Series fans are enjoying these days. Two of the best and most awarded in recent years return with new seasons: Succession (HBO) and Ted Lasso (Apple TV).
For those few who haven’t seen them -and heads up, there may be spoilers- Ted Lasso is a comedy starring Jason Sudeikis, skillfully playing with the cultural disparities between the English and the Americans. Deep down it is about emotional intelligence and faith in people. Meanwhile, Succession is an extreme portrayal of the offspring of heirs to a media mogul, Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox. The storytelling style is excellent and contemporary, yet deeply rooted in classic influences like Falcon Crest, Dynasty and beyond. It explores greed and intrigue. If Ted Lasso paints us an innocent smile, Succession steers us towards cynicism. Both are worth watching to balance the emotions.
And, without forgetting that they are just fictions and that this is just a game, it may also be worth looking at some of the leadership behaviors that we find in both, and see where we find more inspiration. Is it in the smiley Ted Lasso, vulnerable and a little clumsy, but always governed by a clear strategy and set of values? Or in Logan Roy, the feared media shark who rules in Succession without empathy?
As a model for this reflection we will use one of my favorite classic leadership books: The Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner. They identified five behaviors that characterize leaders: paint an inspiring vision, encourage the heart, enable others to act, challenge the status quo and show the way.
Vision
Conveying a visión means seeing a future and getting others to see it too. We often imagine that this requires a special charismatic speech. But effective communication is simply the one that is understood and reaches the heart, and that can be done in very different styles. Ted Lasso communicates his vision calmly but clearly. He repeats it several times to the stuffy journalist of The Independent who represents the opinion of the others, saying that “he doesn’t care so much about winning or losing, but more about making sure that all team members give their best and believe in themselves and their teammates”. We are paid to achieve results, but the true leader is capable of seeing a purpose beyond the results. This is what gives them meaning and throws light on the path to achieve them.
When visioning is just a hollow exercise commissioned to an agency with the market an not the employees in mind, without an image of the future that reflects shared beliefs, it doesn’t create cohesion or buy-in. It does not convey purpose. This is exactly what happens in the Wyser Royco, the corporation starring Succession. Instead of a common vision, there is an endless and superficial debate. On one side is Logan, CEO and president, who only believes in the continuity of his benefits, and on the other his children and younger advisers who sense that television’s days are numbered and demand disruption and digitization in a vague and unstructured way. Everyone wants the driver’s seat but nobody is clear where they want to go.
Another mandates of the leadership challenge is to encourage the heart, that is, to share a positive emotion. We know since Daniel Goleman that the first step to be able to share and modulate emotions is to understand them.
Emotional intelligence
Ted Lasso can read emotions in every interaction with the team. One of the moments in which we see it in a more graphic way is in his relationship with his own boss. Leading upwards is an essential skill in organizations. With his apparent naivety and his “cookies with the boss” every morning, Ted follows the emotional journey of a manager who has her own contradictions and dramas, until she is transformed from an enemy into an ally. This process has its great turning point in the game of darts in chapter 8, when Ted gives a lesson in empathy and curiosity while putting the villain of the show in his place to delight his boss and the audience.
Logan Roy in Succession also understands emotions, but he uses them only for his own benefit. Emotional intelligence without generosity or a collaborative spirit is manipulation. And he is a master in that. He senses any weakness to pounce on it and establish his dominant position. He does it with particular effectiveness with his own children -who don’t make it difficult for him, let’s admit- and he does it with his closest followers and even with the president of the United States. But a ruthless leadership based on manipulation and fear does not create loyalty. As we see in some of the juiciest episodes, those around Logan live waiting for their chance to get rid of him.
Logan is very lonely. He has created a rather incompetent team, from which he cannot expect much help in complex challenges. That’s what happens when people aren’t given the opportunity to grow and shine.
Enable others to act involves teaching, equipping with tools and, above all, delegating. And delegation is an exercise of trust. When we delegate, we assume a risk since the result of the action is no longer in our hands. Whoever is not capable of assuming that risk is not ready for leadership.
