Nine in ten people lack the natural talent to run a team well. Here is how the other nine build it anyway.
Most people running a team were never actually the right choice for the job. Gallup’s research on management talent puts the number of people who have it naturally at around one in ten, and finds that organizations pick that person for the role only about one time in five.
Konstantinos Ladas has coached baseball in Agrinio, Greece for more than a decade without a club, a salary, or a town that believed the sport belonged there. Nobody appointed him to lead anything. He built the authority himself, one season, one rejected proposal, one free lesson at a time.
What follows is what fourteen years of being taken seriously by almost no institution taught him about the difference between a title and a following, and why he still will not let a chatbot do the part of the job that made him worth listening to.
From the Diary of Konstantinos Ladas
Konstantinos Ladas is an Agrinio, Greece-based baseball coach and instructor, and curator of Volunteer, a free baseball-instruction project. Volunteer publishes baseball lessons, sports history articles, and coaching commentary across LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, entirely without charge. Before baseball became his focus, Ladas spent more than fifteen years in computing and insurance and ran his own company as a programmer-analyst, and he was a registered mentor with the British Computer Society. “Persistence never stops; if you stop, you are finished,” he says.
Nobody Is Born in Charge
A senior title, a large team, a good salary: none of it is proof that anyone will follow. Gallup’s finding that companies get the manager choice right only around eighteen percent of the time is really a finding about how little a job description tells you about whether someone can lead.
Ladas puts the same idea more bluntly.
Leadership is something that anyone must be recognized, no one is borne as leader, no one can be self-acclaimed leader because of his status, position or salary. Persistence never stops; if you stop, you are finished. At these kind of projects, you have to be persistent in order to make something successful and of course your efforts rewarding.
He has had a lot of practice testing that belief against people who held real power and gave him none of it. Contacts with two of Agrinio’s established sports clubs went nowhere despite friendly meetings. A sitting-down with the city’s Vice Mayor for Sports produced encouragement and no action. As he puts it, town officials “falsely believe that I will quit or I will become bored.” Nobody handed him a mandate. He built one anyway, in public, over years, where anyone could check whether he was still showing up.
Coach and Mentor, Not One or the Other
The habit of starting from what a problem actually requires goes back further than baseball. Ladas built his working life as a computer programmer-analyst, running his own personal company from Agrinio for nearly fourteen years. “As a certified Analyst-Programmer, I know where to begin and where to stop,” he says, and that instinct, diagnose first, then act, shows up again in how he separates two jobs that most coaches blur into one.
For me baseball coaching and mentoring is one thing. A sports coach must be two things, coach and mentor. Your athletes must be in a position to talk to you for various things, sport specific or personal. It is very important that coaches receive training at both.
That is not a passing opinion. For several years Ladas was a registered professional mentor and a member of the British Computer Society, and in 2011, the same year he started the Agrinio baseball effort, he was named to Strathmore’s Who’s Who as a mentor. He calls the mentoring years “a huge experience.” The lesson he carried from it into coaching is simple: an athlete who cannot talk to you about anything but the sport will not stay coachable for long.
The Move Nobody at the Club Ever Made
Warm meetings are cheap. Ladas’s actual advantage was refusing to let a warm meeting stand in for proof.
In 2017 he began writing a fifty-page study on how to establish a private amateur baseball league in Agrinio and the wider region. It took two years. In 2019 he submitted it formally to the Agrinio Municipality, where he says the reception was “very uncomfortable, rude” and went nowhere. Rather than wait on the town, he took the same study and, in May 2025, presented it as a rapporteur at Mediterranean College’s 12th Interdisciplinary Student Excellence Conference in Athens. In March 2026, the free baseball lessons he had been publishing since founding Volunteer the previous October earned him an Excellence in Training award from the Global Leaders Business Awards.
None of that required anyone’s permission. It required doing the credentialed version of the work whether or not the institutions that should have backed it ever did.
His advice to anyone chasing a similar project starts before the project does. “I had already six years of professional experience at management of personal company when I decided to start writing my baseball study,” he says, and he tells others to get that grounding first rather than learn management theory from a book alone.
What AI Cannot Coach
A newer problem sits alongside the old one. As generative AI tools spread into how people write, research, and present themselves, a University of Bath-led study published in the Academy of Management Review in 2026 warns that managers who lean on the technology as a shortcut risk losing what the researchers call managerial phronesis, the practical judgment built only through firsthand experience, reflection, and dealing with other people. The risk is not that AI gets things wrong. It is that people stop doing the thinking that used to make them right.
Ladas uses AI daily, to sharpen his social media presence and to help him write about baseball “more scientifically.” He is also clear about where the line sits.
I will never sacrifice my time, fame, effort and knowledge. I do not replace AI with myself.
“Humans must control technology, not the opposite,” he says, and he traces the risk to the same gap the Bath researchers describe: the space between using a tool and letting it use you. “This is very bad for anyone,” he adds.
Why Konstantinos Ladas
He built the credibility to say any of this on both sides of the same problem. For close to fifteen years he ran technology and insurance work through his own company in Agrinio. He is a registered coach with National Alliance for Youth Sports and Babe Ruth League, and a National Federation of State High School Associations accredited interscholastic baseball coach, credentials that exist because youth sport bodies vet who is allowed near children before results ever enter the conversation. A colleague who worked with him on the same team put it plainly: he is “a well-rounded professional with experience across business, management, marketing, education, and information systems.” The Excellence in Training award and the Athens conference presentation are the two moments, he says, that proved the small, unglamorous steps were adding up to something. “A small step for the big win,” as he puts it.
Where Konstantinos Is Now
Ladas lives in Agrinio, in western Greece, where he still publishes free baseball coaching videos, articles, and sports history posts through Volunteer on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. Away from the sport, he describes himself simply as a husband. He is not finished with the town that has spent fourteen years telling him no. “I still believe that I will make it,” he says.
The Konstantinos Ladas Playbook: Earning What Nobody Will Hand You
- Get the job experience first. Years of running something, anything, teach lessons no course covers.
- Turn promises into documents. A friendly meeting is not proof. A study, a conference paper, or an award is.
- Keep showing up after they expect you to quit. Persistence is not a mood. It is what happens after the mood passes.
- Use AI to sharpen your work, not to replace your judgment. The thinking still has to be yours.
- Be both coach and mentor. Anyone you lead needs to be able to talk to you about more than the task.
Konstantinos Ladas coaches baseball and builds the case for it in Agrinio on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.
