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.
Here is the number that should give us all pause. A record 55 women are running Fortune 500 companies this year, 11% of the list and the highest share in its 72-year history. Not one of them is a Latina. When Priscilla Almodóvar left Fannie Mae last October, the Fortune 500 lost the only Latina chief executive it had.
Now, the Latina executives who call me want the job more than anyone else in the running. In Lean In’s study of Latinas in corporate America, 87% said they want to be promoted, against 81% of women overall, and 44% said advancement had become more important to them over the previous two years, against 36% of women overall. My phone is not going to get quieter, either. Of the 186 chief executive departures Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted in August, government and nonprofit organizations accounted for 62, more than any other sector.
The shortfall in support begins with managers, often the first advocate anyone has in their career. Thirty-nine percent of Latinas say their manager shows interest in their career advancement, against 46% of white women, and 47% say their manager makes sure they get credit for their work, against 53%.
The loss is felt at the very first rung of the corporate ladder. For every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager, 74 Latinas are promoted. By the C-suite, Latinas are 1% of executives, down from just under 5% at entry level — a drop of 78% across a career, the largest of any group in the study.
Thirty years ago, John Kotter spent a decade watching more than a hundred companies try to remake themselves, and he found that most of those efforts fell short. He catalogued eight reasons why. Some of them belong to the leader. Others describe conditions no chief executive can build alone: a coalition of senior people genuinely committed to the change, reporting lines and compensation systems that stop rewarding the old way of working, and a board close enough to the transformation to understand what it requires.
We are also not measuring the thing we say we want. In Lean In and McKinsey’s 2024 Women in the Workplace study, 78% of managers said more is expected of them than a few years ago, most often around employee well-being, career development and inclusion. Only 37% of companies evaluate their managers on whether they develop anyone. Expectations went up and accountability never followed.
I leave every event with 20 business cards from women asking me to be their mentor. Nobody counts that as infrastructure, but it is what fills in when the institution does not.
No board ever sets out to sabotage its own leader. Directors are usually volunteers giving hours to an organization they believe in. Their governance training covers how to hire an executive and how to evaluate one, and then it stops.
I have been a chief executive five times, and in the best of those transitions, much of the board’s work began before I walked through the door. The boards that got it right did three things.
They built a structure for the first year before anyone needed it. In one of those roles, the chair assembled a formal transition committee that met with me throughout my first six months. It arrived with a detailed plan to introduce me to the people who mattered most to the organization and to hand over the donor relationships, so I was never building every connection from scratch.
They made the mandate for change their own, and said so out loud. More than once, a board told its stakeholders early and plainly that I had been hired to redesign the business and that the directors stood behind the changes. One chair went further and advocated for me in rooms I was not in, which mattered most in the months when the work got hard. None of them left me to carry the case for change alone.
They treated the top of the organization as a partnership. In one transition, my predecessor stepped back from the day-to-day and made himself available for advice whenever I asked. We agreed at the start that the organization’s success would come before either of our egos, and I can still call him on any issue. One chair put the principle to me simply: a great board chair is a partner, not a hammer.
Every one of those steps fit inside the budget the organization already had. What made them possible was a board that treated my first year as a design problem instead of a probation period.
For 20 years, the question on those calls has been whether the leader was strong enough. The better question, and the one I want us to ask, is what we built around her.
When I got through that door, I took off my chancla and wedged it in the frame. My job was to keep it open for everybody else.
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