What Ted Lasso Gets Right About Being the Boss

If you haven’t watched Ted Lasso, the premise at the beginning seems pretty ridiculous (but that's also part of its charm). An American college football coach who knows almost nothing about soccer gets hired to coach a professional English team, mostly because the team’s new owner is trying to destroy it to get back at her ex-husband. Ted walks into a place where almost no one expects him to succeed, plenty of people think he is an idiot, and he is absolutely not the technical expert in the room.

And yet, over the course of the show, he becomes one of the best examples I’ve seen of what it actually looks like to be a good boss. He also becomes one of the most beloved characters on television, with a pretty cult-like following (I'm a proud member of the Ted Lasso cult).

What makes Ted interesting to me is that he doesn’t lead by trying to prove he is the smartest person in the room. In fact, some of the best moments in the show come from the fact that he knows he isn’t. He pays attention to people, asks questions, gives them room to grow, and understands that different situations require different kinds of support.

The darts scene is probably the best example. Rebecca’s ex-husband, Rupert, assumes Ted is as clueless about darts as he is about English football and confidently challenges him to a game. What Rupert never bothers to ask is whether Ted has actually played before. Ted has, a lot, and Rupert finds that out a little too late.

The point of the scene is curiosity, and it has stuck with me because I think it is one of the easiest things to lose as you become more experienced. The longer you have been doing something, the easier it is to assume you understand the person, the problem, or the decision in front of you. Sometimes you do. Sometimes there is more information you don’t have, a perspective you haven’t considered, or a question you should have asked before deciding you already knew the answer.

Ted also understands that people need room to get something wrong without feeling like the mistake will define them forever. When Sam makes a mistake during a game, Ted tells him to “be a goldfish,” because goldfish supposedly have very short memories. The point isn’t to ignore what happened. You address it, fix what needs to be fixed, figure out what you can learn from it, and then move on.

I have high expectations for the people I work with, but I don’t think high expectations and grace are in conflict with each other. If every mistake becomes a permanent mark against someone, people eventually stop making decisions. They play it safe, wait for approval, or become reluctant to tell you when something has gone wrong. None of those things are particularly useful if you are trying to build people who can think and lead for themselves.

One of the most interesting examples of Ted’s influence actually isn’t one of the players. It’s Rebecca.

When the show begins, Rebecca owns the team and is technically Ted’s boss, but she is leading from anger, control, and a pretty serious desire to burn the whole thing down. Ted never gives her a lecture about how to manage people better. He just gives her a very different experience of what trust looks like. He tells her the truth, challenges her, forgives her, and treats her like someone capable of doing better. Over time, you watch her start to extend that same trust to the people around her.

By the end of the series, Rebecca is a completely different leader. She trusts Higgins, relies on Keeley, listens more, gives people room, and is much more comfortable not having every answer herself. I think we talk all the time about how bosses shape their teams, but not nearly enough about how much the people around us shape the kind of boss we become. Good people can make you a better leader too.

And this is one of the things I think Ted Lasso does so incredibly well. There are a million lessons in this show, but they aren't beaten into your head. Nobody stops the episode to explain what we were all supposed to learn. The writing and character development are so good that you just watch these people interact, screw up, forgive each other, change, grow, and slowly become different versions of themselves. Somewhere along the way, you soak up what the show has been telling you.

I wonder how often the same thing happens with a boss and a team.

Most of what people learn from us probably isn't coming from the things we explicitly tell them. They are watching what happens when someone makes a mistake. What happens when someone disagrees with us. How we react when someone brings us bad news. Whether we give credit away or take it. Whether the values we talk about still apply when things are stressful or inconvenient.

We're teaching people what it's like to work here all the time, whether we realize we're doing it or not.

That is also why I loved the storyline with Alice in the latest season. Alice wants Ted’s job, and she is frustrated when she doesn’t get it. She has talent and ambition, but she also has things to learn, and Ted gives her the opportunity to do exactly that. He gives her responsibility and room to lead, but when her approach starts creating problems, he doesn’t confuse support with telling her everything is fine. He tells her it isn’t working.

Developing people does not mean endlessly encouraging them or pretending every decision they make is a good one. Sometimes people need room and responsibility, sometimes they need to make a mistake, and sometimes they need a hard conversation. If they learn from it, they also need another opportunity.

Alice does. By the end of the season, she is ready to lead, and Ted gives her the chair.

I think that is probably what Ted Lasso gets most right about being the boss. The job is not to make yourself permanently necessary to every decision or problem. It is to help build people who can eventually make those decisions, solve those problems, and lead other people themselves.

The best bosses I have had did that for me. They gave me room to develop judgment instead of just following instructions. They expected me to have an opinion and trusted me with things I had not done before. They let me disagree with them, and when I got something wrong, they expected me to learn from it and keep going.

I try to do the same now, although I am very aware that it is easier said than done. When you know the answer, it is tempting to give it. When you can solve something faster yourself, it is tempting to take it back. And when you care deeply about the outcome, giving someone else room to own it can be uncomfortable.

But I don’t want to build a team that is really good at waiting for me. I want people around me who ask questions, make decisions, challenge assumptions, own outcomes, learn from mistakes, and eventually help someone else do the same.

Maybe that is what I love so much about Ted Lasso. Ted doesn't teach people how to become better by constantly telling them how to be better. He creates an environment where they have the trust, accountability, support, and room to get there themselves.

And they do. As bosses, I think it's worth asking what people are soaking up from the environments we're creating too.