Arsenal after Arsène

This month Arsène Wenger marked 18 years as manager of Arsenal Football Club, an extraordinary tenure in professional sports. He's been in charge for 1,023 Premier League matches, while the next longest-serving manager, the embattled Newcastle United boss Alan Pardew, has served only 171. In the relatively near future, though, Wenger will depart.

This eventuality seems to be dawning on club officials. "The biggest challenge we're going to face as a club is that, when the transition from Arsène to our next manager happens--and I don't know when that's going to be--that we come through that strongly," CEO Ivan Gazidis said in a recent interview on the Arsenal website.

Is succession actually the "biggest challenge"? Bigger than competing with the financial might of Chelsea, Manchester City, and Manchester United? Perhaps not. Those issues are structural, will exist regardless of who manages Arsenal in 2017 and beyond, and indeed raise the stakes of the appointment.

For that reason, a thoughtful, thorough plan is essential to guide the club through this important period. This article explores the Board's public pronouncements on the issue and outlines what we should look for as evidence of an effective succession plan.

The Arsenal Board's readiness to plan and to act

The close of the 2013-14 season should have energized the Arsenal Board and Gazidis to intensify succession planning. That's because credible reports suggested that Wenger was prepared to decline the renewal offer had his team not won the 2014 FA Cup. Gazidis's comments at the time showed that the club was in no way prepared for that possibility. (See my personal blog post "And All the Clocks Wound Down".)

So far, the Board doesn't appear to be bringing much urgency to the task. At Thursday's Annual General Meeting of shareholders, Chairman Sir Chips Keswick said, "It's premature to speculate about a successor to Arsène. I'm delighted he has signed a three-year contract. Rest assured, we follow the situation carefully... It's not being complacent--we think about it all the time--I hope when the time comes we will have a solution that pleases you."

I'd rest a lot more assured if the language coming from the board were more assertive. Instead of "we follow the situation carefully," Sir Chips should be saying, "we have launched a plan to guide our decisions."

Even if Sir Chips is only displaying English reserve, it's hardly a strong response to what Gazidis called "the biggest challenge." The approach seems instead to invite problems that befall many organizations in transition.

"They fail to recognize the need for a strategy for this critical business process, they haven't had great exposure to what other organizations are doing, and they haven't thought through what their organization should be doing given its unique set of circumstances." That's Scott Saslow, founder and CEO of a leadership development consultancy, who collaborates with Stanford University on research with senior executives. He could be describing Arsenal's leadership as it appears now.

What would indicate a plan

That passive image is all anyone has to go on at the moment, because no one at the club has detailed its approach to succession planning.

What would a prepared organization look like? According to Stanford Professor David Larcker and Stephen Miles, vice chairman of executive recruiters Heidrick and Struggles (page 14 of the presentation here), the steps an organization should take in succession planning include:

• Add succession expertise to the board, particularly the person chairing the search committee
• Think of the succession plan as a multi-person event also involving internal officials not promoted
• Develop a robust succession architecture that covers time horizons from immediate emergencies to five years
• Develop and refine a skills and experience profile
• Use external advisers to assess candidates and work closely with the board
• Prepare to move individuals off the current management team if they block the development of others
• Expose internal candidates to the board
• Engage in a confidential external search
• Provide ongoing support to entire management team after transition

Using these guidelines, we can assess the club's preparedness. All the club's activities won't be obvious or public, but the Board could start by clarifying who is primarily responsible for the appointment. Is it the full Board, a smaller group, or Gazidis? That's a crucial question. Not only does the authority need to be established, but that individual's or group's experience with these kinds of transitions could determine the search's success.

Another important statement would address Wenger's involvement. Studies suggest he should definitely have a role, perhaps even as far as identifying a candidate within the organization, but his influence on the decision should be minimal. Too much involvement from the outgoing manager can produce successors like Manchester United's ill-fated David Moyes.

Need for a seasoned executive

The search that brought Wenger to the club in 1996 was, by most accounts, a one-man affair, planned and executed by former vice chairman David Dein. He is no longer in a position to shape the board's thinking on Wenger's replacement or to work his network on the club's behalf.

The current Arsenal Board falls short of the Dein standard of experience. It's accurate that Josh Kroenke, the newest member of the Arsenal Board, was president of  the NHL's Colorado Avalanche in 2013 when it let head coach Joe Sacco go and hired Patrick Roy. But that doesn't seem like adequate experience for a high-profile Premier League appointment.

(One interesting point about the Avalanche's signing of Roy: It came just after the franchise elevated longtime captain Joe Sakic to lead hockey operations. So there is precedent in Kroenke Sports Enterprises for hiring former players to serve in prominent, decision-making positions.)

Gazidis? He communicates extremely effectively, makes decisions methodically, cares about the club's future, and publicly acknowledges the enormity of the task of replacing Wenger. What neither he nor anyone else at the club has yet displayed is any urgency to set forth the principles and processes to guide the eventual transition. As a result, we're left to wonder  how prepared the club is.

Management the Arsenal Way

The recent, revealing interview with Andries Jonker, head of the Arsenal academy, provides considerable food for thought as the club and its shareholders prepare for Thursday's Annual General Meeting.

