management

Mikel Arteta – A Case Study in Radical Candor

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All or nothing

Introduction – All or Nothing

Managing and supporting a team is a difficult job. A manager is often a coach, disciplinarian, a surrogate parent, and cheerleader – all rolled into one. I am always on the lookout for ways to be a better supporter of my teams. Over the last few days I discovered a fortunate intersection in my interests in sport and in management.

I am a fan of the Arsenal football club. Like many other Arsenal fans, I have been watching and enjoying the Amazon Prime show “All or Nothing: Arsenal,” which follows Arsenal through the 2021 – 2022 season. We get a close look at how Arsenal’s manager Mike Arteta works with his players and his management team and motivates them over a challenging 45-game season.

At 38 years old, Arteta is currently the youngest manager in the English Premier league. He has been at the helm since 2019. The Arsenal squad also has the youngest average age in the Premier League – this season, the first team averages just 25.2 years old.

Arteta’s reign has seen the club slump to 8th place in the 2019 and 2020 seasons before having a marked improvement in form to finish 5th in 2021.

Arteta comes across as an intense, detail-oriented and hands-on manager. I realized that Arteta’s approach to management was something I had come across before. It is strikingly similar to that described in Radical Candor by Kim Scott – one of my favorite books on building high-performance teams.

In this post, I will summarize the Radical Candor approach through the lens of Arteta’s unique take on people management.

What is Radical Candor?

Radical Candor is a book by Kim Scott published in 2017. It focuses on creating a culture of guidance, building an effective and cohesive team, and driving results collaboratively.

The book’s central thesis is that effective leadership requires direct, clear, truthful, and kind feedback, even when difficult. Scott believes getting to know each person in your team personally is essential to understanding their desires and motivations.

The book offers tactical and strategic advice to leaders on building high-performing teams in an open, healthy, and productive environment. I strongly recommend Radical Candor for those looking for an authentic and modern approach to people management.

We see Arteta speaking candidly and passionately with his players throughout the season. He is generous in his feedback when things go well. When things go poorly, Arteta is direct, passionate, and emotional. While he doesn’t mince words, he doesn’t humiliate his players in the dressing room or in front of the media.

Caring Personally while Challenging Directly

The 2X2 below shows “Radical Candor” as giving feedback by caring personally while challenging directly. It also covers some dysfunctional ways of giving feedback – obnoxious aggression, ruinous empathy, and manipulative insincerity.

From Radical Candor by Kim Scott

Ted Lasso aside, football managers are not known for their empathy. Indeed, the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson are revered for their ability to drive performance through aggression and intimidation. Ferguson’s proverbial “hairdryer treatment” would probably end up in the “Obnoxious Aggression” quadrant above.

While he is partial to the odd F-bomb, Arteta’s open displays of emotion and vulnerability inspire his players, as seen in this clip. At the end of a run of poor results in April at Crystal Palace and Brighton, we see a manager who cares about the results and is passionate about wanting to make things better. He calls out a lack of intensity from his players and gives specific feedback on the training pitch and in the dressing room.

This combination of caring personally and directly challenging poor performance is right out of the Radical Candor playbook.

Building Resilience Through Trust

The Radical Candor approach is built on a foundation of trust. Trust is difficult to gain and easy to lose. The key to building trust is to be transparent and authentic, clear and concise in communication, and consistent in your actions.

Arteta calls out his “non-negotiables” in explaining his management philosophy: respect, commitment, and passion. Throughout the show, we see Arteta embodying these values.

This results in significant friction with his star player Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang who does not meet Arteta’s high expectations around discipline and accountability. Aubameyang is the club captain and is a popular member of the squad.

Arteta ends up stripping Aubameyang from the captaincy of the team. This could have destabilized the team, but it seems to have the opposite effect. Arteta does not criticize Aubameyang, and his team is made aware of how important trust and accountability are to their manager. By showing consistency in his actions and clarity in his communication, Arteta builds trust and resilience, resulting in outstanding results on the pitch in the second half of the season.

Managing Rockstars and Superstars

In Radical Candor, Scott describes Rockstars as stable employees who are happy and effective in their roles. These are folks who are aware of their talents and limitations and can consistently perform at a high level. On the other hand, Superstars are on a steep career trajectory and can be change agents. They are ambitious and want new opportunities. A high-performing team usually has both rockstars and superstars.

