophic. The big man spoke. I don't agree with the outcome, but I'm not the boss. So that was the end of it (except for in discussions like this on here). I left for another team because there's no way I'm going to be the security champion for a system with that level of risk. And thank God you weren't my manager or I would have been fired under your #2 scenario. On a side note, just because a small number of people are complaining doesn't mean their opinions are invalid. Minorities are often disenfranchised due to this thinking. Also, managers may not know all the policies for the company and may be violating them. For a real life example combining these, company policy states that a person be evaluated against the standard and recieve a rating that way. Some departments mandate that if a manager pick a higher than average rating for someone, then they must pick someone else to balance it out with a lower rating. This would only affect 10% of the population and the number unjustly affected would be lower than that. So the other 90% recieved good rating, so why would they complain? The objective way I know that I was unjustly rated was because I had a manager friend who told me what happened in the meeting and said it was wrong.
ryandrake 6y ago
Reminds me of the old Dilbert cartoon where the boss tells his employees to do something, then grabs the binoculars thinking "This will be the easiest round of layoffs ever" [1]. Sometimes, suggestions from upper management that employees should let their guard down and do something they normally wouldn't are just clever tactics to encourage "undesirables" to out themselves. 1: https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-08-18 https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-08-18

bko 6y ago

Most CEOs and senior managers say this. This isn't carte blanche to undermine your superiors or break protocol. I'm sure there's more to the story.