Ted Lasso, the sports comedy-drama series, can make anyone a better leader, if you can stop laughing long enough to pay attention. At first, I was just enjoying the comedy and the setting in London, but after a few episodes I started to experience something deeper. Apart from earning more Emmys than any other debut show in history, the creators of the show share a profound sense of what makes leadership work in the real world. And by that, I mean that, in the real world, most leadership theory falls flat on its face. So how do you get a team of crazy, neurotic humans to band together and do something great? Ted Lasso has a few secrets for you.
Here’s the premise: Ted Lasso is an easy-going American football coach who has just been hired as the new manager of the English Premier football team, AFC Richmond. He has no knowledge of the game (what he would call soccer) and just a single season as a college football coach at Wichita State. It’s a controversial appointment and it’s intended to be. Rebecca Welton, the team owner, has acquired the team in a divorce from her playboy husband who has only two loves in his: the Richmond team and younger women. She hopes Ted will tank the team and break her ex’s heart.
The first person Ted meets in the stadium is Nathan Shelley, clearly someone on the lowest level in the organization. When Ted asks Nathan what his name is, the man is astonished. “Nobody ever asks my name!” he says. But Ted makes is clear that he sees Nate’s value as a team member and expects good things from him.
After an unexpected press conference where he’s eviscerated by the press and jeered by viewers in the pub and players in the locker room, he goes in to meet the team. Convinced that he’s a joke, they ridicule him publicly. In response, he does just two things. He puts out a suggestion box (designed by Nate, who’s very proud of his emerging role) and he puts up a handmade sign that reads “Believe.”
And then the leadership secrets start to reveal themselves.
#1: You don’t work for Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso works for you.
When Ted and his assistant coach, Coach Beard, open the suggestion box, it’s filled with slurs and insults. And a single suggestion: the water pressure in the showers is terrible. Fix it! Later on in that episode, when a player steps up to the shower and turns it on, the restored pressure knocks him to the tiles. With that the players start to see their manager in a new light, as someone who cares about what they need. Score one for Ted.
It soon becomes clear that Ted views the team as a collection of unique humans who need different things. Nate needs to feel that he matters, so Ted constantly asks his opinion on coaching matters, and it turns out Nate has promising ideas. Sam Obisanya, a Nigerian player, feels homesick and out of place in London, so Ted throws him a birthday party in the locker room. Sam responds by becoming a leader among the players. Ted understands that the players need to win as human beings before they can win as a team.
#2: You don’t earn Ted Lasso’s trust. Ted Lasso gives you his trust.
If you make me earn your trust, I’ll deliver what you want, but I’ll never trust you. Nate is dumbfounded every time Ted asks his option or advice on something. No one ever has done that. So, his desire to keep getting that sense that the manager trusts him drives his performance. And soon, he’s part of the leadership team.
Ted constantly assumes trust with the players and coaches and most of them respond by living up to it. When the rest of the coaches want to bench the team captain, Roy Kent, Ted refuses. Roy is an elder icon of the game who no longer has the physical power he used to have, but Ted trusts Roy to make his own choice. He lets Roy know his decision: he will not bench Roy unless Roy asks him to. And, before the final game, Roy hands his Captain arm band to another player. Knowing that he is trusted to do the right thing for the team allows him to make the move.
#3: Ted Lasso is vulnerable. He needs the same from you.
When he brings the morning box of shortbread to the boss (he bakes it himself) he makes it clear to her that he does it because he wants to make sure he knows what she’s thinking and that she approves of the job he’s doing. He also knows how vulnerable she is and needs to get her to open up to him so he can help her and the team. When he meets with Coach Beard and the rest of the leadership circle, they all talk openly about what’s working and what’s not. In one scene, he finds Keely Jones, the club’s head of marketing and PR, in a store room looking unhappy. He asks her why. Then he shares why he’s unhappy. Soon, the room starts filling with others, all sharing their fears and frustrations. And by the way, you want trust? Be a real human being.
The secret of Ted Lasso is that he cares about the players more than he cares about winning. To him, the playing field is about helping people find what matters most to them. And what matters most is to be a fully evolved, open-hearted human being.
#4: Ted Lasso can’t make you accountable. That’s on you.
In any organization, a leader has to take ownership for his part of the operation. In team sports, every player has to own his or her position. And that takes more than athletic ability, it takes mindset. In one episode, he calls the team’s star player, Jamie Tartt, into his office and tells him that he’s the best athlete he’s ever worked with, but he needs to be a team player. When he tries to score every goal himself, they lose games. They have developed plays where he can draw the defense to him so another player can make the goal. “You’re one in a million,” he tells him, “now we need you to be one in eleven.” He needs Jamie, in other words, to take ownership of his role as a leader.
But in the next game, Jamie refuses to pass the ball. He scores two goals to tie the game, but Ted can see the cost to the morale of the team. He benches Jamie, to the outrage of the Richmond fans. But here’s another secret: although he loses their best player, he wins the team. And, with them, the game.
In creating the story of Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis and his colleagues have a profound message about leadership, something they reveal in the first few minutes of the first episodes with a device screenwriters call “invisible ink.” We first meet Ted Lasso on the flight to London with his sidekick, Coach Beard. The lavatory door opens and gives us our first glimpse of Ted as he returns to his seat. Cut to a hero shot of his seat and the book that he’s reading. It’s an old paperback, something he might have picked up in a garage sale. You’ll have to pause the video and get up close to read the title, and even if you do, it may not mean much to most viewers.
The book Ted Lasso is reading is a 1956 novel by Jack Kerouac called The Dharma Bums. It’s the story of highly educated beatnik poets and seekers in San Francisco and Berkeley. They spend their days arguing fine points of Buddhist thought, backpacking in the mountains and hitchhiking up and down the coast, all in a search for higher awareness.
And that’s the real leadership secret that Ted Lasso wants to share, that leadership can evolve into a path of enlightenment. Like many leaders today, Ted is playing an infinite game, focusing on what he can do to help the people he leads find a deeper meaning, not just in what they do, but in who they are as human beings.
Written by Dain Dunston, author of Being Essential: Seven Questions for Living and Leading with Radical Self-Awareness [Disruption Books, March 8, 2022].
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