What TV’s Ted Lasso can teach you about leadership

Ted Lasso is back on our screens, and it got me thinking about what Ted Lasso can teach us about culture and leadership. An American football coach arrives at a struggling London football club, knows nothing about football, and somehow changes AFC Richmond and the way people behave and perform.

The best thing about it? Ted doesn’t change Richmond by learning more about football from a tactics book; he changes it by changing the culture.

Beneath the jokes, the biscuits and the relentlessly positive attitude, the show has some surprisingly good lessons for anyone running a business, particularly when it comes to leadership, culture and building a team that can perform without everything depending on one person.

The evidence backs up the real business issue behind it. Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that only around 10% of UK employees are actually engaged at work, one of the lowest rates in Europe and just 38% trust their senior leadership team. Culture isn’t a ‘nice to have’ but it affects how productive people are, how they respond when things go wrong and whether they want to stay.

So, what can your business learn from Ted?

Lesson 1: Belief needs a system, not a slogan

The word “Believe” hangs above the Richmond locker room door from episode one, and it becomes the emotional spine of the whole show. But Ted never treats belief as wishful thinking. He takes the time to understand people, build relationships (think: the biscuit ritual with Rebecca) and create an environment where players are expected to support each other.

This is the bit businesses can often miss. You can put your values on the wall and talk about teamwork but if the day to day experience doesn’t match those words, people feel it and they notice.

Instead, culture is built around what happens repeatedly. For example, regular one to ones where people can speak openly, a compliments of the week email chain where wins, of all sizes, are celebrated.

The important thing isn’t what you say your culture is, it’s what you consistently do.

Lesson 2: Curiosity beats judgement, every time

In season one, Ted quotes Walt Whitman to Rupert over a game of darts: “Be curious, not judgmental.” It is one of my favourite lines the entire show. Rupert completely underestimated Ted and Ted’s response wasn’t to gloat but rather to ask questions and let the answers speak for themselves.

It’s something we try to bring to our relationships with both our clients and our team. If a team member misses a deadline or makes a mistake, the instinct can be to judge first: they’re difficult, they’re careless. Curiosity asks a better question: what’s actually going on here? Dig a little deeper.

That’s also part of what we mean when we talk about being a trusted adviser at A4G. A client once asked Emma, “If I was your brother, what advice would you give me?” It’s a great test of any adviser relationship. Would you give the same advice to someone you genuinely cared about, even if it wasn’t what they wanted to hear? That kind of honesty starts with understanding the situation properly before jumping to a conclusion.

We take the same approach when something goes wrong at A4G. Rather than immediately looking for someone to blame, we look at three things first: was the system good enough, did the person follow the system and did they understand the system? Sometimes the problem isn’t the person, it’s the process around them or their understanding of it.

We aren’t saying poor performance shouldn’t be addressed but rather you need to understand what the problem is and why it’s happening before you address it.

The next time something goes wrong, try replacing your first assumption with a question. It changes the conversation, and usually the outcome.

Lesson 3: Losing well is a leadership skill

Season two leans hard into failure, particularly through Nate’s storyline and Richmond’s relegation battle. Another line that sticks with me from Ted is where he describes the fear that sits behind most high performers: “It’s the hope that kills you.”

It’s a joke about football fandom, but there is a serious point behind it. Business owners can sometimes avoid ambitious decisions because the thought of getting it wrong feels worse than staying where they are. But if you never take a risk, you never really know what the business could have achieved. As Michael Jordan (the basketball superstar) famously says “I miss 100% of the shots I never taken.”

The important bit is what happens when things don’t work. A good leader doesn’t pretend the failure didn’t happen or immediately look for someone to blame. They work out what went wrong, what can be learned and what needs to change.

At A4G, we often talk about three degrees of learning:

1. People who don’t learn from their mistakes.
2. People who learn from their own mistakes.
3. People who learn from other people’s mistakes.

The aim is to get as close to number three as possible. Your team shouldn’t have to make every mistake themselves before they learn from it.

That means creating an environment where people can be honest when something hasn’t worked, talk about what happened and use the experience to make a better decision next time. That’s not about celebrating failure. It’s about making sure a setback has some value.

The best leaders don’t just ask, “Who got this wrong?” They ask, “What can we learn from this?”

Lesson 4: The best leaders make themselves replaceable

By season three, Ted has largely stepped back from being the centre of attention. He spends more time developing Roy, Beard and the coaching staff than commanding the room himself. This shows Ted’s growth as a leader by how the team functions when he isn’t there.

Season three also gives us one of the clearest statements of this philosophy, when Ted tells the squad they might be “so sure that you’re one in a million” that they forget they’re “just one of eleven.” Ego versus team, individual versus succession.

It’s the same principle we talk about again and again at A4G, and it’s even the subject of a book by our Founder, Malcolm Palmer. A business that only works because one person is in the room is not a business, it’s a bottleneck. The test worth applying to your own leadership isn’t “how good am I at my job,” but “how well does the business run on the days I’m not in the building.”

And if you find it doesn’t run well at all, download a free copy of Malcolm’s book, Making Your Business Less Dependent on You. It’ll teach you everything you need to know to stop being the bottleneck in your business.

Bringing it back to business

If Richmond’s journey from underdog to contender proves anything, it’s that culture built deliberately, and repeated consistently, outlasts any single season, and it shows up directly in retention, performance and how well a business survives when things don’t go to plan. None of this requires a locker room or a “Believe” sign, although you’re welcome to put one up.

If you’d like to talk through what culture, structure or succession planning looks like for your own business, book a free 1-2-1 consultation with us.

Email enquiries@a4g-llp.co.uk or call 01474 853 856.