Ted Lasso starring Jason Sudeikis has garnered many awards. He and his fellow characters were invited to the White House to speak about mental health. It is a bit ironic as Sudeikis played Joe Biden when he was part of the cast of SNL. For those of you who have never watched the show, it is about a NCAA football coach who is hired by a football/soccer team in England to be their head coach. There is just one problem that is at the heart of the comedy. Ted Lasso knows very little about soccer. What he does know is how to treat people who are struggling. He infuses the team with hope and kindness and points out that real leadership is about relationships more than it is about knowledge of any particular sport.
One of the central human nature issues in the show is the Imposter Syndrome that many people and leaders including me have had. The Imposter Syndrome is the inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or legitimately achieved. We all have it to some degree, some more so than others. Ted Lasso is the embodiment of this view of life. It is the opposite of something that I have written about called the Dunning-Kruger Effect when you over rate your abilities such as Trump does. The Imposter Syndrome is usually based in families that vacillate between praise and criticism. Recognition for achievement is stressed.
When I graduated valedictorian of my high school class, I concluded that it was because it wasn’t a top tier school. I didn’t see myself as capable or smart which drove me to work harder to prove to myself that I deserved the recognition. When I achieved at the highest level at demanding institutions such as the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and my work at Duke and Duke Medical Center, I finally had to claim, as silly as it sounds, that I was very capable. It helped that I loved learning and borrowed my brother’s library card because I was too young to get one and read every book in a series about important historical figures. Learning came naturally to me. It was never to achieve higher status.
I can now spot this phenomenon in others fairly quickly. It usually occurs in high functioning individuals. I could see it quickly in the character of Ted Lasso. When I was working in a parish in Swarthmore, there was a student who was attending Swarthmore College, one of the highest- ranking small colleges in America. She was getting all A+ grades and concluded that she received those grades because the college was not demanding enough. She transferred to Princeton. You guessed it! She got all A+ grades there as well. She had to come to terms, as I and many others did, that she was a terrific student.
Ted Lasso has been recognized as well for the leadership style that is demonstrated by Lasso as a coach. It is not recognizable by those screaming coaches on the sidelines. His leadership style is the direct opposite. I liked his style because it resonated with what I attempted to do as a leader. Lasso is concerned with relationships and not transactions. There are no quid pro quo arrangements that “you do this for me, and I will do something for you.”
Lasso knows that the right word at the right time can make a big difference in another person’s life. Jean Paul Sartre, the father of existentialism, famously said, “Hell is the others.” He meant that we have the power to help or hurt others by our words. Lasso is the master of developing hope and kindness in his players. Throughout the series, he gives them what they need and not what they want. Lasso leads from behind. He knows that the important people in the room are the players or, in my case, the student leaders. It is why I always gauged the success of a meeting by the fewer words that I had to speak compared to the student leaders. Like Lasso and other leaders, we interjected words and direction when it was needed and therefore welcomed by the group. The leader’s role is to inject kindness and hope into the group with a well-placed word that keeps everyone moving in the right direction as differences of opinion are honored in the process.
Who could have ever guessed that all of the above psychological insights and character traits of leadership could be part of a comedy show? Evidently our President did.
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