Corporate Culture & the Ted Lasso Way
There is a sub-culture of compliance professionals out there who adore “Ted Lasso,” the Apple TV drama about an American football coach leading a British soccer team. I have delightful news for this crowd: the most recent episode included a scene about Ted’s coaching style that speak perfectly to how a corporate culture should work.
Did you see it? The moment comes about 52 minutes into the one-hour episode. The team, AFC Richmond, had just tried a strategy Ted sprung on them called “total football” — where players have no specific positions or roles, and instead work together as a single, seamless unit, moving the ball toward the opponent’s goal.
Richmond lost the game, but the team played beautifully in the second half as they grasped what Ted wanted them to do. After the game, Trent Crimm, a journalist embedded with the team, rushes up to Ted, absolutely vibrating over what Ted had really accomplished.
this scene is EVERYTHING to me pic.twitter.com/UGh7sgBU1I
— elena | ted lasso spoilers (@sudeiking) April 26, 2023
For those too analog to watch the video:
Trent: It’s going to work! Total football!
Ted: OK.
Trent: And I’ll tell you why.
Ted: Why?
Trent: The Lasso Way! You haven’t switched tactics in one week.
Ted: I haven’t?
Trent: No! You’ve done this over three seasons, where slowly but surely building a club-wide culture of trust and support through thousands of imperceptible moments all leads to their inevitable conclusion: total football.
That same approach is what drives corporate culture to higher standards of performance. It’s not about providing employees with the best tools or technology; neither of those things exist on the soccer field. It’s not about bringing together superstar performers, either; Richmond tried that earlier in the season when it hired Zava, the best player in the world, and after a brief winning streak the team resumed its lackluster performance. Zava got bored and quit.
Success, as Trent Crimm observed, is about building a culture of trust and cooperation among the employees you have. Then you can let them struggle, improvise, and push through to victory.
Not a CEO in the world would dispute that statement.
The Lasso Way Through Time
The writers of Ted Lasso might not have known this when they wrote that scene, but they stumbled upon an insight that U.S. military strategists developed 50 years ago. One of the great strategists of the time, a fighter pilot turned Pentagon bureaucrat named John Boyd, grasped that military success depends on an army’s efficient use of time. That is, the more quickly officers can understand changing battlefield conditions, the more quickly they can respond to those conditions, outmaneuver the enemy, and win the battle.
Boyd even structured his theory into a specific procedure: the OODA Loop, for “observe, orient, decide, act.” The faster your team can cycle through the OODA Loop, the more agile and responsive it can be.
How does all this relate to corporate culture, ethics and compliance, and Ted Lasso? Well, just consider what must be present for a team to cycle through the OODA Loop at high speed:
- Mutual trust
- Strong, clear lines of communication
- A single, unified vision of the objective
And how does a team develop mutual trust, strong lines of communication, and single vision of the objective? By slowly but surely building an organization-wide culture of trust and support, through thousands of imperceptible moments, all leading to their inevitable conclusion.
We can even take the analogy further. When Boyd developed the OODA Loop, he worried all the time about “friction” — the small, unpredictable events that complicate your decision-making and response times: a communication line cut, a soldier killed, a bomb unexpectedly defective, and so forth. Friction is sand in the gears of the OODA Loop, as people slow down to bicker about what to do.
That led Boyd to his other observation. To overcome friction, he said, senior officers should focus on setting broad objectives, defining the organizational culture, and then trusting junior officers to improvise their way to victory. Junior officers should focus on working with their teams, and relaying clear, unvarnished information back to HQ so senior officers could reallocate resources and set new objectives as necessary.
Apply those principles to the soccer field, and you end up with Trent Crimm gushing about the Ted Lasso way.
The Level 5 Leader
We have one other point about Ted Lasso to consider. Ted is a Level 5 leader.
Don’t take my word for it; more than 20 years ago management guru Jim Collins developed that leadership scale in his seminal book Good to Great. Level 5 leaders are the top of the scale, able to take organizations to astounding heights of success. Here’s how Collins describes them:
Level 5 leaders display a powerful mixture of personal humility and indomitable will. They’re incredibly ambitious, but their ambition is first and foremost for the cause, for the organization and its purpose, not themselves. While Level 5 leaders can come in many personality packages, they are often self-effacing, quiet, reserved, and even shy.
That’s Ted Lasso, and every fan of the show knows it. We even see that in last week’s episode, when Ted’s assistant Coach Beard explains the concept of total football to the players. Coach Beard (does he even have a first name?) credits with deciding to give the idea a try, and Ted immediately responds, “Thanks, but it’s not about me.”
Level 5 leaders don’t succeed despite their personal humility; they succeed because of it. That humility allows them to put their egos aside and welcome bad news, so the team can debate the situation honestly and agree on a new course of action. And then everyone goes forth and acts, because they all trust each other to work together.
Sounds like a thrilling way to work, doesn’t it? No wonder Trent Crimm was so excited.