Deion Sanders was identified early in his childhood as an especially gifted football player. In high school, he was chosen for the All-Century Team in 1985, followed by a stint at Florida State University, where he was a star player. He was then drafted into the NFL, playing for Atlanta, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington, and Baltimore as well as playing professional baseball with the New York Yankees, the Braves, and a few other teams. He retired as a player from baseball in 2001 and football in 2005, transitioning into coaching. Deion Sanders has coached since 2012 and is popularly known as "Coach Prime."
Sanders coached Jackson State, an NCAA Division I football program to a 27-6 record before taking over as the head football coach at the University of Colorado this year. Criticized for his directness and callousness Sanders was forthright in his initial speech with the UC team encouraging the majority of last year’s team to transfer. “Those of you that we don’t run off, we’re going to try to make you quit…That’s what our season is going to look like. I want ones that don’t want to quit, that want to be here, who want to work, who want to win.” Many of them took him up on his offer as only about 10 scholarship players stayed and 86 new players joined the team. Once derided as an “outsider masquerading as a coach”, he is off to a strong start with the UC team that finished with a 1-11 last season, already defeating the number 17 ranked Texas Christian University. After which he heckled reporters with statements such as “Do you believe now?”
After months of waffling, mudslinging, and lawsuits, in October 2022, Elon Musk closed a deal to acquire Twitter for $44 billion. He immediately began cleaning house, with at least four top Twitter executives — including the chief executive and chief financial officer. It didn’t stop there. In a BBC interview in April 2023, Musk stated that he laid off more than 6,000 people at Twitter since taking over the company, shrinking the company from 8,000 employees to just 1,500. Over the course of 2023, Musk has made a number of starts/stops and pivots on everything from free speech, to stepping down as CEO, to verified accounts (formerly known as blue checkmarks), to the brand. By some estimates he had wiped out half of the value of the company by the middle of the summer and to add insult to injury, he decreed that he was getting rid of the bird logo and changing Twitter’s product name to “X” harking back to the X.com days before he merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal.
So we have two leaders who have huge personal brands and are not afraid to speak out boldly about what and how they believe is the right way to lead an organization. They both recently took over teams and either drove out or fired a majority of the folks. In one instance the team was rebuilt and seems to be on a meteoric rise (see UC’s defeat of TCU) while the other (X) seems to be struggling as they are forecasted to lose 4% of the users by the end of 2023, and another 5% by 2024. As engineering and product leaders who often have to step into new teams and new organizations, are there lessons for us to learn here?
The first thing to state is that obviously the fate of UC or X is not yet determined. They are both in the very early stages of their transformations. While it looks like UC is doing well and X is struggling, this doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the final outcome for either. Having said that, one stark difference is that Sanders rebuilt and restaffed the UC team immediately while Musk at X did not. I’m not a fan of downsizing if you are trying to achieve growth as I think it is a fallacy to expect to cut costs and grow simultaneously. Of course some businesses need to cut costs in order to live to fight another day and that’s understandable but you should expect to not grow as fast or possibly at all during this period. In X’s case, they not only probably gave up the ability to grow in the short term but they also gave a competitor, Meta, the opportunity to hire a bunch of the folks they let go and build a competing product, Threads. Despite Threads having reached 100 million users faster than any app ever created, user engagement has fallen dramatically since then. Many pundits are weighing in on whether Threads will overtake X or fall to the wayside. Whether it’s Threads or some other social media distraction platform, X is struggling by some of the most important metrics, such as ad revenue. In June, Musk conceded that Twitter’s ad traffic was down another 20% with a 50% overall drop in ad revenue. A take away on this for me is reinforcement of the fact that you need people to accomplish things, even if that’s just to keep the site available which as we should all have as a mantra “availability is the most important feature.”
