Do you find the TV show Ted Lasso compelling? Many do.

In fact, I was at a workshop with the Municipal Management Association of New Hampshire and the speaker brought up the show in the context of how to be curious, not judgmental. A good reflection. But beyond that, I noted that many of the managers there who liked the show really liked it. Some had watched it through several times right off the bat. The show really grew on me, too. Why?

I’ll start with identifying the three of the main themes I argue make Ted Lasso so compelling, and then leave you with a few thoughts for how we think about our workplaces, communities, and our own lives. Though this article may be most relevant for folks who have seen the show, with only very mild spoilers, if any, it should be safe as well as interesting for people who haven’t seen it.

1. Coach-based Leadership in Ted Lasso

The first theme is really excellent coach-based leadership. Ted is a true coach, not a “boss.” That’s a big difference. His character exemplifies some of the best qualities we hope for in coaches, teachers, counselors, and the like. I’ve worked on many projects—whether while teaching, managing, mentoring, or consulting—that have brought people from different backgrounds into discussion about what “good leadership” looks like. There are remarkable similarities in what people have in mind, even when coming from different perspectives. And many of these themes are just rolling off of Ted much like his endless supply of (excellent) dad jokes.

For example, Ted is humble, and even uses his lack of knowledge of the sport he was hired to coach as an ice breaker. He frequently mentions that he doesn’t need to be an expert in soccer—excuse me, football—because he is an expert in coaching, and that’s what matters and makes him valuable in his role. Does that sound familiar? Are managers really expected to be subject matter experts in every technical policy area, or does our real influence and impact lie in being experts at helping others be successful?

Beyond that, Ted is supportive, takes and acts on critical feedback with ease, intentionally creates bridges between people who don’t get along (but potentially could), provides his team with a shared purpose, and ultimately, he sees his job not as enforcing rules and discipline toward a specific result, but rather, as facilitating others to be the most successful versions of themselves.

2. Community, Belonging, and Identity in Ted Lasso

Second, the feeling of community, belonging, and identity to a shared mission or purpose. Anyone reading this I’m sure has frequently come across the widespread HR content these days discussing the drop off of belonging and positivity in workplaces. Some of these challenges aren’t just from changing economics and demographics of our labor market. Rather, the simple reality is that many organizations and workplaces are losing or have outright lost the thread about how to be positive, supportive places that people look forward to participating in.

The AFC Richmond organization (the English football team that is Ted’s employer) shows what can happen when these things align and people feel belonging and community at an organization where they share a common goal. Granted, a sports team is always going to be more like that than a municipal government, but you get both the explicit and implicit sense that everyone working at AFC Richmond is along for the ups and downs of the journey. From the club owner to the security guards, grounds crews, players, and the fans, everyone feels part of the mission and vision of the team.

3. Good Intentions in Ted Lasso

The last point, and perhaps the most overlooked and important, is about intentions. It is this sequence of things that exists in the Ted Lasso /AFC Richmond universe:

1. The good intentions of most of the characters.

2. The characters capacity for actually acting on those good intentions.

3. Everyone’s general awareness that others have good intentions toward them.

In my podcast episode about Ted Lasso, I dive into some really interesting details about the historical basis for how individuals in groups interact with each other, look at the ratio of “good/negative/apathetic” people in an organization, and how our “modern” world has somewhat fumbled managing the change from much smaller to much larger environments that attempt to leverage institutionally facilitated trust, rather than interpersonally facilitated trust, to enforce social norms, set goals, etc., a major but underappreciated thread underpinning problems in our world.

But to summarize the most key point, instead of characters routinely having perfect things happen to them, there are plenty of missteps and mistakes made. But what’s interesting is that there is significant character development throughout the show largely stemming from people confronting each other, apologizing, talking things out, sharing vulnerabilities, holding each other accountable, and not only doing all of that, but doing it with the implicit understanding that the people they are interacting with are also largely trying their best and acting with good intentions. When people talk to their captain, coach, or friend, they largely trust that person is not out to get them.

