This Hispanic Heritage Month, our stallout in the Fortune 500 gives me pause

For 20 years, I have been taking the same phone call.

A fellow chief executive calls me: more often than not a Latina, and more often than not the first one her organization has ever hired.

She was hired to change the place.

Everyone she met during the interview process was on board with the plan.

Then, somewhere around month nine, something shifts.

She realizes the assignment she was handed is one the organization was never built to support.

She usually thinks that is a verdict on her competence.

It is not.

It is a gap in what was built around her.

When we hire someone to transform an organization, we tend to hand her the role that was designed for the person who came before: the same budget, the same board meeting cadence, the same outline for a standing agenda.

We keep all of it in place and ask her to do something the old design was never built to do.

Then, when the change hits a roadblock, we look at the leader.

Right now, Hispanic Heritage Month is filling programs across the country with firsts.

I want to know what got built around them, because in nine months some of them will be calling me.