Because Jonker does not seem shy about sharing his opinions with the Dutch publication Voetball International (translated on Arseblog in "Jonker: Arsenal scouting must be restructured"), his observations offer an unvarnished view of management practice at the club. In particular, Jonker's descriptions of manager Arsène Wenger's approach to management don't necessarily line up with widespread notions about how the club is run.

The conventional wisdom has long held that Wenger is a micro-manager, someone who must control every aspect of the club's business from transfer negotiations to players' diets to the design of facilities. This is the theory Alex Fynn and Kevin Whitcher advanced forcefully in their 2009 book "Arsènal: The Making of a Modern Superclub." It also flows from the popular tendency to equate football clubs with their managers. (See "Arsenal, Arsène Wenger, and the Cult of Personality" for my critique of this line of thinking.)

Perhaps Wenger has mellowed in recent years; it's also possible the original portrayal was too stark. Whatever the case, Jonker's interview suggests that Wenger's style is not autocratic and in many ways conforms to models of successful leadership.

The manager's level of involvement

Jonker describes his interactions with Wenger in ways that will seem familiar to anyone who has ever worked for someone else. "Almost every day, Wenger and I go through a number of things," said Jonker. "He is approachable, but I do have to show him what we are doing. We must not go behind his back."

This seems like a reasonable, open-door approach to management.

"What I do see," Jonker continued. "is that everybody at the club has the feeling that they need to have the green light from Wenger before they do anything."

Now, if "everybody at the club," including Chief Executive Officer Ivan Gazidis and the stewards at Emirates Stadium, seeks Wenger's approval, then that's not a functional arrangement. I'm more inclined to think, however, that Jonker is referring Wenger's involvement with the football staff, which is a different and more understandable proposition.

It's not unusual for managers to expect those reporting to them to produce recommendations for their response and approval. This is a standard approach in many organizations and a sensible one in the case of Arsenal.

After all, Wenger is accountable to Gazidis, the club's board, its supporters, and the media, so he should know about and support the actions of his staff. How could he appear before any of those constituents and endorse the sporting direction if he had not understood and supported the original course of action?

Foundations in management theory

This pattern of manager-staff communication falls within what management theorists call "transactional leadership." This facet of leadership focuses on exchanges between leaders and followers; managers who want their staff to provide specific things give those staff members other things that they want in return. (The original idea comes from Karl Kuhnert and Philip Lewis, "Transactional and transformational leadership: A constructive developmental analysis," in Academy of Management Review 10 (1995).)

Wenger seems to be practicing "active" management in the sense that he monitors his staff's behavior, anticipates problems, and creates opportunities to intervene before the problems get worse. (For the details of "active" vs. "passive" management, see Jane Howell and Bruce Avolio, "Transformational leadership, transactional leadership, local of control, and support of innovation: Key predictors of consolidated business-unit performance," in Journal of Applied Psychology 78 (1993).)

These behaviors and actions, which amount to exchanges between leaders and staff members, complement other defining characteristics of what's called transformational leadership. These higher-level traits and activities take the form of:

1. Charisma that appeals to followers on an emotional level
2. Inspirational motivation that articulates a clear and attractive vision
3. Intellectual stimulation that challenges assumptions, takes risks, and solicits followers' ideas
4. Individualized consideration that results in mentorship and attention to followers' needs

These are the four dimensions of transformational leadership described by Timothy Judge and Ronald Piccolo in "Transformational leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity," in the Journal of Applied Psychology 89 (2004) and examined for their correlations with positive performance outcomes.

Wenger as "transformational leader"

Without sinking too deep into the academic theory and language, we can use the four dimensions of transformational leadership to understand how any manager's behaviors and actions create conditions for top performance. In the case of Wenger, we can break down his contributions as follows:

Charisma. Before and after the FA Cup victory in May, current players talked about how much they wanted to win this trophy for Wenger. Many former players came out with impassioned support as well. This is just a recent, prominent episode suggesting that Wenger has built an emotional appeal among many of those who work for him.

Inspirational motivation. The vision of attractive, offense-minded football appeals to many both inside and outside the club. Wenger also displays the optimism that this approach will succeed in the long run, another aspect of inspirational motivation.

Intellectual stimulation. It's fair to say that Wenger challenges assumptions and takes risks, as I recently pointed out in "Arsène Wenger's Risk Tolerance." He allows players considerable autonomy on the pitch. Questions persist, however, about his willingness to entertain other ideas. So we should refrain from making a definitive statement about how well Wenger fulfills this dimension.

Individualized consideration. If you listen to experienced players such as Mikel Arteta and Tomas Rosicky, Wenger emerges as a mentor and model they may follow when their playing careers end. And one of the criticisms levied at the manager is that he responds too much to what players need, granting their wishes to leave Arsenal for more playing time elsewhere, for example. That's definitely an indication of individualized consideration.

This admittedly superficial review does suggest that Wenger fulfills many expectations of the transformational leader. It's hard to conclude that he is not, given that he has guided the sporting side of the club during an 18-year period characterized by significant, and in many ways positive, change.

One last test of Wenger's leadership ability remains: What will happen when he departs the scene?