Some CEOs like NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang say that they don’t do regular one-on-one sessions with their direct reports, but some like Elon Musk seem to be on the other extreme.
Elon Musk recently spent 18 straight hours doing 5-min one-on-one meetings with xAI’s staff, Marc Andreesen says. “A guy just shared what it was like to work with Elon Musk at his AI company, xAI,” Andreessen said on the Joe Rogan podcast. “He said Elon came in last week and spent 18 hours at the office. And every 5 minutes, in 5-minute chunks, each person had a 5-minute slot to explain to Elon what they were doing,” he said.
Andressen said Musk spent 18 hours just talking to all employees of xAI one-on-one. “Think about what that meant. Every employee had an opportunity to tell the big boss what they were working on. Every employee had an opportunity to be recognized for their efforts. Every employee had the opportunity to get live feedback from the big boss who had a comprehensive overview of everything as to what they should be doing,” Andreessen continued. “And there’s no place to hide,” he added.
“Think about how different it is for a company to be run that way. Valley companies are generally quite well run by business standards, but that’s a level of intensity that most valley companies aren’t even close to,” Andreesen said.
This isn’t a management style that’s employed by most companies. Most companies generally have scheduled one-on-ones between their employees and their managers, and every once so often have a skip-level meeting between their employees their manager’s managers. But Elon Musk, in spite of being CEO and running several other companies, seems to take time out to meet all employees. The meeting lasts only for 5 minutes, but it possibly helps the company in immeasurable ways — Musk gets to get feedback directly from rank-and-file employees instead of hearing sanitized versions from his direct reports, and can use it to figure out problems and think of solutions. Employees, on the other hand, are presumably delighted to meet Musk, who apart from being the richest man in the world is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. One would imagine that a 5-minute one-on-one meeting with Elon Musk himself energizes the workforce like nothing else. Also, employees get to see him spend 18 straight hours talking to them, and this likely makes them put in similar numbers of hours at their own jobs. The strategy isn’t for everyone, but for the CEO to meet all employees one-on-one for a brief period might just a great hack, and is possibly one of the factors in the outsized success that Musk has enjoyed in running his various businesses.