Leadership Lessons from Ted Lasso

A TV show that inspired and motivated me to unlock my inner potential

Pretty much every time I scroll through my LinkedIn feed, I find people talking about toxic cultures, bad managers, building high-performing teams, and so on. I hardly come across anyone talking about how one overcomes the challenging tides, it’s all about the problems or solutions but never about the lessons learned, why?

And this happened — Ted Lasso.

Leadership Lessons from Ted Lasso — Season 1 by Ruchira Parchur

Before lockdown, it was a Halley’s Comet kinda phenomenon for someone to spot me watching TV. And when lockdown happened, watching TV was just like a sunrise, stitched into the routine. And when a person like me recommends a film, to the extent of writing a film review on my blog, you can imagine the impact it has on me.

To spend my precious time watching stuff, the only metric I choose is the IMDB rating, nothing less than 7 interests me. Nevertheless, when Apple TV+ sent me a recommendation to watch Ted Lasso with a rating of 8.7, I couldn’t decline.

If you are struggling with being a great leader, passionate about growing your people, fostering great culture, and nurturing optimism in your teams, start with Ted Lasso. No certifications or courses can teach the lessons that you learn from Ted's experiences.

Ted is an underrated American college-level football coach, hired with an intention to break the AFC Richmond professional soccer team in England, having no professional experience whatsoever in coaching soccer teams. However, his journey is a mind-boggling realization of what teams can achieve only if they are trusted, respected, and most importantly believed.

For me, success is not about wins and losses, it's about helping these young fellas to be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.

This dialogue from Ted summarises my job in essence. My vision of building teams with equality over hierarchy and learning through failures quite echoes with the film’s plot.

I highly resonate with Ted as a coach, not only for building great sports teams but also for developing any group of individuals into a team. Despite the drama seen from the management on setting goals for the teams, the plot cuts through humour and tension quite flawlessly, leaving you with nuggets of leadership lessons to mull over.

My takeaways from Ted Lasso are summarised,

• You don't hire skills, you hire passion, and with passion, skills follow.

• Courage is little about confidence and more about fighting for the right thing.

• In the war of ego, the loser always wins.

• Good teams become great when the members trust each other enough to surrender the “ME” for the “WE”.

• Develop an ability to observe without evaluating, be curious, and non-judgmental.

• Our strength lies in our differences, not similarities; diversity and disagreements are essential for growth.

What do you think? Have you watched it yet? And if you did, do let me know your lessons learned from Ted.

If you loved this article, how about sharing it with your friends and colleagues too?

Thank you for helping me pursue my writing passion!