Amazing Leadership Lessons from Ted Lasso

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I am talking about lessons that every founder, manager, and professional can learn from the show Ted Lasso. 

[AUDIO CLIP OF TED LASSO]

Fair warning: There are spoilers in this episode. So if you haven't watched season one of Ted Lasso and plan to do so, pause this episode, listen to a different Founder’s Journal, and once you've watched the show, come back and listen to this one. If you haven't watched Ted Lasso and you don't plan to, or you just don't care about spoilers, this is definitely worth a listen. I'll be describing scenes and lessons we can learn from them as leaders, so you won't feel lost at any point. Now, let's hop into it.

Why Ted Lasso? 

One of my favorite ways to build a media company is to look outside of media for inspiration. When thinking about how can we surprise and delight our readers at Morning Brew, I would look to the gaming industry. When thinking about how can we run our business with operational excellence? I'd look to old-school, low-margin industries where operating your business at a high level is an imperative to survive. Well today, I have a different source of inspiration. Over the last few weeks, I decided to binge Ted Lasso, the Apple TV original, which everyone has been ranting and raving about, and which recently won seven Emmys. Here's the quick TL;DR: Jason Sudeikis who plays Ted Lasso and is also an executive producer of the show is hired to coach AFC Richmond an English Premier League soccer team, despite having zero coaching experience in the sport. Prior to Richmond, Ted was head football coach for the Wichita State Shockers, where he led the team to a Division II championship title. We quickly find out in the show that Ted is hired by Rebecca Welton because she just took over the team as part of a divorce settlement with her ex-husband and her only goal in life is to see AFC Richmond crash and burn as a “fuck you” to her ex-husband who had cheated on her for years.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't be the person that would go hunting for business lessons in a comedic drama, but as I watched Ted Lasso, I was constantly reminded about what good leadership looks like as Ted went about coaching a team that, frankly, he had no business coaching. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to describe a few key scenes from Season One of the show, and then describe a key leadership or professional lesson we can all learn from each scene.

Lesson 1: Showing you care has power

Let's start with “biscuits with the boss.” In Episode Two of the show, an always positive Ted Lasso walks into the office of his new boss and AFC Richmond's new owner, Rebecca Welton. 

[AUDIO CLIP OF TED LASSO]

It's his first full day of work and he decides to start a new tradition called “biscuits with the boss.” Rebecca tries to get out of this new tradition and Ted makes a point of saying, [AUDIO CLIP OF TED LASSO]. He then proceeds to start with a funny little icebreaker, a first concert best concert.

Now this scene, like most scenes in Ted Lasso, is a bit of a caricature. Bringing biscuits for your boss and getting conversation going with cheesy icebreakers is probably not the best way to start building a relationship at a new job, but if you don't take it quite so literally, I think there's such an important lesson here about building genuine relationships, showing you care about other people, and managing up. As I've said in a past Founder’s Journal episode, which I'll link to in the show notes, your boss can make or break your professional experience. This could be your shareholders if you're a founder, your CEO if you're a senior leader, or your boss if you're a more junior employee. In a world where we're constantly being trained to be more efficient, getting to know your boss on a personal level may feel like a waste of time, but I don't think there's anything further from the truth.

Showing that you genuinely care about the person who has the most outsized impact on your growth and happiness in work and better understanding what makes them tick is one of the best investments you can make. Even better, don't just build a genuine relationship with your boss, but also build a great relationship with your boss’s boss, or the CEO of the company if you're at a small enough shop. Of course, performance always speaks loudest, but building a true connection with your manager is one of the best accelerators for job happiness and progression. 

Lesson 2: Give clear feedback

Next scene. Let's fast forward to Episode Seven of Season One. Nate Shelley, who is the clubhouse attendant for AFC Richmond, basically the guy who's responsible for collecting laundry, cleaning, cleats, etcetera, he writes up a letter that he plans to give to Coach Lasso, which details each player on the team and what they need to do to get better. What's important to keep in mind here is that AFC Richmond isn't doing well. They're at the risk of relegation and Nate is a lifelong AFC Richmond fan who just wants to see the team and its players succeed. What's beautiful about this scene is that the speech that Nate wrote was completely unfiltered, making the feedback direct, clear, and effective, and he wrote it this way because he had no intention of actually delivering the feedback to the players himself.

But what ends up happening is Coach Lasso tells Nate that these thoughts would best be given by Nate, and he empowers Nate to address the team directly. [AUDIO CLIP OF TED LASSO] There is so much to learn as a professional from this moment. First, we all feel nerves being completely honest and direct when giving feedback to coworkers or direct reports. I talked about this in a recent episode about how we try to be nice versus try to be honest, because we want to feel belonging. I'll link to that in the show notes as well. Second, one of the best ways to get people to deliver feedback respectfully but directly is by creating a culture of it in your company. This is something that has become a hallmark of companies like Netflix, transparency and being honest with feedback in a respectful manner. By empowering Nate to address the team directly, Ted Lasso got someone on his team to talk to players in a way that he would have never dreamed of doing if left to his own device. Third, while again these scenes are a bit of a caricature, how Nate delivered his feedback is such a great lesson on how you should approach giving feedback in everyday life. Don't beat around the bush. Don't deliver a compliment sandwich where you give compliment feedback, compliment, be honest and be specific about how someone can improve. It is the best way for you to see results, and it is the best way for team members to be given the gift of knowing how they can tangibly improve. 

