Sad Together

What happens to an organization the moment its strongest personality walks out the door? This series, Lessons From a Fictional Football Club, turns to Ted Lasso as an unlikely case study, treating it as a structural experiment in what actually holds an organization together under pressure, versus what was just one person's charisma wearing a disguise. Across this series, I will pull leadership lessons from specific scenes, ground them in research where it exists, and close with structural reads through the Loadmap framework, all in service of one question worth asking about your own team: when you leave the room, what keeps running?

As usual, if you’re reading this and haven’t seen all of Ted Lasso - you’re about to have pretty much the whole thing spoiled. Go watch. Then come back. I’ll still be here.  

At the end of the first season, the club loses its biggest game of the year. They’re relegated... dropped out of the top league, in front of the home crowd. If English football (AKA soccer) isn't your thing, relegation is the sports-related definition of failure over there. (It’d be like the worst NFL teams having to go down and play college ball next year.) The dressing room afterward is just grown men staring at the floor, and the show stays on it long enough that it’s uncomfortable. Our culture demands that someone says the thing that makes everyone feel better. 

Coach Lasso doesn't. No "next season starts now." No "we’ll get ‘em next time." He tells ‘em being sad is fine. Being sad together beats being sad alone. And then he lets the room stay sad, together, for as long as it needs.

If you read post two (the one about being a goldfish), an alarm might be going off in your head, because that post argued for forgetting mistakes in ten seconds and this one is about actively choosing to feel a loss on purpose. I went back and forth on whether the two contradict each other. I don't think they do. The goldfish handles a mistake in the moment, when thinking through it costs you the next play. In this case the match is over. There’s no next play tonight. Being a goldfish keeps your attention on the game and the immediate next step. The other lets a loss have its say before anyone turns it into fuel for next year.

Losses suck. They hurt. But, if we don’t acknowledge them... if nobody says what they’re feeling... where do you think it goes? 

Not an expert here, but I have ideas. A loss no one names just hides and grows, and it tends to seep into the next effort as fear. Hesitation. The team takes the safe path instead of the ambitious one. Meaningful topics of conversation become off-limits. The ability to learn from what happened goes away. Naming it converts the isolation everyone is feeling into something that teams were literally created to achieve - a challenge that can be overcome together. 

There's brain-imaging research behind the individual version of this... a UCLA research team (my alma mater, Go Bruins) led by Matthew Lieberman found that putting a feeling into words measurably reduces our brain’s threat response. The shared experience of loss in the Richmond locker room is basically showing the same thing at team scale. 

I’ve never tried it. And I’ve lost more times than I can count. It’s much easier to use the loss as a pivot or springboard. Acknowledge it just enough to give a reframe something to stand on, and get everyone focused forward. It feels good to do it. Strong. Done right, I think it’s genuinely inspirational. But it skips the step where what actually happened reaches the group... as a group. If the team can’t talk about the loss, then I don’t see how it can learn anything from it other than ‘we don’t talk about losing here.’ The cost is never shared, and private stuff is unlikely to bring positive change to how the team works. 

Nothing Coach Lasso might’ve said could undo relegation. But the things he did say served as the foundation for the club’s promotion back up to the Premier League the following year. Sitting with the loss... sharing it. Feeling the awfulness of the moment and knowing that everyone else feels it too? That’s powerful. 

If you want to experience it, it only takes about a minute, but it’s hard. And it’ll probably feel like you’re intentionally making things worse. The next time your team has a meaningful loss - a deal that fell apart, missed launch dates or financial targets - bring the crew together and call it what it is. Don’t lead with next steps. Say it straight. We lost this. It hurts. And it’s fine that it hurts. Give them a moment to bear it together. Then you shut up. And you watch the clock. Give it sixty seconds. (You might want to tell them you’re giving them the minute, though, or someone is probably gonna try to fill the silence with inspiration that isn’t what the team needs yet.)

Don’t follow it with a silver lining. That’s just poking holes in what you’ve just done. Let it settle. There will be a tomorrow, and that’s when you’ll start looking forward. 

The tie-in to my own work and theories? If we want to reliably bring about change, then we need the stuff that needs changing to impact the people with the power to change it. Miss that step and more often than not you’re paving the way for more losses. I suspect that grief and emotional pain are the hardest things to incorporate in that process, because it’s the thing everyone wants to skip. Being emotional at work isn’t something people generally want to see... or do. 

Every fix that I’ve mentioned in the posts before this, and the ones after... they’re all fully dependent on what facts and experiences are shared in the rooms where decisions get made. That doesn’t happen when the loss is shoved in the storage closet, out of sight. 

If trying it out for yourself isn’t workable for you, think about the last time your team had a major loss. Did leadership acknowledge it? Name it? If so - consider whether it helped move the team forward. If not, then it’s probably still in the building. Losses don’t disappear when we ignore them. They fester. And wait. 

Naming them seems a better option, no?

Lessons from a Fictional Football Club is a series of unofficial analysis and commentary. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Apple, Warner Bros., or anyone connected with the television series Ted Lasso. Loadmap is the framework I think with in these posts. Loadmap, by Tate Linden, is offered exclusively by Stokefire. 

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