Delegation
When delegating, together with the task, we also hand over the responsibility. But the responsibility does not leave us, as we are responsible for the delegate and we are there to support him. This is not easy, it has its method. To find out how not to do it, among many other negative examples, we can choose chapter 8 of Succession, first season, where we have everything that should not be done. The CEO has assigned the role of COO to his son Roman who is not prepared to assume that responsibility. Roman presses the engineers tasked who are planning a rocket launch to meet an arbitrary date. The engineers find problems but are not heard nor do they have the authority to abort the operation, so they do not feel responsible… and finally the rocket explodes on the launch pad. Roman, who was attending the show via cell phone, disconnects and tries to convince himself that he hasn’t seen anything, and to avoid any encounter where he has to take responsibility for it.
Ted Lasso gives us better examples of trust and delegation. Let’s pick up the way in which he turns Roy Kent, a veteran footballer who is as nasty as he is noble, into a leader. Ted knows that he needs Kent by his side for his project. A leader needs to develop leaders around him without fear that they will take the applause and the spotlight. For this reason, when Kent shows him a conflict and asks him “aren’t you going to do anything?” he replies no with a lame excuse, very consciously leaving the ground free for Kent to solve the problem by discovering and exercising his own leadership.
Courage
Leading means taking risks with intelligence. This includes the risk of innovating, or in Kouzes ad Posner’s words, challenging the status quo. It is not just about adopting innovations, it is about provoking them, by questioning the way things have always been done.
In Succession, Logan can’t challenge the status quo: he is the status quo. Any proposal for innovation hits the wall of his experience and his idea of power. Everytime someone tries to explain how the communications landscape is changing, he turns the argument off with sarcasm, sticking only to the obvious rules of business.
It takes courage to stop doing the things that have always been done according to the unwritten rules that have always been followed. It’s a risk. Ted Lasso takes those risks with a bravery that almost seems mindless. In Chapter 5 one of the players, Jamie Tartt is a star in the worst sense of the word: cocky, braggart, not a team player. He is an obstacle to creating the team culture that Ted needs. But he is effective, and is saving a difficult game. Halfway through the match, Ted benches him, risking throwing away the lead and making a terrible fool of himself. But that does not happen, the team comes up and, for this time, the strategy has worked. It could have failed, but he would still have done the right thing: take the risk of disrupting the way things have always been done, to try to do them better.
A leader does not only inspire and show where we are going: the also have to throw some lignt on the path to get there. Show the way. Logan Roy gives some clues… but false ones. He teaches and tries to convey his aggressive manners, but not the keen intuition that has allowed him to get out of the conflicts he continually creates. As for Ted… he can’t show by his example how to play soccer because he has no idea, which is the basis of the comedy of the whole story. The solution he finds requires a continued effort of joint learning. For this learning adventure, Ted counts on his curiosity, his ability to recruit knowledge (Nate, Higgins, Kent…) and his absolute confidence in people’s potential.
Trust again.
Trust is the competency that underlies all others. Without mutual trust in both directions, vision will not be shared, delegation is not possible, risks are not taken, and we cannot learn from each other. And trust creates trust, so the best way to ask for trust is to offer it first.
The masterful first chapter of Succession already shows us what trust is not. The story begins with Kendall, the son who has been promised to be named the successor that same day, addressing his first meeting as head of the steering committee for an important negotiation. The father suddenly appears in the office, sowing doubts and setting him up a trap from which it is impossible to get out unscathed. Kendall makes a negotiating mistake, goes to his father’s birthday party, and only there, in front of everyone, does he find out that his father is not going to appoint him as his successor. He has changed his mind or never believed his own promise. Neither Logan trusts Kendall, nor can Kendall trust Logan. And on that basis of mutual distrust, the only thing that can be expected is… everything that comes after, which you don’t want to miss once you see that first chapter.
Too dramatic, you might think, but how many times have you seen trust betrayed in organizations? And what happened next with collaboration, delegation and leadership?
Decades ago, Douglas McGregor compared two theories about people’s behavior and the corresponding leadership styles derived from them. Theory X, based on distrust, led to controlling and authoritarian leadership. Theory Y, based on a more humanistic concept, advocated a more participatory style. Experience has shown that the Y style is not only fairer and more humane, but also gives better results in most situations. Perhaps in the decade of the series a new way of formulating this theory is saying that the Lasso style is not only more ethically acceptable than the Logan style, but it is also the only effective one to achieve results with a purpose.