Here are two examples from the scene. Nate first looks to Sam Obisanya, a Nigerian footballer, and he goes, [AUDIO CLIP OF TED LASSO] He then turns to Denny Rojas, who is a great new attacking player for AFC Richmond. [AUDIO CLIP OF TED LASSO] The reason that scene of Nate giving feedback is so big, and why you learn to love Nate in the show as a character, is because he has such a love for AFC Richmond and such knowledge about the game, but he does his job as the clubhouse attendant thanklessly year after year, while putting up with a lot of shit by some players who just bully him nonstop. Nate giving these players feedback would be like a junior employee delivering feedback to a senior leader within your company. It actually reminds me of this TED Talk that Ray Dalio from Bridgewater gave, where he showed feedback that a junior analyst at Bridgewater sent to Ray, telling him he didn't do well in his presentation to the company.

Lesson 3: You get further by picking “practical” over “prideful”

So to paint a picture of this next scene, Nate gets to the stadium one morning and he gets right to work. He walks in excited to do the job, he's whistling as he walks down the hallway, and he opens the door to the kit room, which is where he normally starts by cleaning the dirty cleats of players. He sees the cleats are already clean, which leaves him confused. So he makes his way to the locker room to see what's up. He sees a younger guy pushing around the towel cart and he immediately goes, “Who the hell are you?” The guy proceeds to share that he's the new clubhouse attendant, basically saying that he's taken Nate's job. Confusion turns to anger and Nate confronts Ted and the team owner, Rebecca Welton, who walk into the team locker room a second later.

Rebecca reveals that Nate has been given a contract to be promoted from clubhouse attendant to assistant manager. The entire squad bursts into the locker room, cheering, popping champagne, and shooting confetti. And Ted Lasso presents Nate with his own whistle to commemorate the moment. Again, it's such an entertaining scene, but it's packed with so many lessons in leadership and being a great professional. First, Nate is the exemplary worker. His job isn't glorious. He deals with a lot of shit, but he takes pride in what he does and in doing it really well. He didn't play politics at AFC Richmond.

He just did an amazing job with a ton of attention to detail because he really, really cared. And once the right manager came around, he was handsomely rewarded for doing great work. Second, this is a perfect illustration of why Ted Lasso is a great leader. He rewards those that are deserving, he makes his people feel special, and he knows what he doesn't know. From the moment that Ted stepped into his role at AFC, he was shamelessly honest that he didn't know the first thing about soccer. So he surrounded himself with an assistant coach in Coach Beard who is an absolute sponge of information and learned the game of soccer in a week. But he also solicited the help of Nate, who quickly shows that he can think strategically about the game of soccer despite being the clubhouse attendant. Ted picks being practical over being prideful and make sure he gets answers from the people who know what they're actually talking about.

That leads to Ted treating people the right way. Coach Lasso saw how knowledgeable Nate was about the game, and he didn't care about the typical way of doing things or the traditional path to becoming a coach. He believed in meritocracy and giving anyone the opportunity to prove their worth. Nate did that for him and he wanted to make sure Nate felt like the most important person in the world when he decided to promote him to assistant coach. 

Lesson 4: Forgiveness is wild

This leads me to the final scene and lesson. Ted Lasso is a great leader because he's kind, he's meritocratic, he actually gives a shit about his people, and because he surrounds himself with people who uncover his blind spots. But I think what makes him a special leader is that he's deeply empathetic. As I mentioned at the top of the episode, this show is about how a coach who knows nothing about soccer is hired by a divorcee owner who wants to tank the team to get back at her husband, Rebecca, the owner I'm referring to, spends the first half of the season doing everything possible to get Ted Lasso to fail. But as Ted grows on her throughout the show, she finally can't handle the guilt of going behind his back. Rebecca finally tells Ted how she hired him for a nefarious reason and how she sabotaged him every step of the way I hired you, because I wanted this team to lose. [AUDIO CLIP OF TED LASSO] She finishes by saying, if you want to quit or call the press, I completely understand. Most people would take her up on that. Or they would get angry or tell her how bad of a person she is, but not Ted Lasso. He forgives her on the spot.[AUDIO CLIP OF TED LASSO]

He believes she's genuine in her apology and he's so empathetic that he says that he understands how hard divorce can be. He actually says to her, this job you gave me, it's changed my life. In this moment of complete betrayal, he actually thanks her. It's wild. Sure, Ted Lasso is fiction. But honestly, when I look at the type of leader that I want to be in life, it looks a hell of a lot like Coach Ted.

Now, this was definitely a different type of episode, but I love to change things up and look in unsuspecting places for great lessons in business. If you have any episode ideas or new formats, you want me to try, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista. And finally, if you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your pods. It is the number one way to grow a show. Our show is produced and engineered by Dan Bouza. Our associate producer is Bella Hutchins. Brian Henry is our executive producer. Alan Haburchak is Morning Brew’s director of audio. Holly Van Leuven is our fact checker. And I'm your host, Alex Lieberman. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.