In our world, is that how people feel when going to human resources? Is that how people tend to interact with each other around political issues in our communities or country? I don’t think so. And we see the growing tendency to assume that others are acting in bad faith, triggering a cascade of worse outcomes for everyone that John Von Neumann would surely shake his head at. This growing dynamic in how people interact—on platforms like social media and online dating, in the workplace, and when discussing important political issues—is one of the greatest tragedies in our culture today.

The majority of the blame doesn’t fall on the individual. Rather, there are many things in our world that inhibit people’s capacity for consistently showing up with good intentions. Too often people are already drained, say, when starting their work day after fighting with their health insurance company over coverage for an aging parent, or spent 90 minutes alone in a car commuting to work where they don’t feel appreciated, or can barely afford rent that keeps rising in a building where they don’t know a single neighbor, or are constantly tired from eating junk food that’s marketed and labeled as healthy, or are emotionally fragile and distracted because they were using any number of common technology platforms that we know openly manipulate people’s emotions for profit, to name a few.

But AFC Richmond gets to sidestep some of this. One of the benefits of existing in a scripted TV show, I suppose. The characters in the show largely do have the capacity to rise above—importantly, not by doing everything right, but rather by having the energy and capacity to believe in others around them and to give others the benefit of the doubt, and by openly communicating their needs, concerns, feedback, and goals without fear of retribution or judgement.

What Can We Do with All This?

1. Coach-based Leadership in Local Government

First, what kind of leaders do we enable, and how do we see our role? I’m sure many of us have worked for people who don’t exemplify those Coach Lasso qualities. And unfortunately, many of our real-world leadership environments seem to enable and even encourage those people (the Ruperts) to rise to the top.

For our organizations and in our communities, what are the various incentives and pathways toward leadership? How do people actually rise through the ranks as staff in the organization? Where do volunteers on boards or governing bodies come from, and how are they set up for success or not? What incentives exist in the community to encourage or discourage civil participation and engagement? Although we must be explicit in our roles about avoiding partisanship and political activity, we must also do things like “manage up,” not by stroking the ego of a political leader, but ideally, by helping them be the most constructive and successful version of themselves. A few thoughts:

How many folks have an onboarding for newly elected officials, not about legal guidance, but about soft skills—trust building, successful leadership values, and things of that nature? It’s easy to forget that many people elected to office have never encountered any guidance of that sort before. They aren’t eyeballs deep in professional development the way most of us are. In fact, fleshing out some best practices on this front is a project several of us in Vermont and New Hampshire are working on right now. If you’re at February’s Local Government Reimagined Conference in Denver, come to my session about this!

A second idea, which I love, though I have mostly gotten Tommy Lee Jones–level side-eye from colleagues about it, is having elected officials participate in your organization’s performance review process, meaning getting reviewed. It’s deeply puzzling to me why this is not standard practice. Obviously, they don’t have the same employment terms as an employee does, but that’s not the point. Yes, one purpose would be to actually use this as an opportunity to provide real feedback that could help improve how the organization functions. But almost more importantly, it’s to show all the staff in the organization that the top dogs are enthusiastic to participate in something similar to what they are asking everyone else to do. Too often I’ve encountered the attitude from elected officials who see by virtue of their position that they should be exempt from the rules and standards they set for others. But in my opinion, the higher you climb on the org chart, the more you should lead by example. I do not believe towns should exempt themselves from permitting, even if they are allowed to, but rather, they must hold themselves to the same or higher standard to have any real credibility to govern. And the same should go for any organization’s leadership.

And then lastly, on a self-reflective note, hopefully many of us have had relationships with our own coaches, teachers, camp counselors, maybe even bosses, over the years who exemplified those Ted Lasso coach qualities. Can you think back to people like that, perhaps when you were younger, people who had a profound positive influence on you in this way? How can we channel their empathy and energy as professional managers and encourage others to do the same?

2. Purpose, Belonging, and Identity in Our Own Communities

Second, creating purpose, meaning, and real community. Great organizational culture can’t be created quickly but it can be lost easily. And usually when you find out it’s happening, it’s too late. How accurate, really, are your existing mechanisms to measure this?