Given his young team, Arteta works with plenty of players on steep growth trajectories. Bukayo Saka, Emile Smith Rowe, and Eddie Nketiah are all young and eager to learn and perform at the highest level. However, he also has players like Rob Holding and Mohammad Elneny. While experienced pros, they have specific roles and are not guaranteed a place in the starting lineup. Holding and Elneny are the rocks (and Rockstars) that provide a stabilizing influence in the dressing room and on the pitch while laying a foundation for the more flamboyant players up front.

As a manager, Arteta has to ensure that the players like Holding and Elneny feel valued and are ready to perform when called upon while the ambition and talents of the young Gooners are nurtured. You can see this come together towards the end of the season. Holding and Elneny perform well after being called into the starting eleven after injuries. He also gives the ambitious Nketiah an extended run. He repays his faith by scoring five goals in the last seven games.
Arteta and his team need to understand each player’s mentality and ensure they feel motivated to perform when needed.

Conclusion

All or Nothing is entertainment and has been edited to push a narrative and maximize engagement. Mikel Arteta has come under intense criticism for being uncompromising and stubborn at times – especially with how he has managed high-profile players like Aubameyang and Mesut Ozil. But, the little glimpse we get in the documentary shows a young manager trying to build a successful team.

Plenty of books like Radical Candor have come out of Silicon Valley, and the content often reflects the author’s experience working in technology companies. The strength of a book, especially in the crowded management genre, is how applicable the message is across different domains.

Managing Arsenal presents quite different challenges from managing a software engineering team. However, I hope the lessons of Radical Candor and All or Nothing are valuable to managers looking to build and support a high-performance team.

Further Reading

From my blog:

George Saunders on Feedback

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Feedback is an integral part of working in a team and managing people.

Code reviews, architectural reviews, 1-1s, and Sprint Retrospectives, are all situations that involve giving (and receiving) feedback as software engineers, product managers, and engineering managers. Yet, giving critical feedback can be a difficult and stressful experience. So how best to navigate these potentially adversarial situations?

George Saunders is one of my favorite contemporary writers. He has an excellent Substack called Story Club. In this week’s post, Saunders talks about giving feedback to other writers. While his advice is in the context of a writers workshop, I found it quite applicable to my work.

Saunders advices us to give specific yet kind feedback:

.. as we learn to analyze and diagnose with increased specificity and precision, the potential for hurt feelings diminishes, because we are offering specific, actionable ways (easy ways, often, ways that excite the writer, once she’s made aware of them) to make the story better. And who doesn’t want some of that?

George Saunders

Giving constructive or critical feedback is integral to working as a software engineer. Yet, these conversations can become challenging. 

One might be tempted not to say anything or speak in the most generic and broad terms to avoid offense. Instead, as Saunders suggests, the focus should be on giving thoughtful, specific, precise, and actionable feedback:

In this [giving feedback], we indicate that we are on the writer’s side, we are rooting for her and are glad to have found these small but definite ways to make her story better. There’s no snark, no competition, no dismissiveness, nothing negative or accusatory about it; just the feeling that we, her readers, are coming together with her, the writer, by way of craft. We’re all on the same team, the team of art.

George Saunders

Not much more to add is there?

Cultivating Range: Lessons for Startups in a Wicked World

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Introduction

I recently read David Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. The book focuses on how to cultivate broad thinking strategies to learn effectively. Epstein’s focus is on individuals. As I made my way through the book, I saw that the points made in this book apply equally well to teams.

Range by David Epstein

I work with and advise early stage technology startups. I learnt a lot while reading “Range”. In this post, I explore how the lessons from “Range” can benefit technology startups or teams looking to launch a new product.

Thriving in Wicked Environments

Epstein introduces the concept of Kind and Wicked environments. A chessboard is a kind environment: the rules are clear, and actions are deterministic. Strategies that work in one situation should work well in similar cases. However, in the real world there are feedback loops and second-order consequences that are difficult to predict. It is a rapidly changing Wicked environment. Strategies that worked well in the past can stop working due to changes to the external environment or the market’s reaction to your previous actions.

We see this pattern repeatedly in the world of startups. Ideas that seem destined for success fail because they attempt to solve a problem that is no longer important or serve a market that no longer exists.

To thrive in a Wicked environment, a team may need to take conceptual knowledge from one problem domain and apply it to an entirely new one. The ability to think broadly and to be able to deploy flexible solutions to complex problems could be the difference between a successful product launch and complete failure.

