A wandering thought about a fictional football club — and the quiet question underneath almost every team I’ve worked with.
I didn’t plan to write about Ted Lasso. But I’ve been rewatching it, and somewhere in the second season I caught myself doing the thing I always seem to do — watching a team and wondering less about the score, and more about what’s holding them together.
If you haven’t seen it: an American coach who knows almost nothing about football is asked to lead an English club, AFC Richmond. On paper it makes no sense, and for a while it doesn’t work — they’re relegated at the end of the first season. And yet, by the end, it’s one of the most quietly moving portraits of a team I can think of. The football never really gets simpler. Something gentler shifts. The team slowly works out what it’s for.
That small question — what is this team actually for? — is the one I keep circling back to, in the show and in the rooms I sit in. It can sound almost too simple to be worth asking. But I’ve lost count of the teams I’ve met who are busy, capable, full of good people, and who still couldn’t quite tell you, in the same words, why they’re all in the room together.
There’s a detail in the show I find oddly true to life. Richmond’s owner, Rebecca, first hires Ted to make the club fail — her purpose for it is to wound her ex-husband. A whole team, quietly pointed at its own undoing. Purpose, I’ve come to think, isn’t always missing. Sometimes it’s just aimed somewhere unhelpful, and nobody has said so out loud.
In the TeamHive PLUS model we tend to talk about Purpose as three quieter things than a statement on a wall:
Goal Alignment — could everyone here describe, in roughly the same words, what we’re trying to do together?
Purpose-Driven Execution — do our ordinary Tuesday choices actually follow from that, or do they drift?
A Stakeholder-Centric approach — are we clear about who we’re really here to serve? (Richmond, for all its wobbles, never forgets it belongs to its town.)
What I love about the Ted — and I wonder if it might be the whole of his leadership, really — is that he doesn’t begin with tactics he doesn’t have. He begins with belief. He hangs a single word above the door: BELIEVE. It’s a bit silly, and it’s meant to be. But I’ve slowly come to think that giving a team something to believe in together isn’t soft at all. It might be one of the more practical things a leader ever does.
Most teams feel they have a clear purpose. Fewer are quite so sure they’re all behind the same one — and that little gap tends to stay invisible until someone looks. It’s the difference between a purpose written on a wall and a purpose you can see in how the team spends a Tuesday. It’s the sort of thing we built the TeamHive 360 to make visible — gently, and from everyone’s point of view, including the stakeholders we don’t always think to ask.
So I’ll leave you with the question I’m still turning over myself, rather than a tidy answer: if you asked each person on your team why the team exists, how close would their answers be?
That’s where this little series begins — with Purpose — before we wander on into Learning, Unity and Shared Leadership over the next few posts.
