What Ted Lasso Teaches Us About Coaching — and Leadership

With Ted Lasso back for a fourth season, I have been thinking about what makes him a great coach — and whether his approach translates to leaders generally. Research says it does. 

I looked across Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, John Chambers, and several large empirical studies of leadership and management. What is striking is how much convergence there is. Their language differs—Drucker talks about effectiveness, Collins about Level 5 leadership, Chambers about empowerment and navigating transitions—but a remarkably consistent picture emerges.

There are 8 principles of great leadership.

1. Great leaders put the mission ahead of themselves. Humility Matters.

This is the clearest common thread. Lasso coaches with enormous heart and humility, always thinking about the mission of developing the players into a winning team. 

Drucker argued that effective executives ask what is right for the organization and deliberately think in terms of “we,” not “I.” 

Collins reached essentially the same conclusion through his Good to Great research. His Level 5 leaders combined intense professional determination with personal humility. Their ambition was directed toward the organization or cause rather than toward themselves. 

And this isn’t merely philosophical. A meta-analysis of 53 studies involving 16,534 people found humble leadership associated with higher trust, commitment, engagement, creativity, employee voice and task performance. 

Former CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, rated top CEO in America for years by Forbes, was known for his extraordinary humility and kindness. He always put mission first and organized everyone around a shared goal. 

The research on humble leadership correlates positively with employee trust, creativity, voice and team performance.

Pattern: The strongest leaders are humble and demonstrate ambition toward the mission — not themselves. 

Leadership is ambition for the mission rather than ambition for yourself.

2. Great leaders create clarity about what matters most.

Drucker’s first question for an executive was deceptively simple: “What needs to be done?” He emphasized concentration on the few areas where exceptional performance would make the greatest difference. 

Collins similarly emphasizes disciplined focus and prioritization on the few most important things.  

Google’s Project Oxygen independently identified having a clear vision and strategy for the team and being results-oriented among the most common behaviors of effective managers. 

Pattern: Leadership isn’t generating more priorities. It is reducing complexity until people understand:

Where are we going? What matters most? What does success look like?

Great leaders ruthlessly prioritize and set clear direction.

3. Great leaders get the right people—and then trust them.

Collins famously found the pattern he described as “first who, then what”: before strategy, get the right people into the right seats. 

Drucker emphasized building organizations around people’s strengths rather than weaknesses. 

Chambers reached a similar conclusion at Cisco. He deliberately moved away from command-and-control leadership toward empowered cross-functional groups. In describing the transition, Chambers even identified himself—the CEO—as a potential organizational bottleneck: “I’m the roadblock.” 

Google’s data point in the same direction: effective managers empower their teams rather than micromanaging them. 

Pattern: Great leaders don’t try to become indispensable.

They try to build an organization capable of performing without every decision flowing through them.

4. Great leaders coach people instead of simply directing them.

Lasso is a master at developing people rather than just directing them.  Last weekend, I watched my son’s soccer coach yell at the team: Score goals, it’s simple. The other team’s coach explained to the players how to spread the field, how they could defend better, and what their exact mistakes were and what to do differently.  Not surprisingly, they won! 

The empirical research on developing people is especially strong.  It’s the “teach them to fish” instead of fishing for them. It often takes longer, but the results are a team that can do the work well. 

Google’s Project Oxygen analyzed employee surveys, performance reviews and qualitative data to identify the behaviors of its most effective managers. Among the recurring behaviors were coaching, empowering people, communicating well, supporting career development and caring about employees’ success. 

Gallup’s much larger body of workplace research reaches a similar conclusion. Gallup reports that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, with effective managers setting expectations, providing meaningful feedback, providing stretch opportunities with support, recognizing contributions, and helping employees develop. 

Pattern: Great leaders don’t merely produce followers.

They produce more capable people.

That is an important distinction.

5. Great leaders listen—and create an environment where people can tell them the truth.

Chambers was especially known for this.  He listened deeply and asked for the hard truth, always making it safe for team members to share it.  

Drucker added what he regarded as such an important principle that it functioned almost like a ninth practice:

Listen first, speak last. 

Modern organizational research adds another dimension: psychological safety. A major meta-analysis covering 136 samples, more than 22,000 individuals and nearly 5,000 groups found strong correlation between authentic relationships and space for candid feedback with psychological safety.  And, that a culture of psychological safety produces better teams and results. 

