Week One of the Test
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?
Last spoilers for the original three seasons of Ted Lasso. At least until I find more to write about.
I opened this series with the last few minutes of season three. Might as well return to the scene of the crime.
The beginning of the end has Ted on a plane home to Kansas with no trophy and not much of a sendoff. But most of what follows isn’t about Ted. It stays behind and looks at what he left.
Roy Kent, who spent three seasons learning how to become a multidimensional human, is named manager. Nate is back on the coaching staff, teaching the same philosophy he tried to burn down on his way out. Rebecca stays, sells nearly half the club to the supporters, and starts planning a Richmond women's team with Keeley. Beard stays in London and marries Jane. And Nate uses his crafting skills to fix and re-hang the Believe sign, the lone homage to the man who believed it all was possible.
But no one is shown trying to become Ted except the man himself.
Roy couldn’t stop swearing long enough to try to coach like Lasso, and has willingly shown affection for (by my count) three whole people over the three seasons (his niece, Tartt, and Keeley), a feat Lasso does by brunch, most days. Rebecca hands some ownership to the people she was alienating a couple years earlier. Everyone is working with assets that Ted helped develop, but never owned. Which just might be the entire point of this series that I shared back in post one: a way of working that depends on one person is a personality. A way of working that survives them is a culture.
What we're shown is week one of the test. The show gives us the days after, and the day after is the easy day, because everybody still remembers how it's supposed to feel. The interesting failures arrive months and years later, when the pressure's on and Roy has to choose between the method and forty years of f***ing habits. And while adding that to the ending would’ve given us answers, it would’ve taken away the unlimited potential he’d brought the team.
We’ve covered the fact that Ted’s methods weren’t perfect. His focus missed Nate for a long stretch, badly enough that it took a year for the relationship to begin to mend. And Richmond never became #1. Of course, trophies were never the point. What’s still standing after Ted left? That’s the thing that matters.
Real organizations run this test all the time, and they mostly flunk it in month eight, not week one. I'd point at Starbucks, where Howard Schultz came back to run the company twice after handing it off, and at Disney, which brought Bob Iger back less than three years after he left. Both companies looked fine the week after the founder walked out. I'd argue both had built a personality and called it a culture, and found out the difference later.
Okay, so how do you run something like this on your own organization? Two things...
First, do the leader’s methods have names that people use when the leader isn’t around? Not values off a poster. That's how a practice proves it left the founder's hands. Be a goldfish. Be curious, not judgemental. Believe.
Second, when somebody replaces a leader, did they come from inside, and do they run it their own way? A successor doing an impression is the warning sign. A culture that requires impersonation is still a personality. Putting it in a new body just makes it harder to notice.
There’s a name for this: Founder's Syndrome. It’s more a critique than a diagnosis. But the underlying observation is valid. The organization and the person become the same object, it’s dangerous - and hard for founders to recognize until they leave and see the chaos in their wake.
If this is a thing you’d like to avoid, there’s something you can try. Pick one decision you make on a regular basis. Which vendor gets the call, who gets the difficult client, what goes at the top of the Monday agenda. Something that comes around at least a few times a month. Now give it to somebody else for the next month, with a single requirement: they can't ask you what you'd do. (You'll want to tell them. Don't.) At the end of the month, first... ask them why they chose what they chose.
Why, not what.
The what tells you whether the decision is in line with the culture you’ve tried to build. The why tells you how it got there, which is the thing with potential staying power.
A decision that matches yours because "it's what you would've done" is role-playing. It'll hold as long as you're around to be imitated. A decision that matches yours for a reason they could defend to the board or peer is the culture doing what it’s supposed to do without you prodding it. And a decision that doesn't match yours, backed by a reason that's better than yours would've been, is the best possible result. That's the thing I hope Ted felt when his plane’s wheels left the ground. Richmond had learned to be itself, not just dress up as Ted wanted.
Going back to the stuff I know well - what I keep coming back to through the whole series is that almost nobody runs this test deliberately. Founders discover how much of the place was them at the exact moment they can no longer do anything about it. Ted is unusual because he spent three years handing pieces away while he still had the power to keep them. He gave the goldfish to the players. He gave Roy the freedom to find his (f***ing) humanity. He gave Nate a second chance. By the time he got on the plane there wasn’t much more of him that he could’ve given.
Then again, he's fictional, and his writers were rooting for him. Yours aren't.
A year after you go, what would still be running in the way you left it, with the name you gave it? And could anyone tell you why?
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.
