Ted Lasso, Matías Ponce and the Leadership Nobody Teaches
Ted Lasso Got It. Matías Ponce Gets It. Some Organizations Still Don't.
There's a scene in Ted Lasso that pretty much sums up what Matías Ponce has been trying to explain to organizations for 16 years.
An American coach arrives at an English football club knowing nothing about football. He doesn't have the credentials. He doesn't have the track record. He has something different: the ability to see people before results. To understand that behind every underperforming player there's something nobody bothered to listen to.
Organizations hire consultants who show up with the right manual. With the proven framework. With the slides in order.
And then they wonder why the change doesn't stick.
Matías Ponce, founder of Estudio Locht and one of Latin America's leading voices in leadership development and change management, has an answer for that. And it's not in any manual.
The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes at the Beginning
When Matías started out, he believed organizational change was a communication problem.
Which makes sense, really. If you explain well why the change matters, if the message is clear, if the presentation has the right data — people get on board. That's how it works, right?
No.
"The wake-up call was realizing that resistance is almost never about lack of information. It's fear of losing something. Identity, status, a way of working that took someone years to build."
That's the trap most organizational transformation processes fall into: they treat resistance as a messaging problem. More communication. More meetings. More slides about the vision of the future.
When what you actually have in front of you is grief.
"The day that clicked for me, I stopped trying to convince and started to accompany. And you don't rush grief with a good PowerPoint."
Ted Lasso didn't win anyone over with statistics either. He'd sit down. Listen. Wait. And when the person was ready, he was there.
That's the difference between managing change and walking people through it.
What Nobody Sees From the Outside: The Loneliness of Leadership
There's something Matías repeats when he works closely with executive teams. Something that's completely invisible from the outside.
How alone leaders are.
From the outside you see the position, the team, the budget, the decisions. Up close you see a person with no one to think out loud with without political consequences. The leader is the only one in the room who can't doubt in public. Can't say "I don't know." Can't show they're afraid of being wrong.
Because if they do, the market reads it as weakness. The team reads it as instability. The board reads it as lack of conviction.
"I'm struck by how grateful they get when someone offers them a space where they actually can: make mistakes, not know, say 'I'm not sure.'"
That's exactly what Ted Lasso does with Roy Kent in the series. Roy is the tough captain, the guy who doesn't ask for help, who figures it out alone. And the coach doesn't give him a new technique. He gives him permission to be human.
Matías's diagnosis is spot-on: most leaders don't need more leadership frameworks.
"They need a place to take off the armor for a while."
The Uncomfortable Question Organizations Aren't Asking
Everyone talks about AI. About productivity. About what tasks get automated and which ones don't.
What almost nobody is looking at, according to Matías, is something deeper: what happens to the authority of the person in charge when their team asks an AI before asking them.
For decades, part of a manager's value was being the source of knowledge. They knew more than the other person. They had accumulated experience. They knew the shortcuts.
That edge is shifting fast.
"The leader who added value just by knowing more than everyone else is getting exposed. The uncomfortable question isn't 'what do I do with AI?' It's: why does my team need me now that they have it?"
Those who answer that question well reinvent themselves. They find new value: judgment, context, the ability to synthesize information with human judgment, to make decisions in ambiguous scenarios.
Those who don't answer it become a bottleneck with a title.
Ted Lasso didn't know more about football than his players either. His value was elsewhere. And that, in today's context, is exactly what leaders need to learn to build.
What Sports Teaches That Management Denies
Matías also directs Escuelas River al Mundo, which brings grassroots sports to the international stage. And there's something he learned on the field that he never found in any management book.
That individual talent loses to the mediocre team that understands why it plays.
In sports you see that in ninety minutes. In a company it takes years to become clear. And by then you've fired the wrong person or lost your biggest client.
But there's another lesson, more uncomfortable.
"On the field the result is immediate and public. You can't spin a lost match. It teaches you to live with the fact that sometimes you do everything right and lose anyway, and vice versa."
Management, he says, spends its time denying that. There's always an explanation. An external cause. An adverse context. Something to justify the result without questioning the process.
"Sports gets it into your body."
One Piece of Advice for Anyone Leading Change in the Region
If there's something Matías wants HR professionals across Latin America to understand, it's this:
Don't copy the playbook from up North.
Organizational change models that come imported from there assume three things: stability, budget, and long time horizons. Three things that are structurally scarce in the region.
Leading change in Latin America means doing it in motion, with the context changing the rules halfway through.
"That, which looks like a disadvantage, trains you in something the world needs today: real flexibility, not the kind in slide decks."
His concrete advice for anyone starting out: lower the ambition of the plan and raise the frequency of adjustments. And win people over one at a time.
"Because change is sustained by relationships, not by press releases."
"Leadership isn't taught in the abstract. It's practiced."
Matías Ponce — Founder, Estudio Locht
Frequently Asked Questions on Leadership and Change Management
Why do most organizational change processes fail?
Because they treat resistance as a communication problem when it's actually a grieving process. People don't resist change because of lack of information — they resist because they're afraid of losing something they built.
What skills does a leader need in the age of AI?
Judgment, discernment, and the ability to make decisions in ambiguous scenarios. The leader who only added value by knowing more than their team is getting exposed. The new differentiator is human, not technical.
How do you build a team that actually works?
A functioning team processes conflict instead of avoiding it. If your team never argues, you don't have good culture: you have a problem that hasn't exploded yet.
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Published by the Desky team — June 2026