Pattern: Leaders need information and feedback — and must create the conditions to receive both. 

Organizations become dangerous when people learn that telling the leader what they want to hear is safer than telling them what is actually happening.

So one of the leader’s jobs is to make candor safe.

6. Great leaders are decisive.

Great leaders seek input, hard truth, and data - then with this information they make clear decisions. This clarity enables the team to act. Often, they have imperfect information. But they understand that they need to act in order for their team to move forward.  

Rather than rethinking decisions and spinning without clarity, great leaders move forward while watching the data and continuing to seek information. If the decision turns out to be the wrong one after tracking it, they adjust and change course then.  But, they tested the decision and enabled everyone to truly enact it to have the data to know whether it worked. 

Drucker similarly emphasizes taking responsibility for decisions and translating knowledge into action. 

Google’s updated Project Oxygen findings explicitly include being a strong decision-maker alongside coaching, empowerment and listening. 

Pattern:

Be decisive once you have enough information to act. Track decisions to determine whether they worked.

7. Great leaders continually adapt and look to the future—but don’t abandon their core purpose.

This comes through particularly strongly in Chambers.

His description of Cisco’s leadership model emphasizes recognizing transitions, getting outside one’s comfort zone, empowering people across organizational boundaries and changing structures as conditions change. 

Drucker similarly emphasized focusing on opportunities rather than problems and directing attention toward the future rather than merely restoring yesterday’s equilibrium. 

In an evolving economy, organizations have to retain their North Star and mission focus while adapting to changing times.  This may mean organizational structure or program shifts. It may mean changing how the work is does. It’s also about looking over the horizon to prepare for what’s coming not just what was.  

Pattern: Strong leaders have conviction about the destination while remaining flexible about the route.

They are simultaneously:

stable in purpose + adaptable in method.

8. Ultimately, great leadership is measured by results—not personality.

This may be Drucker’s most important contribution.

He observed effective leaders with wildly different personalities—extroverted and introverted, charismatic and uncharismatic, easygoing and controlling. What distinguished them wasn’t a particular personality type but a set of practices that produced results. These practices are outlined in 1-7 above.

Collins’s findings challenge the mythology of the charismatic celebrity CEO. His good-to-great leaders were relatively understated and always humble.

And decades of leadership research generally support the idea that observable leadership behaviors matter most—again those outlined here. A meta-analysis covering 117 independent samples found these leadership behaviors positively related to individual, team, and organizational performance. 

This leads to an important conclusion:

There probably isn’t a “leadership personality”—except humility being a common characteristic. Generally, rather than personality there are winning leadership behaviors.

That also means leadership can be learned.

The larger pattern I see

If I step back from Drucker, Collins, Chambers, Google, Gallup and the academic literature, I think the research tells a surprisingly coherent story.

Great leadership is about creating an environment in which other people can perform exceptionally well.

The leader does that through a repeating cycle:

Purpose → People → Clarity → Trust → Candor → Decisions → Execution → Adaptation

And underneath all of it sits one counterintuitive idea:

The best leaders simultaneously have a strong purpose and a small ego.

They need a strong, unwavering purpose because leadership requires conviction, resilience, difficult decisions and the willingness to be accountable.

But they need a small ego because they must listen, admit mistakes, hire people better than themselves, share credit, relinquish control and put the organization above themselves.

Collins calls that humility + will. Drucker essentially describes it as contribution + responsibility. Chambers describes the organizational version as moving from command-and-control to empowerment. And contemporary research on humble, transformational and empowering leadership increasingly provides empirical support for pieces of the same model. 

If I had to turn all of this into a memorable “8 Rules of Great Leadership,” I’d write them this way:

1. Make it about the mission, not yourself. Be humble.

2. Create ruthless clarity about what matters.

3. Put great people in the right roles.

4. Coach people so they become better than they were before you.

5. Listen enough that people will tell you the truth. Create psychological safety.

6. Be decisive enough to act.

7. Adapt while remaining anchored to purpose.

8. Results come from leadership practices not personality. 

The interesting thing is that “be charismatic” isn’t on the list. Neither is “be the smartest person in the room.” The evidence points much more strongly toward purpose, people, clarity, trust, learning and disciplined execution.