Ted Lasso and Workplace Leadership
by Audrey Roofeh
“For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.”
Ted Lasso is making my job easier.
If you’re familiar with Ted Lasso, you’re probably picturing a wide-smiling and mustachioed Jason Sudeikis in warm up gear. If you’re not yet familiar, Ted Lasso is an AppleTV comedy about an American college football coach who’s hired to coach a Premier League football team, AFC Richmond, never having played the game. The show is, I kid you not, based on a series of promos that Sudeikis did for NBC Sports’ coverage of the Premiere League in the US in 2013. We won’t give away the first season’s conflict, but it’s no spoiler to say that Coach Lasso is the anti-David Brent; Lasso is a lead in a workplace comedy who shows a commitment to sincerity, kindness, playing to strengths, and honesty (with himself and others). Many of the reviews that panned the show seemed to have a discomfort with its lack of irony, how nice Coach Lasso is. It’s been described as “determinedly cornball,” and that Sudeikis himself was a flop: “[h]ow I wish . . .that Lasso had been more of a flying a**hole, as he was in the original clips.”
At this point you’re wondering – why is she talking about a sports comedy? It’s because of the value of cultural touchstones in our work, and how they help to set expectations and norms at work and in our personal relationships. At Mariana Strategies, we help businesses and teams establish and maintain healthy workplace cultures of inclusion, workplaces where people feel safe to raise issues, where they feel valued and trusted, and they can be their authentic selves. When these pieces are in place, our clients can focus on being the best at what they do, whether they focus on physics, architecture, politics, or preventing nuclear disaster. When we work with clients and use current events to make a point, we’re often left to talk about news stories, lawsuits or movies that demonstrate what not to do at work. It’s easy to point to all the awful behavior we saw when the dam broke following #MeToo, but when we look for an example of a nurturing, emotionally intelligent, capable leader (who also identifies as male), that doesn’t seem to make the news or be the subject of a tv show. But here we are, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
At first, Lasso appears to be a mediocre white man who fails upward in his gig. Indeed, he is in no way prepared for the role he was hired for. However, Lasso makes tremendous use of his own self-awareness and empathy for people around him, and a strengths-based approach that delivers success. As Miles Surrey of The Ringer explains, “[s]occer managers’ ability to succeed can often depend on how well they can balance their tactical acumen with handling the myriad personalities of the locker room; Lasso falls on one extreme end of the spectrum. He doesn’t understand the offside rule, but by the end of the season, everyone at AFC Richmond is willing to run through a wall for him.” Lasso seeks to understand what motivates his colleagues, how to bring out the best of each of them, what each of them needs to succeed in their roles. In the workplace, during a period as trying as 2020-21, that kind of leadership particularly resonates.
Another satisfying aspect of Ted Lasso is how it “does” rather than “shows” progress. A comedy about a football club could tell a hackneyed story about a traditionally masculine workplace where men unlearn toxic behavior, all for laughs. It doesn’t. The club owner is a woman, a fact that is not a point of conflict for the team or Lasso. Deep professional and personal bonds are fostered by the two main female characters, a story arc given real attention. Locker room fights occur, but as Shannon Melero at Jezebel discusses, “[t]he magic of Ted Lasso is that … it removes some of the worst factors of the space —overt sexism, homophobia, emotional and physical abuse…. These men and this locker room are more evolved than the men and locker rooms that the audience is familiar with, and that’s accomplished through the simple addition of empathy.” As we like to talk about here, emotional intelligence (including empathy) is a skill, not a personality trait, and it can be learned. What sets mediocre leaders apart from high performing ones isn’t technical ability, it’s emotional intelligence, and it accounts for nearly 90 percent of that difference.
For ages, the TV/movie boss has been someone to laugh at (or be horrified by) – Michael Scott, Bill Lumbergh, Logan Roy, Miranda Priestly. Ted Lasso is not the boss you laugh at, he’s the boss you want, and the leader you want to be. Maureen Ryan at Vanity Fair put it well: “Ted Lasso will remain deeply valuable into next year and beyond, because it is [] about a bunch of very different people who display fulfilling, conscientious confidence and leadership—not the bullying, toxic, arrogant, violent, condescending domination that has, in this country, has too often masqueraded as ‘leadership’ and ‘confidence’.” We need sincerity and authenticity in 2021 more than ever. Everyone has been, and is still experiencing, a global pandemic, and their own traumas from it. Extending kindness and grace goes a long way. There’s nothing earth-shattering about the show. It’s funny, it’s comforting, and the characters seek to treat people with respect and use empathy to understand one another. We hope you can take some of that Ted Lasso energy into your workplace.
