Three Lessons in Organizational Life from Ted Lasso

The Apple+ series, Ted Lasso, is a wonderful show, but it also offers a powerful view into organizational life, and how poorly we understand it. The series is based on a collection of whimsical advertisements run by NBC in 2013, when the network began airing English Premier League Soccer matches. The television series is the story of an American college football coach who goes to England to coach a professional football (soccer) club; at its heart, it is tongue in cheek and satirical. Perhaps this is what makes looking at Ted Lasso from an organizational lens so powerful: Many of us work — everyday — in a satire that is not nearly as funny as this show. In study after study, it is apparent that people dislike their jobs, they resist change, and they feel no energy for what they do. We know that many of the well-established ways for affecting people's behaviours in organizations are broken, and yet we keep doing them. Ted Lasso provides a different lens on where we should focus, and what it really takes to affect performance and behaviours in organizational life.

Ted Lasso's approach to organizational life, is distinctive. He has no technical skill for the role he has assumed (he is a college American football coach from Kansas, after all). In one scene he proclaims, "heck, you could fill two internets with what I don't know about football." What Ted Lasso lacks in technical prowess he makes up for in one vital dimension: He knows how to unlock energy and shape the social system that helps people thrive. Ted Lasso offers a whimsical glimpse into something lacking in most organizations: an understanding of what really drives behaviours, engagement, and energy.

It is about the social system, stupid

Ted Lasso knows what it means to lead a social system, and most leaders do not. Our models of leadership continue to be far too linear and assume causality: "If a leader says X, people will do X"; this has never been my experience. People interpret, filter, and localize what they hear, and then they tend to do what they want. Most senior leaders in organizations have considerably less power than they imagine, though they do not like to hear that reality. Sure, senior leaders have power over budgets and policies, but those are not the things that help organizations win in the marketplace. In a video call with his son, Ted is told that it looks like he is "not doing anything" when he is coaching; Coach Lasso laughs and responds, "Well, it ain't like being a football coach back home kiddo, I got a lot less control . . . I gotta hope that everything I've been trying to teach them has had some sort of impact on 'em and that they'll make the right decisions when they're out there on their own." This is a lovely reminder of what leadership should look like in the 21st Century; leadership should be about enabling people to be better on their own. Too often this is not the case. Where leadership seeks to control it destroys value, and where it seeks to teach and enable a way of connecting and being –together — it accretes immense value. Leadership is about cultivating and nurturing the social glue of shared standards and norms.

Ted Lasso understands that it is this social glue that enables innovation and competitiveness; it is through these social norms that groups of people are compelled to work together and strive for better and better results. In a compelling article about the pastoral qualities of Ted Lasso[i], Alex Sosler suggests that Ted Lasso represents an idealized vision of agrarian virtues: "The agrarian mind . . . denies specialization in order to care for the whole, desires to holistically care, and knows there are no little people or little places." Ted Lasso sees leadership as a means to trigger the whole system of shared norms to respond and begin to behave differently. Whether through benching a star player, elevating the status of an overlooked club house attendant, or pushing the responsibility for policing norms back onto his own people; Lasso recognizes the limits of this authority, and understand the role he plays in cultivating energy through shared social norms. Knowing how to lead a social system –something that Ted Lasso does so well- is a poorly understood organizational skill. There are three lessons that every leader, and every organization, could learn from Coach Lasso:

Lesson One: Leadership is different from authority

Too many senior leaders don't understand the difference between formal authority, and the informal leadership that they can enable in others. Ted Lasso does; instead of exerting authoritarian force when the club house attendant is getting picked on by players, he 'winds up' the team's captain, Roy. This is a deliberate strategy and demonstrates Ted's recognition of the power of informal leadership. In explaining his unwillingness to act to Roy, Coach Lasso says, "If a teacher tells a bully not to pick on someone, it is only going to make it worse". Leaders can push and demand a number of things, and –in many cases — get short term results. For leadership to truly unlock energy, and the potential of people, it needs to look different. It needs to be about catalyzing the standards that people hold one another to.

The role of a leader in shaping the social system of work does not surround dictates and missives, it surrounds helping people own and establish the standards that they want to accept in themselves and those around them. Lasso accomplishes this by pushing a problem he could have addressed as an authority figure back into the realm of informal leadership, because he knows that is a more sustainable and impactful solution.

