Leadership Lessons from Ted Lasso cont. What My Grandson Taught Me About Learning

We were enjoying our annual family week at the beach when at the pool I noticed my grandson, who was about to enter high school, sitting with a physical book in his hands and earbuds in his ears.

At first, I assumed he was multitasking, which is the polite term we’ve invented for doing multiple things poorly at the same time. Perhaps he was reading while listening to music, responding to friends, or doing whatever teenagers do on their phones that their grandparents aren’t supposed to understand.

When he came up for a break, I asked him about it.

He explained that he wasn’t listening to music. He was listening to the audiobook while following along in the printed book. He had discovered that hearing the words while seeing them on the page improved his comprehension considerably compared with either listening to the audiobook or reading the book alone.

But at our Rosh Hashanah dinner, as I told the story to the family and tried to give him his due credit, I learned there was yet another layer. It turns out that he hadn’t merely experimented until he found a method that felt better. He asked ChatGPT to design a comprehension test so he could corroborate and quantify the difference. Reading alone put his score in the 60s. Audio alone did the same. When he read the physical book while listening to the audiobook, his comprehension climbed above 90.

No, this wasn’t a randomized controlled trial. He wasn’t applying for a research grant or preparing a paper for peer review. He was solving a problem that mattered to him. He formed a hypothesis, created a simple test, compared the results, and let the evidence—not his preference—decide what worked. Then, at the pool, he put what he learned into action.

Brilliant.

My grandson had discovered something about learning that took me decades to appreciate: how information is presented affects whether it is merely heard, actually understood, or remembered long enough to be used. More impressively, he didn’t confuse what felt better with what worked better. He measured the difference.

The research generally supports his experience, although with an important qualification. People may have learning preferences, but there’s little evidence that each of us possesses one fixed “learning style” to which all instruction should be tailored. The better-supported principle is that learning can improve when multiple senses deliver relevant, coordinated information.

Relevant and coordinated are the important words. Adding music, animations, colorful slides, sound effects, and a bowl of aromatherapy oils doesn’t automatically transform a dull presentation into an educational experience. It may simply create a better-decorated distraction. But when what we see supports what we hear, comprehension can improve.

Learning becomes stickier when we then do something with the information. Discussion forces us to organize what we think. Practice adds motor, visual, and contextual memory. Retrieval—calling the lesson back later without simply rereading the handout—strengthens our ability to use it when it matters. In other words, exposure isn’t learning.

Ted Lasso understood this, even if he never used terms such as multisensory learning, cognitive load, or retrieval practice. He rarely developed his players by standing in front of them and delivering an hour-long lecture. He used stories, signs, questions, demonstrations, locker-room conversations, videos, drills, and repeated practice.

When AFC Richmond attempted to learn Total Football, the coaches didn’t merely explain the concept on a whiteboard. The players saw it illustrated, heard it explained, discussed what it required, and then tried to execute it on the field. They had to anticipate one another’s movements, communicate, adjust, fail, and try again.

And then there were the red strings used to teach spacing. There are some instructional techniques I wouldn’t recommend introducing at your next dental team meeting. Nevertheless, the lesson was unforgettable because the players didn’t merely hear about spacing. They physically experienced the consequences of losing it.

My grandson’s experiment adds another layer to the Ted Lasso lesson. Ted didn’t ask whether the players enjoyed the drill and declare victory. The coaches watched what happened next. Could the players maintain their spacing? Did the ball move more freely? Were they creating better opportunities? And, eventually, did those opportunities become goals and wins?

The BELIEVE sign mattered because belief changed behavior. But belief alone didn’t move AFC Richmond up the table. Total Football became more than a clever idea only when the players could execute it under pressure and the results appeared on the scoreboard. Ted cared deeply about the people behind the numbers, but he still watched the match. The lesson isn’t that winning is everything. It’s that improvement should leave evidence.

Dentists frequently miss both parts of that lesson. We attend continuing-education programs, take pages of notes, photograph slides, and return home inspired. By Monday afternoon, we’re treating patients exactly as we did before we left. Then we explain a new system at a team meeting and assume the team has learned it because we said it clearly.

When this happens often enough, it creates what I call Monday Mourning CE. The doctor returns bursting with enthusiasm while the team silently braces for the latest big idea. Their reaction isn’t, “How exciting.” It’s, “What’s not going to work this time?” That may look like resistance, but the team has learned it honestly. They’ve watched excitement lead to an announcement, inadequate training, frustration, and eventual abandonment.

My grandson did what too few practices do. He established a baseline, changed a variable, and tested again. Dental practices often reverse that sequence. We introduce a system, feel good about the meeting, and declare progress before determining whether anything changed.

The scoreboard counts. Feelings do not.

Consider the phone. Before changing how calls are handled, determine the baseline: of the qualified new-patient callers who reach the practice, how many schedule and how many actually arrive? Then let the team hear a well-handled call, see the language, discuss why it works, role-play it, listen to recordings of themselves, receive feedback, and try again.

After a reasonable period, measure the same numbers. If the scheduling rate rises from 62 percent to 81 percent, the new approach has earned our confidence. If everyone agrees that the calls sound warmer but the conversion rate doesn’t move, we’ve improved the mood—not the result. That doesn’t mean we blame the person answering the phone. We examine the training, the language, the system, and the obstacles, then adjust and test again.

Of course, the metric must be meaningful. A higher scheduling percentage is not much of a victory if the patients never arrive, which is why the scoreboard follows the behavior far enough to reveal the real result. The goal isn’t to measure everything or turn the practice into an accounting seminar with dental chairs. It is to choose the few numbers that reveal whether the behavior we are teaching is producing the outcome we intended.

A useful training sequence is simple:

Hear it. See it. Discuss it. Do it. Teach it. Retrieve it. Measure it.

That last step closes the loop. The team doesn’t merely receive information; it demonstrates that the information has become usable behavior. Just as my grandson’s comprehension score corroborated his learning method, the phone numbers corroborate whether our teaching method is working.

Feelings still matter when we evaluate culture. We should care whether people feel trusted, supported, confident, or frustrated. But feelings cannot corroborate performance. A leader needs both the human conversation and the honest scoreboard—and enough humility to believe the scoreboard when it contradicts the story everyone would prefer to tell.

Ted didn’t build AFC Richmond by finding a roster of finished players. He helped the players he had become a team they hadn’t yet imagined. My grandson taught himself how to learn—and then had the wisdom to test whether he was right. Dental leadership asks the same of us: create the conditions in which people can become better, and then look for the evidence that tells us whether our leadership is actually helping them get there.