Creating Innovative Products Through Analogical Thinking

Epstein describes Analogical Thinking as —

“The practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface.”

Barriers to entry in the information economy are low. While anyone can launch a software product or service, successful companies frequently bring together ideas from different fields to build a compelling product.

Uber brought together logistics, mapping, mobile experiences, and access to an entirely new labor market to create a transformational service. Snowflake’s recent success is another example of a business built on the convergence of industry and technology trends. They successfully executed a simple, in hindsight, idea — cloud-only data warehouses.

Building a Successful Team

In Superforecasting, Philip Tetlock quotes the Greek poet Archilochus: “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Hedgehogs are specialists — they love to focus on one problem and usually work within their specialty’s confines. Foxes tend to work across various disciplines and work under ambiguity and contradictory conditions.

Epstein cites Tetlock’s research in forecasting and shows that in the face of uncertainty, individual breadth is critical. Similarly, teams that were open-minded and embraced a wide range of experience outperformed teams of narrow specialists.

A Team of Foxes may be more effective in a startup

Early-stage teams need to be open-minded and willing to change their assumptions and pivot when circumstances demand it. As a company matures, it may become useful to include specialists to refine a product and idea. However, having too many specialists at an early stage could lead to tunnel vision.

Choosing a Technology Stack

Gunpei Yokoi was a legendary video game designer at Nintendo. He designed the Game Boy. In Range, Epstein talks about Yokoi’s concept of “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.”

The heart of his philosophy was putting cheap, simple technology to use in ways no one else considered. If he could not think more deeply about new technologies, he decided, he would think more broadly about old ones.

You can still see this philosophy in play at Nintendo today.

The Nintendo Gameboy — A Lateral Application of Withered Technology

This lesson is of particular importance for startups with technical founders. It is tempting to be on the cutting edge of technology. But few customers will pay to use a product because it uses a fashionable technology stack. The ability of the company to solve the customer’s problem is way more important.

It may be more productive and faster to build a product using battle-tested, well-understood technology that is quickly and cheaply available. Just like Nintendo, a startup must cultivate a relentless focus on delighting the customer. Technology choices should come second.

Deploying Data Carefully

Startups are encouraged to be data-driven. They optimize for metrics such as customer behavior metrics, sales funnels, infrastructure costs, etc. The danger for the startup here is relying too much on data to make decisions without considering the market or whether the data is relevant to the vision of the company. As Epstein says — the critical question to ask is:

‘Is this the data that we want to make the decision we need to make?’

A dogmatic data-driven approach may lead to doing the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behavior becomes so automatic that it is no longer recognized as a situation-specific tool.

An over-reliance on data can lead to actions that may improve the metrics the team relies on, but may not help the company in the long run to achieve their strategic objectives.

Making the most of External Advisors

Formal or informal advisors can play a critical role to the founding team in a startup. The most effective advisors are outsiders who may be removed from the company’s problem but may help reframe the problem that unlocks the solution.

Epstein notes —

‘A key to creative problem solving is tapping outsiders who use different approaches so that the “home field” for the problem does not end up constraining the solution.’

An outside advisor may offer solutions to a problem the founding team may not even consider because they are too close to the problem.

Knowing when to Give Up

Thirty percent of startups will go under within two years. Fifty percent will fail within five. Running out of money is the most common reason for failure. If a startup keeps trying to execute the same plan despite not gaining traction, it will fail.

Startup culture venerates hard work and not giving up. But here, Epstein provides an essential quote from Seth Godin:

‘We fail when we stick with tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.’

The best, most thought-through plan may fail when it comes up against external conditions — like a global pandemic. Persevering through difficulty can be a competitive advantage, but knowing when to quit can also be a significant strategic advantage. As a startup, it is vital to define and understand the conditions in which it is clear that Plan A has failed, and it is time to try something else.

Conclusion

Building and running a startup is exciting, scary, and can be extremely challenging. It rewards being able to adapt to complex, changing environments. It is vital to pick the right problem to solve, identify the correct tools to solve the problem, and build a team that learns how to make the most of diverse skill sets. Leveraging data and being metric driven can help guide, but must not constrain decision making. Leaning on external advisors and investors is essential to help keep the team grounded and provide different perspectives to solve tricky problems.

Finally, success is not just about persevering through difficult times; it also involves knowing when to quit and when to pivot. A battle may be won simply by disengaging at the right time.

Range is a fantastic book and one that I strongly recommend. The lessons in the book are important not just for individuals but also for teams.