Lesson Two: It is never about the individuals

Our views of work and talent are deeply individualistic; all of our systems are designed to look at individuals and their contributions. The world is obsessed with the concept of "Talent"; every organization I know purports to hire the "best and brightest", even though this is a mathematical impossibility. Despite all of this focus on individually-oriented processes and policies, that is not where the real power resides in organizations. In almost every realm it is teams, not individuals, that contribute to organizational performance. Ted Lasso understands this reality, and he sees his role in enabling it, differently. He seems to know that his role is to unlock the value of how people work with one another, and raise the performance of their peers. He knows how to raise, and deflate, people's social status so that their contribution to the whole is optimized. For Coach Lasso, it is not about getting the best, it is about unlocking the best of the people that he has.

The power that Coach Lasso is tapping comes from social relationships and informal status; how people interact, conferring power and prestige upon one another, and Ted Lasso shapes it in distinctive ways. In one instance, Lasso benches the team's star player, because the player's ego is doing damage to the team. In a response to a question from "Trent Crimm of The Independent" about benching his best player, Coach Lasso says, "That depends on Jamie (the benched star); he knows what we need from him." Lasso goes on a journey to deflate the young stars ego, which impact everyone, including two of the star's previous minions who refuse to do his bidding of putting cones up on the field. Lasso adjustment of the star's social status in the team is not about the star player, it is about the whole.

Lasso also knows how to turn the dial of status the other way, too. In another engaging story line, the much derided and seemingly invisible club house attendant, Nate, begins the show with no status whatsoever. He cleans shoes and tries to remain invisible. At one point he is astounded that Coach Lasso remembers his name. He is not talent. But through the course of the narrative, Nate emerges as a powerful force ("Talent" would the language we would use to characterise his reimagining of the team's offensive scheme). One of Lasso's great lessons is that any organization that focuses too much on individuals, and doesn't understand the importance of social status, and how to affect it, is doomed. Truly great organization cultivate great talent, everywhere.

Lesson Three: Dialogues matter

Leadership begins and ends with dialogue; it is how leaders affect what people see and prioritise. Too many leaders view dialogue as "telling people stuff." This couldn't be further from the truth. Coach Lasso understands the power of dialogue; he knows how important time with people is. Whether it is his morning routine of 'biscuits with the boss' or visiting a dejected player after a dismal performance and telling him he is not going to tell him he screwed up. Dialogue is an art that most managers, and most organizations, do incredibly poorly.

While we have to take all of this with a grain of salt (it is a comedy, after all), it is important to recognize what Coach Lasso does talk about when he is in dialogue with others. For Coach Lasso, dialogue is not about expressing his views, and getting his point across. He tends to do three things in dialogue with others: He shares personal and funny stories ("when my mom used to have something hard to share with me, she'd always start out by sharing something overtly nice or cute"), he asks questions and listens (in one of his biscuits with the boss encounters, he goes for "first concert? best concert?"), and he expresses support (upon a player making a mistake he reminds him to "Be a goldfish"). How refreshing would this triumvirate of approaches to dialogue be within most organizational conversations! The net impact of Coach Lasso's approach to dialogue is that it minimizes and dilutes his "authority," and helps them clarify and raise their own internal standards. When people feel accountable for their own standards, and those around them, they tend to rise. In the words of Alex Sosler, "People 'perform' well if they are well-cared for — if they are heard and seen and listened to." If there were one superpower I could wish upon managers everywhere, it would be to learn to do dialogues the Ted Lasso way!

Conclusion

Ted Lasso is a delightfully funny and positive show about a genuinely sweet guy. However, it offers a glimpse into the failures of how most organizations approach their people. Performance in any organization is about cultivating social norms, and the role that leaders play to enabling that end. In many ways, the old Manager of the team (who is fired at the beginning of Episode One) represents everything we loath in most corporate leadership: it is overconfident, egoistic, and misogynistic. Traditionally, leadership has no curiosity, it merely tells people what to do. Leadership, as Ted Lasso demonstrates, is about cultivating the conditions for others to hold themselves and their peers to a different standard. As Ted says amidst a game of darts, remember Walt Whitman, "Be curious, not judgemental". Leaders who can begin to live by some of these standards will be a blessing to organizations everywhere. I, for one, am on-board for seeing more leadership the "Lasso Way".

[i] https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2021/02/ted-lasso-as-parish-priest/