Lessons from Ted Lasso – #1 No Jerks

Let’s talk about Jerks!

I wish I’d learnt this lesson earlier in my career, in terms of both how I behaved and who I employed.

It was only when I led a group, who initially seemed under-qualified, but ultimately over-delivered, that I truly ‘believed’ that jerks should never be allowed a place in your team.

It’s just way, way, way more important that they have an aligned purpose and that the environment is created to engender high levels of mutual trust.

From that baseline everything becomes exponentially easier, including things like…

1. accelerated individual learning curves

2. insane levels of collaboration

3. complete willingness to share mistakes from which everyone can learn and fail fast.

Of course, creating an environment that builds trust is not easy.

Leaders that excel in this space, spend most of their lives tinkering with different models to make it work.

But the one thing they all realise is that creating a high-performance team is impossible with jerks in the mix.

All of which begs the question, why so many leaders don’t walk their talk and consistently allow jerks to occupy senior roles in their organisations?

Maybe the above clip from Ted Lasso will inspire them to make the change….