Leadership by Micromanagement
Last week, Elon Musk made headlines (again) by insisting that government workers across multiple agencies send a list of five bullet points summarizing what they accomplished.
Naturally, this led to a panicked kerfuffle among government employees. Some were explicitly told not to respond to the email, while others presumably complied—perhaps under the unspoken threat that their jobs were on the line.
(That's probably more than just an idle fear, if we're being honest. After all, Elon also used Twitter to remind folks of the mandatory nature of this request.)
Setting aside for a moment the problematic nature of any leader needing to resort to a public social media platform in order to assert control of their employees, it does raise the question:
How, should a new executive get a handle of what's really going on under the hood in their company?
Let's unpack it a bit.
How to (Quickly) Evaluate the Efficiency of the U.S. Government
While stuck in bed over the weekend, I found myself wondering—if I had to quickly assess the efficiency of the U.S. government, where would I even start?
It's not as simple as it might seem. At last count, 3 million people work for the federal government, which doesn't include 1.3 million active-duty military personnel. (Side note, if you've got some time to kill today, this Pew Research report on the breakdown of federal workers is actually a really excellent read.)
Needless to say, with a scale of operations this large, the idea of quickly gathering normalizing data that works across multiple organizations feels nearly impossible.
Any of the classic "new CEO" moves seem woefully insufficient at this scale and come with their own tradeoffs. For instance:
Classic CEO Playbook: Tactics for Assessing Efficiency (and Their Tradeoffs)
Go on a new CEO listening tour. The classic move—hit the road, hold all-hands meetings, and build trust by hearing employees out. While this would surely offer a few good kumbaya moments and buzzy press photos (can you image 3 million federal employees on a Zoom all hands meeting?), it would be a logistical nightmare at scale.
Ask senior leaders from each department. But this runs the inevitable political risk that managers tend to over-inflate the importance of their own teams or departments (particularly if they are worried about losing headcount). What you might get instead is a skewed version of what every team thinks they are doing, without a lot of honesty.
Dig deep into the budgets for each department. Probably the most informative is to see where the money flows, to whom, and for what. But it'd take a year or more to wrap your head around the ins and outs of budgetary decisions and the impact. Who's got that kind of time?
Survey people. While generally a good idea in any large employee population, employe pulse surveys only work if the survey is actually well-constructed with a bias to action, that employees feel safe in providing honest responses, and if there's appropriate resources to action some of the findings from the surveys. None of these things appear to be true right now.
Read the reports. Every department generates plenty of documentation, both public and private. While this gives insight into major initiatives, it’s also the polished, sanitized version of what’s happening. It won’t tell you much about individual contributions or real operational inefficiencies.
Not to mention that all of these strategies are retroactive. In an agile, fast-moving world where each week is different from the one before it, it's kind of important to get a sense of the now.
Which brings us to a better question: What’s a smarter way to do it?
Smarter Ways to Take the Pulse of a Massive Organization
If you really want to understand what's happening inside a complex system like the U.S. government, asking for weekly bullet points isn’t the answer.
Instead of micromanaging from the top, here are three better ways to surface real insights, build trust, and drive meaningful change.
Here's how I'd approach it:
1. Teach Everyone AI.
Give every federal employee access to a government-approved AI tool—not just to use, but to understand how AI can make their work more meaningful, efficient, and impactful. Don't frame AI as a threat. Instead, make it fun. Run contests, training sessions, and government hackathons that bring in tech talent to collaborate with insiders. When people feel inspired (instead of scared), you'll start to build real trust (which in turn, will lead toward productive ideation).
Just as important, build new, lightweight databases that let people move quickly on projects without getting bogged down by legacy systems. Once people see real-time efficiency gains, they'll start asking: What else can we improve? By that point, they won’t fear change; they’ll actively look for ways to streamline their own work.
2. Ask people what they want to be working on.
Rather than ask people what they did this week (which is both micro-managing and a little unfair, particularly when you imagine how many people are stuck in jobs just doing what they've been doing for years), ask them what they wish they had time to do. How would they redesign their job if they weren’t stuck in redundant, bureaucratic loops? What projects would excite them?
Tapping into this shared vision of what’s possible is a much more effective leadership move than forcing compliance. Now, instead of fighting inertia, you’re harnessing ambition. By the way, as a leader, this is a win-win. You've got so much play-doh to work with; your job is just to design a container that fits.
3. Offer people a graceful exit.
It would be a mistake to presume that everyone working in the federal government today is pulling equal weight. Like any organization of that size and scale, there is certainly some excess bloat. The key as a leader is finding ways to be strategic and graceful about off-ramps.
As I've written about before, many people are stay in jobs not because they want to be there, but because they don't have an alternative path forward. Particularly in government jobs, where things like pensions and benefits and long-term specialized contracts are the norm, the idea of agility is downright terrifying. Firing people into a rapidly changing, AI-driven world without a transition plan is borderline unethical. Before any downsizing, leaders should offer upskilling programs, education stipends, or career transition funds. If technology is changing the landscape, we should ensure people have a fair shot at adapting to it.
The Fastest Way to Lose Good People
I've worked at enough places to know that the quickest way to lose good people is to micromanage them. Nothing kills trust, autonomy, and motivation faster than demanding constant status updates. (Anyone who's worked with me knows–if I were to get an email like the one Elon sent on Friday, I'd have one foot out the door by Monday.)
The bottom line is this: People don't like being micro-managed.
Obviously, as a multi-time-CEO-slash-billionaire giving all those classic supervillain science-fiction vibes, no one gets this more than Elon.
To him, this was never about cooperation. It was about control.
Which leaves us to yet another classic CEO move: Piss people off enough to get them to leave on their own. (After all, it's way cheaper than doing it the hard way.)
Ah, well.
But wouldn’t it be nice if leadership looked a little different, for once?
While stuck in bed over the weekend, I found myself wondering—if I had to quickly assess the efficiency of the U.S. government, where would I even start? It's not as simple as it might seem. Today, a reflection on Elon's "enforcement by micro-management" strategy in the U.S. government and some thoughts on an alternative approach. https://hardmodefirst.xyz/micromanaging-by-tweet-elon-musks-latest-power-play
To gauge U.S. government efficiency, start with how long it takes for them to fix a pothole, and then extrapolate wildly.
Elon Musk's recent micromanagement of government workers sparks questions about effective leadership. Instead of demanding weekly updates, @bethanymarz advocates for empowering employees via AI training, aligning on meaningful projects, and providing career transitions—essential for building trust and engagement.