The next topic to consider is the treatment of employees. At West Point cadets are required to memorize parts of Major General John M. Schofield’s address to the Corp in 1879. Schofield served as the U.S. Secretary of War and as Commanding General of the United States Army. In his address he states:
The discipline which makes the soldiers of a free country reliable in battle is not to be gained by harsh or tyrannical treatment. On the contrary, such treatment is far more likely to destroy than to make an army. It is possible to impart instruction and to give commands in such a manner and such a tone of voice to inspire in the soldier no feeling but an intense desire to obey, while the opposite manner and tone of voice cannot fail to excite strong resentment and a desire to disobey. The one mode or the other of dealing with subordinates springs from a corresponding spirit in the breast of the commander. He who feels the respect which is due to others cannot fail to inspire in them regard for himself, while he who feels, and hence manifests, disrespect toward others, especially his inferiors, cannot fail to inspire hatred against himself.
From the articles and statements of former employees, it sounds like Musk’s treatment of employees is tyrannical. An article in the LA Times states, “Elon Musk’s track record as a boss is an endless scroll of impulse firings, retribution, tone-deafness on race — and the impregnation of a subordinate.” It has been reported that shortly after Musk took over Twitter, he mandated 80-hour work weeks from employees and required them to be in the office at least 40 of those hours. He later required Twitter employees to commit, via a Google form, to work long hours or leave the company. While I do believe people want to be held to high standards and work on a team that is high performing, demanding it via hours worked or a written statement, doesn’t seem like the best approach to achieve that outcome.
Contrast Musk’s attempts to form a high achieving team with Sanders approach. Responding to an interview question about standards, Sanders responded that, “We recruit smart, tough, fast, discipline with character. We don't recruit those that have the propensity to destroy your locker room. We want the ones that don't quit. The ones that really want it. The ones that are going to work for it and earn it.” High standards but with respect. Some other quotes from Sanders that seem to paint a very confident and demanding leader but someone that is going to give as much respect as he demands from his team.
I expect to be great. I expect to do what hasn’t been done. I expect to provoke change.
Whenever you make a promise, you have a responsibility to that promise.
What separates us (Hall of Fame players) is that we expect to be great.
Take a listen to Sanders’ reaction to being named a NFL 100 All-Time Team defensive back finalist and notice how despite all of his confidence, humility comes across. We know from Jim Collins’ Level 5 Leadership framework that humility is what differentiates them.
The last difference that I want to explore is actual experience doing the job that they are now leading and managing. For Sanders, he was not only a great football player, with a career spanning 15 years across five NFL teams, but also a great all around athlete. He played football, baseball, and ran track for Florida State University. He later went on to have not only a career in the NFL but also in the baseball major leagues. For Musk, there is a lot of controversy over not only his claim as an engineer but also of his education. In fact, there seems to be controversy about his contribution to almost every company that he's been a part of including Tesla, where he was the fourth CEO and not a founder, and PayPal. However, there are folks who have actual experience with Musk and claim he is the real deal. From the outside, unless Musk was playing a real life “chaos monkey”, his early actions at Twitter of unplugging a rack of servers doesn’t lend much credibility to his understanding of modern software architecture.
I don’t think you have to be a great engineer to be a great engineering manager. The jobs are very different and to be a great manager you have to spend a lot of time working on those skills which gives you little time to maintain your technical skills. If you aren’t a great engineer, and honestly most of us managers even if we were great once we aren’t any more, we need to respect the technical expertise of our engineers. Our jobs are sometimes to make technical decisions but 99% of the time that should be done by getting engineers investigating, researching, discussing, and debating different approaches. I know a good amount about cloud providers. I’ve personally deployed and maintained code on two major providers. But when it comes to selecting a cloud provider for a company, I want practicing engineers to map dependencies, speak with service providers, fill out the details of the decision matrix, etc. I’m happy to make the final decision but I want the engineers to weigh in with lots of thoughts and data.
We’ll ultimately see if Sanders and/or Musk are successful in their approaches. Early days it seems like Sanders' approach to rebuild, set and demand high standards as well as respect, have faith in himself and his team, practice consistency, and speak from a place of experience are serving him and UC well. Musk’s alternative of demanding high performance through threats and intimidation, dismissal of engineers, and near constant change in direction seems to be taking a toll on the employees and the business. If you are a practicing technology leader, you might want to think about emulating Sanders and not Musk.