Quick story: When I was 23, I was elected the (nonpartisan) mayor of my hometown. I was also a volunteer EMT on our rescue squad. I frequently interacted with public works, police, and fire employees not as the mayor, but as an EMT. Even my first partner was a long-time highway/equipment operator at public works. Careful to not throw the entire chain of command out the window, I had literally countless hours of conversations late at night in the garage, coming back from calls, or over breakfast about all sorts of things that never made its way to me through the traditional channels. Combined with the high-level context from the supervisors and department heads, this gave me an insanely honest and detailed look into how the organization actually functioned. I’m lucky that early in my public service career, this provided me with context that has driven much of my work since then, which is that the frontline employees, who often work under the toughest conditions, are often the least appreciated and least listened to. Why doesn’t that feedback make it up the chain? Well, I refer you back to the first topic about good leadership tone-setting.

When our public works garage flooded in South Orange, it wasn’t hard to rally community members to help. Within days, the department had assistance—and new couches, furniture, and kitchen equipment from dozens of residents and local businesses who came down to thank them for everything they do. Beyond getting some stuff replaced (and finally some plans to address the building in the capital plan), they felt listened to and appreciated not just by their CEO, but by the people they serve in the community. It gave everyone a chance to build some pride and sense of community.

You don’t have to be a volunteer EMT to get at this feedback. In the prior town where I was town manager, when renegotiating our three union contracts and studying our pay scales for all employees, we had more than 75 meetings with union and non-union staff over a year, not only getting feedback from department heads and supervisors, but talking with, in many departments, every single staff person without their supervisors present, multiple times. We learned a ton through this, down to small but important details, like the fact that public works employees previously had no worker’s comp coverage while driving into work during a snowstorm to plow because their shift didn’t start until they clocked in at the building. We fixed that. But beyond that, I had quite a few custodial staff, equipment operators, and laborers—some of the folks who had fallen most behind in the pay scales—who reached out and said they finally felt listened to and appreciated, some for the first time.

3. Good Intentions in the People We Interact With

Third, intentions. This is such a rabbit hole, so I’ll just make two closing points here.

First, on a self-reflective level, when you look at others around you, do you assign motive or intentionality? We all do this to some degree. It’s something I constantly am working on myself, which is harder to do the more pressure I personally feel. But there is something powerful here in trying to reverse the trend where people more likely seem to assume the worst intentions. What can you accomplish if you just decide to always start assuming the best intentions and really push that culture down and out to everyone in the organization? And what if that caught on? Try to imagine what our political discourse as a nation would look like if the majority of people believed that everyone else was coming with the best intentions.

Next, I argue local governments can and should think a lot more seriously about our impact in where people get a sense of community and what is allowing them to show up with good intentions, especially as it relates to people’s capacity for broader civic engagement.

I was catching up with a friend who also works in public policy. We were reflecting on how different our and our parents’ train commutes were compared to younger people today. Often taking the same train every day, they used to be social scenes, where you’d look forward to seeing your neighbors and friends on your way to and from work. Now, virtually everyone is buried in a smartphone with headphones on. Much larger dynamics are at play here, but for example, where we come in is that if that public transit doesn’t exist, or the stops/stations aren’t designed well, or people don’t know about it, then we aren’t even giving people the chance to build that community.

In 2024, we all know, and the data is ultra-clear: people are desperately searching for community. These aren’t “nice to haves.” They are fundamental building blocks to long-term well-functioning people and communities, a la Robert Putnam and similar. How can we create public or outdoor spaces better? How can we encourage a little more walking around versus driving? How do we design new housing to create a sense of shared living? How do we create neighborhood collaboration, not competition, in our local civics? How do we affect this feeling within our organizations?

There are a thousand ways we can make small changes in how things work at the local level that at least help us go in this direction. And critically, like with any major change, we don’t need to do the whole thing in one shot, but rather, make smaller incremental changes that help to start nudging us to go in a better direction. We can build momentum with each small success that further engages, energizes, and inspires people. Considering we’re talking about people’s capacity to have the actual energy to show up and engage and advocate with others constructively, every small win will compound and build, as people gain momentum toward a better future. I think that’s a legacy Ted Lasso would be proud of.

ALEX TORPEY is a municipal manager, consultant, educator, and podcast host. You can find his latest updates, links to his podcasts, and more at alextorpey.substack.com.